Evaluation 4

Our intended outcome of our production was to create a vampire spoof comedy that did what every comedy is meant to do; make people laugh to entertain and to leave consumers wanting more.

We found that by making a vampire spoof we already had an audience the fan base generated around the likes of the Twilight phenomenon around the time when vampire films were at their peak we knew that this was going to be a hit. Last year we saw many twilight fans flock to see ‘Vampire’s suck’ a spoof comedy based around the Twilight saga.

Our audience demographic we discovered was generally mixed gender young adults aged around 17-25 and were fans of the twilight series and many other spoof comedies. The fact we weren’t just making a vampire film but a spoof gave us the advantage of a larger fan base, of course we know not everyone is a fan of twilight but the fact we are a spoof comedy means anyone who enjoys comedy can enjoy our film without ever watching twilight simply because of the comedic references made in the film.  Being a fan of the sequel myself and at a time when ‘Breaking dawn’ was just out in the cinema it appealed to me that making our vampire spoof at this point in time would be an ideal selling point. We did plenty of research into other spoof comedy’s like ‘vampire sucks’ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1666186/and ‘Scary Movie’ as well as research into many ‘Twilight’ films in order to gain ideas and to see audience reviews that told us exactly what kind of things their audiences enjoyed and what gave them that ‘Hilarious, Hit comedy’ name.

        When gaining feedback for our film trailer we used numerous social networking sites to post our trailer on and to gain feedback and guidance on what we could do to improve our productions. Due to  our school's filtering system we were unable to have access to sites such as ‘YouTube’ and ‘Facebook’ in college hours so whilst in college we made use of ‘Vimeo’ a site that allowed us to post videos online and to gain feedback. We found that as our target audience for our vampire spoof was late teens we decided to post our production on Facebook as with us ourselves being around that age we were able to reach out to our target audience easily in order to gain constructive criticism. We have learnt from this feedback what has worked within our production and what needed to be changed. We learnt that our audience liked the references to twilight as they saw it was something they could relate to and in turn was a way of getting the audience more involved because they will understand the jokes when referring to these films. This research also informed us of what kind of comedic terms worked and what we needed to do more of they particularly liked ‘Steve’s’ unlucky in love story his quest for love became an on-going theme in the trailer showing that our vampire ‘Steve’ is ironically very much the opposite of ‘Hunk’ Robert Patterson.

      I believe that my media skills and ability have changed dramatically in the space of two years I have gone from not even being able to set up a tripod to editing and producing my own film trailer! At first my skills were amateur but as time went on I became more comfortable when using the camera my filming became smoother and less ‘home video like’. When editing our footage we used the video editing software ‘Pinnacle’ at first I felt kind of intimidated by the thought of using the software as I hadn’t used anything like it prior to my AS coursework, but with plenty of guidance and experience I became more confident and was able to edit my footage to a higher standard, making my productions look more professional and stand out as being unique and interesting.

Evaluation Activity 4

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Evaluation 3

Evaluation Activity 4

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Evaluation 2

When performing research into various conventions and themes which we wanted to use in our A2 media trailer production, we made particularly strong use of various internet sites such as YouTube and the Internet Movie Database. We watched a variety of film trailers on both sites, particularly YouTube (www.youtube.com), due its easy accessibility and use, as well as it being used by major film companies, such as Miramax to advertise their upcoming films and generate hype for them. We found good use of Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) as well, due to the amount of institutional information available on the site, and links to related works, such as to trailers and pages featuring similar actors or directors.

When planning our production, we primarily used software such as Microsoft Word to write up our planning documents and files such as our scripts, shot lists etc. as well as using the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop to design our production company logo, as well as our ancillary tasks of a magazine cover and a film poster.

 

When filming our production, we used a variety of equipment to achieve our visions of what our trailer was going to be like. We used a Sony handheld camera for filming our footage on, due to its easy availability as well as being portable and very easy to carry around due to its small size. The camera also provides clear images and videos to use in our production. As well as our camera, we used a tripod to steady our shots, which we found was of very important use when filming the bedroom scenes at Antonia’s house, due to the odd angle of the floor, which meant that without the tripod, the footage we had would have been unusable. However, with the use of the tripod, we ensured that all of our shots were at the correct angle and could be used.

Although the equipment we used was helpful in a variety of uses, we also had some problems using them. For instance, although the tripod was useful in correcting the angles of our shots, we found it to be hard to set up the tripod up to precisely counter the floor angle, and were a very long and arduous task. Likewise, when using the handheld camera, we found that the built-in microphone of the camera did not pick up the sound and voice of our scenes, meaning that often in times of editing we found that the music often was louder than the dialogue and drowned it out.  We also used a microphone in our production, for recording the voice over for our trailer. When using the microphone, we at first had trouble getting a clear and useable piece of sound from the microphone, due to the microphone muffling the dialogue from the voiceover, as well as picking various pieces of background noise. If we were to re-record the voice over, then I would use a different microphone, due to the difficulties we faced when recording for this trailer production.

When editing our film trailer, we used the video editing software Pinnacle Studio Pro HD V.15.

 

 

We had experience with the previous version of Pinnacle Studio prior to using it to edit, as well as first using the current version it to edit our AS production, meaning that we felt comfortable with editing and capturing our footage into a trailer format. When using Pinnacle, we found that the new version captured all of our footage and separated the different takes and shots we had taken in one action, resulting in a much easier process of transferring our footage onto the computer to edit, instead of capturing individual shots and scenes ourselves over a prolonged period of time, a problem we faced with the previous version of Pinnacle. Pinnacle also allowed us to easily transfer our created images such as our production company straight in to use in our production. When using Pinnacle, we cut specific shots from our footage down to smaller sections, fitting them together with other pieces of footage in an almost montage style, allowing us to connote across certain ideas and themes, bringing out the comedy of our piece by connecting a variety of our footage with comedy elements in. 
Pinnacle was also used in making our animatic, where we scanned the images of our storyboards onto the computer, before transferring them into Pinnacle and placing alongside each other.

Overall, we found Pinnacle a very useful piece of software when creating our production, due to its easy to use interface, and our previous experience with the software meant that we felt more at ease going into the editing process than we would have with prior experience using the Pinnacle Studio software.

When adding the finishing touches to our production, we used the websites http://www.freesound.org/ and http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ to get copyright-free music to use in our production. We found these sites were very helpful and easy to use, and had a vast amount of sounds to be used, meaning that we could become more specific with the sounds and music we wanted, narrowing down the genre of music we wished to use.

After finishing our piece, we decuded upon placing our finished productions upon both our own Facebook accounts as well as on video sharing sites such as Vimeo, to share with our friends and others, asking for Feedback.

These sites proved particulary useful for us when sharing our video, due to Facebook being instantly linked to our friends so that they could instantly view our video, as well as Vimeo having the ability to share and embed our video upon our blogs and other sites, as well as being viewed driectly from Vimeo. We also posted our animatic onto our Vimeo sites, to embed onto our blog afterwards as evidence of producing storyboards and an animatic.

To post our research, planning and evaluations online, we made use of the website Blogger. Blogger was of great help in easily posting our information online in a structured manner, and we could easily send each other information posted upon our blogs to other group members. Blogger was also good for keeping to schedules for filming etc, and meant that we could work both in school and at home to share our information to be viewed by group members, allowing us to post freely and quickly. The website allowed the ability to easily transfer and embed images and videos to use in correlation with our work and as evidence, and to use to show our characters used in our production and the costumes we had used for the characters.

Evaluation 1

Ancillary Task- Poster

Ancillary Task- Magazine Cover

Finished Production

Animatic

Untitled from Gabrielle Tomlinson on Vimeo.

Music Used

For our production, we decided to use copyright free music in our piece, with the idea for the music to give the film the comedy edge and match the parody theme of our trailer.
For the opening section of our trailer, we used an orchestral piece we found on the website http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ called "Intrepid Traveler". Featuring a building string section, we felt that the piece would work well with the opening of our trailer, lulling the audience into a false sense of security and playing up to the parody side of our film, presenting it as an almost Epic movie. http://www.freeplaymusic.com/search/preview_file.php?id=92&dur=0&type=mp3 - Shortcut  to "Intrepid Traveler".


We immediately used a sound effect of a record player's needle being pulled off of a record quickly, to give the impression of the track being stopped short of it's climax. This effect is used in various pieces of media, like in a variety of songs, films and television shows, often to switch from one idea of connoting to the audience a switch from a serious situation to a more comedic one. We took the sound effect from the website http://www.freesound.org/.http://www.freesound.org/people/Halleck/sounds/29938/ - Link to Record Scratch sound effect.


For our final piece of music in our trailer, we used a short piece of hip hop music entitled "Beat 1", also taken from http://www.freesound.org/. We chose this piece of music due to Hip-hop's worldwide appeal, as well as due to the fact that the music contrasts with the "camp" character of Steve the vampire, hip-hop music associated with  "urban" themes and rap music. http://www.freesound.org/people/zyberbird/sounds/15495/ - link to "Beat 1"

Script for Characters

Steve pushes open doors, crowd moves apart.

Steve is walking through the corridor towards camera, stops  in front of camera.

Crowd Member: gasp

CUT TO:

Steve opens door and looks across the room at girl

Girl with ketchup on face looks confused at Steve

Steve displays look of affection, then brushes back hair smoothly

Girl shrugs, eats burger

Steve leaves, looking sad

CUT TO:

Steve Brushes hair back, sat on tree, almost falls

CUT TO:

Steve hanging upside down from tree

Steve:  it’s so high!

CUT TO:

Steve is sat in office chair, holding cat stroking it

Steve: (in camp voice) Hello Mr Kitty! Hello!

Steve realises he is talking camply, coughs loudly

Steve: (in deep voice) hello…

CUT TO:

Steve appears at a window of a house, and climbs in, getting stuck on the curtain on the way in.

Steve climbs onto the bed of the “Female” and crawls along towards them.

He pulls back their hair from their neck, before they turn to him, revealed it is a man.

Steve: (shocked) you’re a man?!

Man: I can be anything you want me to be…

CUT TO:

Steve eats a slice of garlic bread

Realises it is garlic, begins to choke and collapses

CUT TO:

Steve stood in front of houses on a pathway, pouts and looks into camera, before looking away into the distance

Titles overlaid.

END

Script for Voice-over

Voice-over: This Summer... A film like no other...will hit your screen...He may not be R-Pattz…
Scene where he's walking through the school
Voice-over:...but he does have his own vampire diary,
Burger scene
Voice-over: ... with the courage of Lion.

Hanging upside down from tree scene, scene with cat
Music changes
Voice-over: He'll do anything to get the girls... or so he thinks. Sink your teeth into this! Glampire, coming soon

Make-Up

As our production is a vampire parody film, we needed to have our lead Vampire character to have the all the looks and features of the stereotypical vampire. With this in mind, due to my position as playing the lead vampire, I had to undergo a fairly lengthy procedure of applying make up to my face.

To get the look of the vampire, we used white face paint as a base all over the face, with black eyeshadow used to create distinctive cheekbones, creating a gaunt and somewhat animated look. We again used black eyeshadow over and under the lids of the eyes, the by lining the eyes with a black liquid eyeliner this gave out more definition in the eyes giving them a more intense look.

We then used the liquid eyeliner to line both the eyebrows and the hairline using angled edges to create a Dracula esque symmetrical facial shape. Furthermore, we added some red lipstick to the lips, and then coated with a gloss to give a dripping effect simular to blood. Finally, by adding wet look gel to the hair we were able to create the combed back, quiffed style made synonymous with the Count Dracula image.

Character List

Steve the Vampire: Mitchell Terry

• A very un-cool vampire who thinks he's really popular and a total ladies man. He's clumsy and dum and most fo the time a complete scaredy cat. He always wears a cape and has a hair comb on him at all times.

Nora the Geek: Gabrielle Tomlinson

• Nora is a typical geek, she wears geeky glasses and plain clothing. She likes Steve but he doesn't relalise until the end of the film. Nora and Steve are good friends for the duration of the film.

Film Company Logo

This is the altered version of our logo. We wanted to keep the same logo that we used in our AS film project for the purpose of audience members more likely recognising it from previous films I.e. When you see the Warner Bros logo you are more likely to go see a film rather than if Warner Bros used a different logo for every film.

I therefore added a bow tie and some googly eyes as these are typical features of a clown and make the logo more comical. By simply adding these two things, I haven't made our logo to obscure, just enhanced it slightly to fit our genre.

Original Logo

This is our final logo for MGT Film Productions. I used the swan picture and cut round both the swan and its reflection and put into a seperate picture I hen combined it with the font the I'd already decided on. When i cropped round the swan itl ooked a bit ragged rather than graceful so once I'd finished moving all the images a used 'paint' to draw round the images with white to smooth the images. I decided to keep it on a white background as it's more pure and innocent than black. It also connects more to the image of a swan.

Potential Logo Backgrounds

Swan's Reflection



Ballerina

I thought about what I wanted for the background of our film logo, and when I decided on our final font, it was pretty clear. The swirl underneath the font meant that the background image had to be somethign graceful, the first think I thought of was a swan as it's known for being graceful, I then thought of swan lake and ballerinas. I had to potential ideas for the backgrounds which are shown above. I then asked friends and family of all ages and both genders and asked them what they thought was more appropriate and more people thought that the swan was better so we decided to go with that.

Potential Fonts

This font is quite bold and stands out. However it's quite squished together and a little difficult to read. We liked the idea of having a loveheart over the 'I' to make it more feminine. We could perhaps change the colour

This font is a lot like the fint for the Disney company, it therefore has a childish feel to it. The writing looks handwritten but still clear enough to read it. There is also a love heart above the 'I' which makes it girly and cute.

I like this film title, the curled, rickety edges remind me of a late ‘Nosferatu’, the original vampire film. Although this font style is apparent it’s some kind of theatrical thriller film, it’s not however getting across the essence of our genre. The small heart inside the letter ‘A’ subtly emphasises the twist within our film however doesn’t give too much away.

This font reminds me of the film 'Bewitched as it has the sparkles over it. However I think the sparkles would be more appropriate for a film with magic in it rather than a supernatural film. The letters are clear although strangely formed and curled a little.

I really liked this one, the letters are bold and clear and easy to read and there are numerous heart shapes over the top. This is girly however because it's written in bold capitals and not hadwriting its not quite as feminine. This is the one we've decided to pick for our font.

This one is quite spooky looking so would go with our genre of the supernatural. There is no hearts or stars over the letters though which is what we were looking for. However we still wanetd to include this font as we could quite easily put a heart over the dot of the 'I'.

This font is always quite nice but the 'G' doesn't stand out as much. Although I think it's quite effective that the 'G' is inside the heart with a smaller heart next to it. The letters are also bold and in capitals so they do stand out quite well.

Although this one is quite nice and girly, its not particularly easy to read and doesn't stand out straight away because the hearts are inside the letters. The only bit I really like about this font is that the letters are bold and black.

Shot List

Done	#	Shot	Action	Notes
Done	1	Medium-close up	Steve sat in tree pouting	Fade after shot
Done	2	Long shot	Steve walking down school corridor through crowd, stops in front of camera
Done	3	Close up	Steve opens door
Done	4	Close up	Nora turns to face Steve
Done	5	Close up	Steve pulls out brush and brushes hair, moves closer to Nora
Done	6	Close up	Nora gives Steve an unenthusiastic look
Done	7	Medium shot	Steve sat in a tree brushing hair back pouting
Done	8	Medium-close up	Steve hanging upside down from tree	Dialogue
Done	9	Medium	Steve and cat	Dialogue
Done	10	Medium	Steve climbing through window
Done	11	Mid-close up	Steve climbing across bed towards “girl”
Done	12	Close up	Steve pulling hair away from “girls neck”
Done	13	Close up	“Girl” turns to Steve, reveals it is a man
Done	14	Close up	Steve shocked at man	Dialogue
Done	15	Mid-close up	Steve eating garlic bread, collapses
Done	16	Long shot	Steve stood posing, pouting	Zoom in, fade
Done	17		Logo, credits