Research| Distribution Companies

In AS media we looked at major distribution companies such as; Warner  Brothers, the same creators of the worldwide successful film Dark Knight. Warner Brothers distributed the film, theatrical trailer and teaser trailer at IMAX cinemas across the world; taking advantage of the shots in the film, captured using IMAX cameras, Cinemas, box office, DVD, Blu-ray, mobile competitions and via social networking sites.  The Warner Brothers social networking takeover involved; temporarily customising the facebook and myspace welcome page with the Dark knight poster and logo. They also gave the social networking users an opportunity to view the trailer online. The Teaser trailer was distributed at cinemas, at late night previews and their website as well as the Dark Knight website.

Distributing Hysteria

To distribute our Horror teaser Trailer, Hysteria we have chosen to distribute our trailer via Youtube.  Youtube allows us to target a wide range of audiences, most of whom have never witnessed or been around during the pre-production and production of the film, to give feedback on the teaser trailer. This also allows enables people to be brutally honest regarding the teaser trailer and the editing of it. Youtube primarily targets young audiences, and would benefit us as our trailer targets young audiences between 16-25. The benefit of using Youtube is also that, it allows users to share videos and send links to social networking sites for others to view.

In terms of links to social networking sites, we have chosen to distribute our trailer and poster via Facebook by tagging friends to our posters and magazine cover and posting our posters and magazine cover on our profile for any facebook to view. Facebook is one of the most popular and frequently used networking sites today . The benefit of using Facebook to promote and distribute our trailer is that it allows us to receive direct feedback from a mass audience by creating a group dedicated to our teaser trailer, poster and magazine cover, which allows facebook users to join the group and follow our updates.

Twitter allows users to post comments anonymously and follow people and groups to keep to-update. The benefit of Twitter is that is consists of a random audiences, and so feedback from unrelated audiences in terms of the trailer and friends is likely to be more accurate.






DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES JOCELYN

Planning | Meetings and Discussions Video Footage

Meetings & Discussions

This video shows us setting up the equipment for filming e.g. lights, camera, tripods. We discuss the angle we will film from in our set and where the lights will be in the shot. We also talk about how some shots can be improved and when it will be most appropriate to film.

Film Magazine

Teaser Trailer Equipment

TEASER TRAILER EQUIPMENT JOCELYN


Filming

We used a Canon EOS 7D to film our trailer. The benefit of using this camera is that the footage appears crisp and high definition. There are also many settings on the camera that can override each other, which I feel can effectively improve the quality of the shot.

Tripods

In all our shots we required tripods to hold the Kino-Flo Diva lights, to give us maximum stabilisation.
We also used a Steadi-cam tripod to film the shot two where Stacey is running into the distance, this helped create the feeling of chaos and immediacy.
A professional camera tripod was frequently used as it gives us a high level of control over using different camera shots whilst the character stays in frame e.g. panning shots, tilt, low angle shots, close-ups and medium close-ups.

Lighting

To film our teaser trailer, we used 400v Kino Flo Diva-Lite 400 and the 2-unit Diva-lite - soft lights from California, which allows you to manually reduce or increase the intensity of the lighting. In most of our shots we used one 2-unit Diva-Lite soft light and two 400v Kino Flo Diva-Lite soft lights, as the majority of our shots involved filming in tight corners and corridors so as to create the feeling of loneliness, isolation, fear and anxiety.

In the suffering shot and sink shot, we used a green filter to create a sense of hostility and sickness. The green filter often reminds people of hospital and so the colour green is symbolic of the suffering and pain experienced or witnessed in hospitals.

Rifa lights; We used a softbox to create soft key lighting; it has a soft fill and backlight which we used to light our photoshoots for the poster and magazine cover.

Photography

I used a Canon EOS 400D to take photographs for our posters and magazine cover. The camera was also used to capture behind the scenes shots.
We used a Bowens Gemini Esprit GM 500 flash unit, and connecting it up to a softbox so that the light perhaps delicate and 'soft' on Stacey's face. 

Hysteria | Official Film Posters

Weekly Update

Wednesday 26th January 2011

In this lesson, Joshua and Melissa focused on the finishing the posters to post on Youtube and Melissa has started working on the Magazine cover. Stacey helped give use ideas as to what we could potentially add or get rid of to improve the magazine cover. I spent the lesson ensuring that planning and research , production and post-production are blogged. In addition, any equipment used, technology, and information on distribution companies are crucial and so I needed to ensure they are blogged. I also finished a few blogs and created new posts in this lesson and in my free periods.

Weekly Update

Monday 24th January 2011

Today, we focused on editing our trailer and making the finishing touches to the posters and magazine cover. I added the new shots to a storyboard on final cut pro, so that we know how the film should preview, and it allows us to rearrange shots so that when we are editing the film to distribute for audiences on Youtube, you will see the rough cut and it will also help us to think about whether shots are relevant or not and where we need to make cuts and transitions.

Weekly Update

Wednesday 19th January 2011

Today, we recorded sounds for the trailer; screams, heavy breathing, door handles shaking and door closing. The one variable we struggled with to reduce was echoes and so we overcome this variable by recording about 15cm away from the subject or using the subject in such a rapid manner that echoes are not heard as much e.g. the door handle shaking. This echo was created as a result of the open, empty corridor and its failure to block sound waves.

Film Magazine

Film Posters and Magazine Cover| Raw Photographs

Weekly Update

Monday 17th January 2011

Today, I took some more shots for the poster and magazine cover, so as to have variety of shots to choose from and 2 alternative posters. This was captured in the corridor outside my media classroom, leading to the automatic doors. The photo shoot was a success and in the end we chose two of the many photographs taken to be used as our final poster and magazine cover design. Stacey our actress was used in the shoot; she is shown clutching the voodoo in her hand, communicating with the audience through her eyes and body language, she is emotional and afraid. In both the poster and magazine photographs I captured today that I want to use, the corridor has been captured in the background; this has been done to create a feeling of loneliness and helplessness.

Weekly Update

Wednesday 12th January 2011

Today, we have completed all our filming; which includes the new shots we have added. Today was our study day at school, but as a group we saw it as an opportunity to finally finish all the filming that needed to be done and focus on written work on blogger and the magazine cover and poster designs. We all arrived at school for 11am to start filming and left at 3pm, which was more than enough time to do our filming. In that time slot, we filmed Stacey with the voodoo doll, her running down the corridor and the closing shot of a tap on the shoulder at the end. The most complex shot of them all was the corridor shot. We had to decide how the lights will follow Stacey and what facilities can we use to create a feeling of panic and urgency. We decided in the end that because it would be too difficult to run with the lights as they are large and narrow, we should use the main light supply in the corridor as it shouldn't make too much of a difference to the shot and to use a steadi-cam to create the jerky images to create a feeling of panic.

Skills Assessment| Planning

Discuss the different technologies we have used the skills we have gained and developed e.g. lighting - getting rid of shadows and dark areas camera canon 7D youtube for research, distribution of film survey monkeys final cut pro software tripods blogger

We have used a vast amount of technology in our media group and have developed a number of skills behind them. Working as a proper professional media group production team we started to have a close eye for many important key aspects in our trailer, and print media. These includes thinking about

• Focuses of shots


• Lighting


• Moving around handing equipment carefully

Use Of The Apple MAC

One of the first technologies we used once we had started our working in groups was The Apple Mac. This was something all of us had to grow familiar with as we were going to be using for the rest of the project to edit, access our blog and manipulate our print media. Skills which we have gained from this are using quick keyboard shortcuts to work faster and more professional as a team. Also we all had to get used to how different Apple Macs were to PCs and the difference between sized screens and layouts of the desktop.

Canon 7D Camera

The Canon 7D camera was use for filming and taking still photographs. Joshua was the only member of the group who was familiar with the camera. With the rest of us we all got used to the properties around the camera and it functions. The Canon 7D was a camera that was different to other cameras whereby the quality was so much clearer whereby everything that may not show up as much on a normal camera would differently show up on the 7D. Skills we al developed as a group whether we were watching it or playing it back was the fact that each an everyone of us had an eye for camera focus, lighting, correct angles and ideal scenery. In our first stages of filming, we hardly paid close attention to that great us a result of bad shots and lighting. Gradually as we filmed more shots we gave each team a role to check lighting, camera focus, ideal scenery and camera shots were done correctly before we filmed. This improved our quality of filming and compressed time avoiding us to continue filming constantly. Another thing we did was do a few test shots before deciding to film properly. This helped use a lot as we were able to see where we went wrong and improve from there.

YouTube



All of us were very familiar with using YouTube to watch and upload videos. One of our project tasks was to actually upload our teaser trailer up in order to get views and comments from a number of people. As YouTube is a worldwide usage, we are likely to get comments from a number of people from all over the world as well as in our area code. This also went under one of our marketing strategies whereby it was one way of using advertising and disturbuting our teaser to the public. As well as uploading our trailer we also made short videos showing our different test shots and meetings we had as a group discussing any changes we made and queries we had to get across to each other as a group. This was very reliable as we could refer back to it as well as taking down notes as those were sometimes misplaced and lost.

Survey Monkeys

Survey monkey is a useful marketing strategy which we used in order find out bit more information about our target market. This was a new way of processing surveys and questionnaires as this it was done and distributed out online. After we had received enough results it was very easy for us to process the results on survey monkey as it was done automatically. Skills which were learnt ....

Blogger

The purpose of blogger was to allow us to post our work onto a blog so that we could keep our work together and provide a simple location for it to be viewed by ourselves, our teacher, and the examiner when the time comes.

Final Cut PRO Software

Tripods

Lights and Lighting

NEEDS TO BE REDONE AS A SPIDER DIAGRAM

EACH TEAM MEMBER MUST CREATE THEIR OWN POST

GIVING IT A TITLE OF SKILLS ASSESSMENT FOLLOWED BY THE AREA THEY ARE ANALYSING

Weekly Update

Wednesday 5th January 2011

Because Monday was bank holiday, we used today to discuss plans for filming next week and finalising the shots we want to re-film and new shots. We also used this lesson to work on our poster and magazine designs, finding the suitable text and coming up with new poster text templates as we want to have 4 posters to advertise the teaser trailer. The lesson was also spent focusing on the technologies we have used and the skills we have gained, during planning, research, production and post-production in regards to the coursework, which is extremely beneficial seeing as in the exam they will ask this question.

Photographs| Behind The Scenes

Adjusting Lights, Ready to shoot

Adjusting Lights, Ready to shoot
Melissa, Stacey, Jocelyn

 

Melissa With The SteadiCam

Melissa

Adjusting Lights, Ready to shoot
Jocelyn & Stacey

Actress Stacey

Joshua With The SteadiCam

Adjusting The Cock Strew On The SteadiCam

Teamwork, adusting the camera shoe onto the camera



Ready To Shoot
Lights Camera, Action



Melissa

Hardworking Melissa attaching the plug to the light

Behind The Scenes; Filming Shots

Lights Camera ACTION