For the next part of the development for the advertising campaign of my film,I will be making a magazine cover and Poster.I will first look at making my poster to establish a house style and layout, as well as creating photographic images and logos unique to the films advertisement.
I have researched romantic comedy film advertisements and found many posters which I like the look of. After browsing I found that I prefer simpler posters,mostly with white backgrounds. I think this is because they are easier to look at and understand at a glance. The colour scheme of the text in most of the posters seems to be is black or blue contrasting red, the colours are known stereotyplically to represent girls(pink/red) and boys (blue) .This technique is very effective because red represents love and passion,which is very relevant to romantic-comedy film.We can see this technique used in the styling of the actors clothes and props aswell as logos and the colour of texts.
In this Poster from the film,”The Ugly Truth”, I think the plain white background is very effective, it is bold and looks simple in contrast to the black line which divides the page. By using bolder text for the title and last name of the actors it creates the concept of pronounciation, which helps to underline what is most important in the film,this being either the ideas the film hold or simply the actors who are performing in the film.
In the poster advertsing the film”500 Days of Summer” we can see that there is minimal text used, which is all in the same colour blue. I think that this minimalist style of the poster works well with the theme of the film which is an indie romantic comedy.
I also like the use of photographs in the poster,Ithink that it is a very clever and unique way to introduce a character through still advertisemen. This techique alos helps to unveil some of the plot to the audience,the audience can gather that the film is mostly about the romatic relationship between the male character in the poster and the female character that is shown in prints on the his t-shirt.
In the”Made of Honour” poster advertisement there is also a simple white background used with black bold text similar to my logo experimentation in the previous post. In this poster there also is a tagline that helps to describe an element of the plot,which helps the audience to understand and establish what time of storyline this particluar film will have.
What I also noticed about the “Made of Honour” poster was that it has a very simple house style of black and red which co-ordinates with the styling of the characters featured in the poster, for example the colour of the brides flower bouquet matches the colour of the smaller text in the title.
For my own poster I hope to achieve something similar to the advertisemens I have researched . After exploring different texts in the previous post, I have decided to use black bold text on a white background, that I have altered in size and angle so that it is unique to the films advertisement.I also plan to co-ordinate the costumes and styling of the actors,so that the image of the characters relates to the colour scheme and house style of the poster.
When I first began to look at film logos I decided to create a selection of varied texts in order to compare how my chosen title for the film looked in each style.In slide one of the slideshow above, I have compared more bold and modern texts to handwritten styles, from this I found that the handwritting adds a more personal edge to the film as it helps relate the house style to the attitude ,genre and theme of the film.
In slide two I began to add backgrounds to significant styles of text which I had taken from the first slide. I found that I could start to design house style colours around some styles of text. After experimenting with different backgrounds I then moved onto designing texts that I had changed by using different letters from other styles or by distorting the shapes of the letters in photoshop.You can see my progession of individual logo designs from slides 3-5.
I then went on to create my final logo design, which I had used as an example in slide one. I decided to keep the logo simple by using a white background ( similar to the basic house style of the Ugly Truth poster) and dark grey handwritten text but to make it unique I decided to change the “R” because it was quite hard to read. I did this by using a different text for the ” R” and the using the free-transform tool on photoshop to rotate it until it was level with the rest of the text.
For finishing effects I added a drop shadow in the same colour as the text to create extra impact. I also decided to use the drop-shadow effect on other texts that would feature in my poster,such as the release date and names of the actors, you can see this in slide 5 -onwards.
I have planned to film my trailer on the saturday of this week as the weather forecast is predicted to be reasonably sunny,which in trailers, implies a sense of optimism that is well-known in romantic comedies.It will also be very busy in the centre of Cheltenham where I have chosen to shoot, so the introductory town scape scenes will look even more realistic. For the establishing shots, the female character(me) will be filmed walking through the town, and the male character(Mark) is to be filmed either inside his place of work or walking out of the doors,which a publishing house located in Cheltenham that happens to be very near the first location for shooting.
There then will be a two shot of both lead characters meeting, as they open the door of the work building from opposite sides,I hoped that this can be filmed from the side,so the audience can see that the characters meet in the middle. However if this idea in practise is not possible, I will film over the shoulder shots,from both characters perspectives and may include close-ups of the character expressions in the scene.
After this I plan to create some sort of flash effects that separate the date scenes,(which will be set in the Cheltenham Montpellier Gardens mostly),by using editing and fast paced cuts to promote the idea of time passing.An example of this would be the scene from “What Happens in Vegas”,when the characters are drunk and cannot remember the previous nights actions. This is from about 30 seconds onwards.
The pace of the cuts will the come to a sudden stop, when the work scene is introduced.I plan to remove the music from this particular scene,so that it hits the audience with some shock and implies a sense of awkwardness that the characters would feel.Depending on how it looks after editing, I may need to add an extra scene set in the work place with a comical effect to conclude the trailer.
For my trailer, I need to cast actors who look conventionally similar to existing actors that are known for romantic comedies. For my trailer I will need three Actors, the female lead,male lead and Manager/Boss of their place of work. I have decided to play the female lead and direct myself so that I can fully concentrate on the production of the trailer and finding the male leads.
For the male lead I have decided to use my friend Mark,who looks very similar to the romantic comedy star Jack Black,so the audience of my trailer can relate to the type of character Mark will be playing.
When planning my trailer,I will have to consider what music will be featured in my trailer.The type of music depends on the Genre of the film and the different moods in the trailer.I have chosen to use Letters to Cleo- “I want you to want me” as one of the main songs used for the trailer,because it relates to the storyline and is a cover of a copyrighted song,so it is not well known.The second song I have chosen to use is a song from the eighties which describes parts of the storyline and is very upbeat.It has a good introduction which would effective at the start of my trailer.I will edit the parts I find most effective on Audacity and then upload it to Adobe Premier Elements 2.0.
When researching locations ,I tried to find places which would relate to my storyline as much as possible.I decided to take photographs of the particular locations which could be applied to the scenes I have described on the story boards.For example for the “Park Scene” on my story board,I chose to use Montpellier Gardens in Cheltenham,which is very idyllic and has a great backdrop of old-fashioned buildings.
Here are photographs of the locations begining with Town Scape for the first frame,followed by shots of Offices where the characters will work.Then there are photographs of Montpellier Gardens for the Picnic scene and more townscape, where the characters could possibly walk hand in hand or have a kissing scene.There is also a couple of shots of cheltenham town hall where the characters could have a date,this frame would be a part of the flash cuts that I have identified in my storyboards.
-In basic terms Genre is a way to categorize texts; it helps to define the codes and conventions.
-Using Genre helps to target a particular audience and helps the audience identify the type of film, which sets up expectations.
-Genre theory is considered to have developed as a result of Andre Basins work on 1950’s Western films.
-Robert Stam believed that Genres were grouped by periods, countries, directors and producers, stars, series, audience and purpose. E.g. American films from the 1930’s are a genre within themselves. Whereas some genres are based on story content, others are borrowed from literature and other media.
-Tzvetan Todorov stated that “any instance of a genre will be necessarily different”, in basic terms this means that any text that has been placed in a particular genre, could still vary from other examples of text put within that Genre.
Is the organisation of facts in a text which helps the audience to help connect events and create their own interpretations based on those connections. To make sense of a text, the human mind maintains the concept of a beginning, middle and end.Past experiences of reality and text also helps an audience to construct meanings from an arrangement of facts.
In basic terms Narrative is the way the story is told and how it is constructed so that it creates a meaning.Different types of text construct meanings in different ways,by using the appropriate conventions.These conventions are Genre,character,form and time.
Open Narratives have no sense of an ending,a text which would represent this would be a Soap Programme, for example Eastenders,which has been shown on television for fifty years.This means that an open narrative text can have a various amount of characters who share different story lines and in most cases the characters have a different knowledge of the story line to the audience.An important convention in open narrative texts is Time, the text is usually chronological and relates more to reality or “world time”.
Closed Narratives are more related to film and cinema, as the audience is aware that they are watching a complete story and can gather an idea of the ending.There is also a smaller number of central characters ,who are more known by the audience as they are created so that viewers can make up their own opinions about them.In closed Narratives the characters are also arranged in a hierarchy of the importance.
Closed Narratives do not relate to the real-time or “world time”, the time is compressed into the running time of a text.The time and events are usually relevant to the story line and not linked to the outside world.
Vladimir Propp created a theory which defined the characters of a text.He claimed that there were seven broad ideas of a type of character that could be applied to any other texts.Propp also stated that certain characters are linked to relevant elements of a text, which he named,”Spheres of action”.
The broad ideas of a type of character are the Villain,the Donor,the magical helper,the princess,the princess’s father,the dispatcher and the hero or victim/seeker,reacts to the donor character and has romantic relations with the princess.
Todorov proposed a basic structure for all narratives.He said that texts begins with an equilibrium,where everything in media is calm and the character types are contented.This equilibrium is then followed by a period of unsettlement, usually when there has been a disruption between the relationships of the characters.There is then a period of peace where the problems in the text have been solved.A new equilibrium occurs which brings the chaos to an end.
In this Romantic Comedy trailer we can see that Propp’s theory can be applied. Alison (Katherine Heigl) is the princess character, her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) acts as a role of authority, which is presented as the princesses father. Ben(seth Rogen) is the hero or seeker of the text. Peter(Paul Rudd) acts as the donor/dispatcher.Ben’s four friends act as the magical helpers and the Villian is the woman at the start of the trailer who calls out Alison’s name.However the Villain could also be the idea of the baby , whose character isn’t actually present in the trailer but at the end of the film.
Refering to Todorov’s theory of the basic structure of Narrative, the concept of a baby is the element that disrupts the equilibrium of the storyline and creates the period of unsettlement.However in this particular film, it is the period of unsettlement which brings the characters relationships together,rather than disrupting them.
