Levi Strauss - Theory

Levis Strauss devised a theory that all narratives include some kind of binary opposition. Some examples of binary opposition are good vs evil to strong vs weak to male vs female, these are just a few of many. In my film we have used 2 binary oppositions, good vs evil and male vs female. In our films case the people representing good are Katie and Chloe because of how young they are and the fact that they are the "victims", these two characters are stereotypical teenagers which suggests their innocent. The evil in our film is Owen, this is because he is the antagonist and stalking Katie during the film. The other binary opposition is fairly well shown with Katie and Chloe being the female while Owen being the male. The stereotypical view here is that Owen is more dominant than the two females and the females are weaker which could suggest the binary opposition of strong vs weak in our film. 

Laura Mulvey - Theory

Laura Mulvey's theory suggests that women are portrayed as objects in film and that they are seen from a heterosexual male perspective, the camera would focus on female parts of the body like hips or legs which would be taken into view sexually and possibly stereotyping. This could apply to our trailer as the main victim in the film is a female character, this could be seen as a stereotypical damsel in distress type character which also connotes innocence towards the female character. Because our character is based around the age of 17 we didn't portray her in Mulvey's vision but instead leaned more towards the innocence side and the typical damsel in distress. 

Film poster

 This was my initial poster creation, I had just Katie featured on the poster but I thought it looked too minimal and needed more. I liked how certain fonts on the poster were in red and went well against the background as this made them much clearer. Feedback also said that only having 4 star rating reviews seemed like the film wasn't very good as I tried to be modest so I did change this. 

This is my final product that I created, straight away you can see that I changed the images to feature all three characters. I thought by doing this it gave more understanding to the narrative by having them all on there, it also made much more sense having Owen, the antagonist centered while the female "victims" on the sides facing inwards. I also changed the stars to 5 and added reviewers while making the stars a little smaller. I then moved the names up above the characters heads and put 2 lines between them all separating the three. This was taken from inspiration from the posters I researched. Finally I changed the wording around with the release date moving to the bottom of the poster surrounded by the billing block and another tagline with "when you are" continuing on from "how will you escape".  

Production company logo - Planning (updated)

This was our updated production company logo as we thought this fitted the genre of Thriller a bit better than our previous one we used last year for our Teen Angst. We thought that the colour of yellow on the production company logo looked a bit childish and not what we wanted on our trailer therefore we created this and thought that the black and blue looked good together while the name was also better. Before we had Mise-en-power productions but this didn't really look like it would produce a Psychological Thriller so we changed the name entirely and came up with this logo and name.    

Film magazine front cover

I decided that my film magazine was going to be called "Reel Talk", reel as in film reel and talk because the magazine was going to be discussing movies. The name Reel Talk suggests that it is unisex and that anyone can read it. I then decided to use a gradient of white and grey for the background and then reds for the writing so that it would automatically attract the reader. Although these colours predominantly suggest male themes the use of reds and darker colours connote the Thriller genre. This was my initial first draft for my film magazine front cover:

After this draft I decided that there needed to be a lot more to fill the gaps on the poster, although the main picture of the two characters hadn't been added at the time I still thought there would be too much free space on the magazine. So I then decided to add little things like institutional information along with pugs/puffs and a reel that displayed other films being shown inside the magazine. 

This was my final product that I put together after feedback from my fellow classmates. The feedback I got from people was to change the size of the bar code, change the 25th Anniversary and detach it from the three images as they thought this could confuse people as they might think it was linked to the images which was not my intention. Therefore I detached it from the film strip and changed it to "Under Control special!" which made more sense. I also changed the colour of this piece as I thought the red was too bright compared to the other red colours on the magazine. With this change I changed the 25 in the corner so it had a hash tag in front of it to create the sense it was the 25th issue and also relevant to this I changed the date under the masthead to October 2016 instead of May as this made much more sense considering our film would be releasing in this month. A few other things I changed was filling up gaps on the front cover with writing about exclusive interviews and a first look puff. Finally I added the images of my two characters, I had Owen towering over Katie to present his dominance and Katie looking towards the floor to connote her innocence.  

 To create this product I used Adobe Photoshop which I had used last year but I found it much easier this year as I had the previous experience of using it before. 

 

Intertitles - Planning

When researching film trailers we noticed that many of them had intertitles featured. The majority of the films used these to either direct the narrative or state institutional information like release date or actors and actresses names. An example of one of the films were "When a stranger calls" and "1408". We then decided than we wanted to include intertitles to tell the narrative during the trailer and use minimal dialogue. By using these and not having much dialogue we thought that it would give the trailer a more mysterious feel and leave people wanting to know more. Our intertitles consisted of red writing on a plain black background, we done this as we thought the more simplistic look here worked best. 

Some of the intertitles we used were:
'Based on true events'
'A controlling boyfriend'
'An interfering ex'
'A damaging relationship'
'How will you escape...'
'When you are...'
'Under Control' 

We felt that these were a good option to use although the class thought we needed more dialogue we disagreed and used the intertitles to explain the narrative instead. By doing this we believe that it gives the trailer more suspense and tension.