Title Credits Analysis

Title credits are an essential part of an opening scene as it is a way of slowly introducing the characters through video as well as by text. We decided to opt for a digital type font which reflects the genre of our film very well. In the video above I explain how the title credits have effected or opening scene and what impact they have on the audiences perception of the opening scene. I also explain why we decided to use animation and vfx in our title credits and how this has further added the the spy / action feel of the opening scene.

Behind the scenes footage

Storyboard

Planning is a very important part in the film industry. Creating a storyboard allowed our group to really visualise each individual shot in order to understand what the camera will see and construct a further visual representation of the mies-en-scene. We have created a story board to help give a representation of what we want to achieve in terms of the out come. Of course this is a rough draft and won't have anywhere near as much detail as the final outcome. 
An advantage of creating a storyboard is that it includes being able to adapt on your shots to make them better as if makes it more clear to the individual what components of the shot may need to be improved or changed (this may include the camera being higher up, the character having a different prop or in a different position). 
I believe designing a story board is a good thing to do before shooting a trailer or a sequence in general because it gives us a rough interpretation of what we intent the outcome to come out like. 

Captive Poster

We have created a 'Captive' cover poster in order to help promote our film opening. Posters are a very effective and traditional marketing tool which helps you build and attract an audience. We did some research into cover posters, we have taken ideas and inspiration from three different film posters to use in our poster. We have made the photo very dark, displaying a single character tied to a chair with a logo containing a white background to make it stand out and contrast the main image.

DVD and Blu Ray Covers research

James Bond Spectre is the latest edition of the James Bond series. It was released in October 2015. It was one of the largest anticipated moves for the last few years. In this cover James is accompanied by his partner in crime. It is clear that James Bond is the main character in this movie because he is in three quoters of the background of the cover with his face in a blue / grey colour. The woman beside him must have a big part to play in the movie. The title is centred at the top of the cover, the font is a silver colour and it has a reflective side to it. The colours are different in the background of James's face as compared to the smaller full body image of him in the cover. I think the blue colour of James represents the past. In the top left of the corner there is a figure with a skull mask on. I think that this figure is a representation of the villain in the movie or has something to do with the plot in a pretty big way otherwise it wouldn't make it on the cover. 

In Olympus has fallen the cover supports and shows three characters, we are able to assume that the character in the middle is the main protagonist. The main character I believe is the centralised character because that is normally how designers create movie posters. The two men beside him will have key roles win the film, we don't know what the specifically are but its safe to assume that they will have a big role in the film. On the left hand side of the cover there is the United States flag which is on fire, I believe this represents how the United States has fallen to the hands of the enemy in the film. The title itself tells us that Olympus has fallen. Olympus is a codename for the president and the Whitehouse. So by saying olympus has fallen it means that the Whitehouse has been taken hostage by someone. With the flag and the white house on fire in the cover this shows how the Unites States has fallen to the enemy. A big emphasis is used on Olympus in the title, it shows a great importance in this movie. 

Star wars the force Awakens was a very widely anticipated movie prior to its release, this theatre cover gives off a lot of information to the film that enthusiasts have picked at and tried to find every bit of information towards the film and the plot as possible. The artists of this cover will want to be able to show off big points in the film and show of the characters, the point of this is to draw people in so they can analyse and make their own assumptions on the film. We can see that on the right side there is the blue side which is of the Jedi. The Jedi is the good side in the star wars universe. There is a female character who is in the centre of the cover, I think it is safe to assume she will be the lead in the film. 

Group communication

Group Communication

In order to work as a team, we needed communicate quickly and efficiently. f

Four of us decided to create a WhatsApp group chat. We chose WhatsApp as it was the most heavily used instant messaging service within our group. 

Organisation is a vital part of video production, however people are often busy so we can't talk in person, so WhatsApp allows us to message on the go whilst planning events without the need to be in the same location.

As well as communicating within our group, we have used Facebook's instant messaging service in order to make plans with one of the people that is doing the Russian voice overs for our opening scene. He is our friend called Philip Ilinitch and his primary language is Russian. However, he is able to speak english in a strong Russian accent which is exactly what he needed. 

One of the characters in our opening credits movie is meant to be Russian. However, in reality he is English. Therefore, we needed someone who is able to speak English in a Russian accent to be the voice of the character.

Overall, the dialogue which Philip sent us was very clear and sounded realistic. The reason it worked so well is because the shots of the character speaking didn't really show his mouth. As a result, the dialogue didn't have to perfectly match the speed of the characters mouth.


The two photos above show a small part of the conversations that have taken place in order to arrange.

I believe working as a group to complete this trailer has been vital, the social media chats we have been using have been so helpful because they have allowed us to be able to contact one another even when we are not even physically present. Its been so much easier having been able to contact each other and organise dates and times for when we can do our shoots, its definitely been beneficial in our organisation of the project. 


A conclusion as to why I believe group communication is vital is that it is so important for us as a team to be able to easily contact one another. Its good because we don't need to all be in the same place physically instead we can arrange and organise our shoots and the dates for the shoots. Having the group chats has been very important and has been vital to our team work and the overall outcome of the trailer itself. 

Evaluation Question 7

Evaluation Question 7

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

This is our preliminary task, in this we had to follow the guidelines and we had to create a simple short video just to show that we understand the task that was given. It required us to edit a continuity task which then involved a person/character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character in which  the person will exchange phrases of dialogue. This task will demonstrated match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule. It is simple but it covers the requirements. 

We my group and I look back at our preliminary task we feel that as a group we have all learnt alot and developed our skills and positively improved as a group. It is has definitely helped us when it came to creating our main trailer 'Captive'. We believe ever since the preliminary tutorial our camera work has been much more efficient and effective as we can now use the manual settings to much greater effect and this actually makes our footage much better as we can control what the outcome will be more like as to compared what it would be like if we were to use the auto mode like we would've done if we hadn't learnt a great deal from our practices. The manual mode allowed for much more control over the shutter speed, aperture and ISO (camera sensitivity) which then made it easier to get a more cinematic look on our film. As a result of this, you can see that compared to our preliminary task there was our main trailer and the trailer showed how much our camera work and abilities had improved, we used a larger variety of shots and angles and also the quality of the footage was much better. I have picked out a you tube video below that describes how colour correction works and how to use it effectively. 

180 Degree rule

One of the main camera techniques we improved and worked on was the use of the 180 degree rule. Before any of our work I didn't have a great understanding of what this meant, but we were able to build a better understanding of it as the course progressed. In our preliminary task we actually didn't use this rule as we lacked the knowledge of how to use this rule, we didn't know where to apply it and how to use it. We then researched into it to improve our understanding of it to see how to achieve the 180 degree rule and this research actually made our final film opening a lot less confusing and time consuming. I believe the use of the 180 degree rule made our film more professional as it has followed the guidelines of a real media production. 

Screen shots from Preliminary Task 

The two screen shots above were taken from our preliminary task. The 1st shot is a close up of my face and the depth of field on the camera focused in on me meaning that the other person was more blurred out, this means that the camera was focusing on me. As you can see the 180 degree rule is broken in this because it is a POV in screen shot two and in screen shot one it is a close up, this has broken the 180 degree rule and it makes it confusing for the viewers to understand whats happening. 

The planning of our preliminary task was confusing and hectic because as a group we didn't really know what to do and we didn't know who to create what we had been used to do so we simply brainstormed a few ideas and came to a conclusion and we created 'LONLEY'. Our outcome was pretty bland a lacked a variety of detail and it missed out the '180 degree rule' for example. We instantly improved on this as it came to the pre production of Captive and the production of Captive, as a group we worked solidly together and we got things done effectively and efficiently. To communicate as a group we used whats app instant messenger and we created a group chat were we would construct a few ideas and then organise the dates and times for the shoots. This was very helpful and it definitely made the process much easier. We worked collaboratively in order to create a storyboard that would help us when it came to shooting the scenes. This helped us give a pre visualisation of our shots and change anything or correct anything in advance, instead of wasting our time when filming. This is something which we struggled with in the preliminary task. We had no storyboard and that definitely effected our outcome and the efficiency of our shoot. 

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 6

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process pf constructing this product?

Hardware

As our Camera we used a Canon 700D with a standard lens and a 300-700 sigma lens. This camera recorded everything we did when it came down to the visual footage, it did the job really well.
We used a road video mic attachment to be able to achieve better audio quality rather than use the on camera mic which doesn't do the best of jobs at picking up high quality audio. In black park it was an open and exposed environment so we needed to use a dead cat to be able to prevent the wind from effecting our audio quality. Henry brought the dead cat along and we needed it vitally. The point of the rode video mic was that it was aimed towards the direction that we filmed in and it picked up a much more intense and high quality audio in that direction, it only picks up audio in that direction so the background noise was pretty non existent.


To record audio when it came to smaller and distinctive things such as footsteps or the voice of someone speaking, for example when Ollie (male being kidnapped) spoke towards the end of the trailer that we recorded by Kieran who used the apple ear pods, this was because they had a mic on them and they picked up the audio really well because it was so simple minimal.






This image here is an example of what our camera set up looked like.
We used other equipment such as tripods for still shot stabilisation, this was important because not every shot was moving, some were fixed and we needed the trip pod for this. We used a glide cam which was extremely important because it stabilises the footage, for example when the camera is moving and shaking the footage will be stable because the glide cam auto stabilises everything.

The lighting we used was a soft box this was used to easily correct the colour in the frame and made the colour better too. 3 lenses were used, we used a 80-55 mil lens this was a great lens because it gave us a fairly good range of aperture. Then the second lens we used was in black park and it was a zoom lens, this was obviously used for its zoom capability but it had a good depth of field, this was used alot on the shoot in black park. The third lens was a 50mil lens, this was used to shoot the dark shots in black park for the kidnapping scene.

Websites

We used a website called free sounds, this was really needed at times because it allowed us to download for free small sounds such as the sound of a drill or water drops anything in that variety was gained off of free sounds. This site was great because when we attempted to collect these sounds for ourselves we found it really hard to pick them up in good quality as to compared to free sounds it was so simple because all we did was search the sound we needed then downloaded it.
Although some sounds were recorded in black park with the rode video mic, we recorded mostly the ambient sounds with this mic.
Our main source of research was from youtube videos, we used other channels to create a broader understanding of the task in hand and we used youtube to learn more about certain angles and ways to improve our camera skills.
We used box office mojo helped us when it came to what certificate (rating) we wanted to create this film for, we chose 12A because stats show that 12A films are the most successful because it opens the variety of the audience to everybody in the public.
IMDb was also used to create further research for things like DVD cover research and in terms of who watches the movies and each specific age group or class of people.
We used obviously blogger as our main website to create the entire blog, we also used Prezi which is a website used to create slideshows. Also we used google docs just to create a few drafts and brainstorm ideas between the group.

The video below shows how to compensate exposure on the camera settings, I put this video in because in black park the lighting massively varied and we had to change the exposure of the lens to be able to make sure the shot wasn't too dark or too light. We liked to keep the aperture on the camera reasonably low because this made the depth of field better and we personally felt that it gave the shots a much more cinematic effect. The settings on the camera massively depended on the day because obviously we cant control the weather so we had to do the best as we could and we had to compensate at times.

The main reason why we shot behind the scenes footage is because it is good to be able to have so we can refer to it and see what we did well and see what we could've improved on when it comes the time to create a new trailer we might possibly do in the future. 

Evaluation Question 5

Evaluation Question 5

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

We chose very specific locations for the shoot, this is because they are of a good environment in which we could shoot the scenes well, the locations we used are well regarded and have been used many times before for big companies who produce box office movies such as James bond and star wars. 

The ways we attracted an audience were by to use certain locations that are used by film productions that are larger then most and have a great fan base, so when they watch one of the films they often know where it is filmed e.g. James Bond is filmed at Pinewood Studios. So black park is the woodlands that is seen in our video footage this is because we were looking to achieve a rustic look for the scenery and woodlands was good for this effect.

The second way in which we wanted to attracted/address our audience was through the use of parallel editing which creates a sense of tension in the scene, in a shoot you can have mediocre shots but with the power of editing you can create something much more. The quick cuts between the two different locations meant that the audience never knew what to expect and are therefore this makes them much more engaged in whats happening. When the quick cut is occurring something else could be happening in the other scene such as the agent is doing something, the Russian kidnappers could be doing something else. This is good because the audience doesn't know whats going on. We could have chosen to create a film opening by using a of montage editing to represent different perspectives, although it wouldn't have had much of an impact in terms of helping the quick change of locations in real time.

 
Our front cover can go two ways it can either go well because the people would pick it up and think it looks good or they ignore it and there will always be some that ignore it, this is because some people just don't pay a bit interest in posters/pamphlets, but we hope to have made it stand out with the black and white photo and shows a man tied up and this would get people thinking is he going to get free or will he die, which will make the audience attracted to it and therefore make our audience wider.

These are all the different ways that we attracted and addressed the audience. The way it addressed the audience was because as soon as they see London and woods they can instantly tell by associating it with other films what this films is going to be about just from the scenery.

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 4

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

I have constructed a structured layout of what I believe someone who would watch our film has interests in. I believe this is a reasonably accurate representation of what that persons interests will be. 

Companies who do pre production research will do the same and the follow the same sort of template for there target audience research. Companies who produce films actually don't need as much funding for a film by using synergy with other companies that would also have a similar target audience. A major example of this Omega the watch manufacturing brand used in James Bond films is advertised as James Bond , along with Omega, Aston Martin and Heineken are big companies who work in synergy with the James Bond title. Movies such as Fast and furious 7 have synergy with corona beer. 



This here is Michael, He is 27, he is an example of the male audience in intend to target towards, as a 27 year old man, Michael is still young and he enjoys going to the cinema on occasions with his girlfriend. They both enjoy similar movies such as action, thriller and sci-fi. This means Michael is a good candidate to use as an example of our target audience. Michael loves action movies such as james bond and mission impossible, both these films fit the same category as our film captive does. Michael has a twitter page where he post he reviews on the latest movies, He has a decent following of 12k. This makes him the perfect example of our target audience and as he works in London he could relate himself to the places that have been shown in our opening scene. The reason why he is our target audience is because as he enjoys spy like films he would be more motivated to watch ours and would help advertise it on his blog too. This would help our marketing as we would create a fan base of our productions.

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 3

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

A distributor is an individual or an organization who will represent your film at festivals and markets around the world and who will attempt to sell it to television or a larger production company.

I believe the best ways for us to distribute our movie is by cinema's DVD's, and via iTunes store. This is because these three get good attention and press. 

DVD's are a good means of distributing the product because most people own a device that is DVD supported, even if people don't have a DVD player DVD's are also supported on some gaming consoles such as PS4 and XBOX. DVD's give everyone a permeant copy for as it is a hardware version. The reason why we may use DVD's is because its the cheapest option and easy to produce on to a disc, simply the movie is burnt onto the disk, this costs little to produce so therefore the profit we can make is rather large. The bad thing about this is due to being in the 21st century most things nowadays are done online therefore DVD's are soon to be redundant as nobody will use them and they take a longer time to manufacturer than simply putting a file online and therefore these aren't as useful. As the viewer has to go out of there will to buy the film this meaning they not bother as not as many DVD's are produced nowadays due to this. Apparent from DVD there is Blu-ray which is a very similar concept but it is of a much higher quality in terms of resolution and frame rate, the quality is much crisper and clearer, the movie flows much better, blu-ray is in terms a higher quality DVD, that makes it also more expensive for customers to purchase, but you get what you pay for and thats extra features and better quality. Who doesn't love high quality films of you're a movie fanatic. 

We may want cinemas is because this is the best way to get our film broadcasted in terms of many people knowing about it as it will be decently advertised. so therefore more people will have heard about it and if it able to make the big screen then many people are going to go see it this is because big cinema chains and companies only play films they believe will generate most amount of income and know they will be hyped u and get a big audience. With cinemas for us to make the big chain companies such as VUE, Odeon and Cineworld IMAX they would only invest their time into big production companies like Universal, Paramount and Walt Disney, Dreamwork's etc. these are all top film production companies that produce the block buster films. This is because they will have the most amount of money invested in them and would have a lot of time to produce them. These big companies have a huge budget and the top facilities and a great cast of his profile actors, these actors can effectively make the movie for the company as the draw of the actor makes people want to see the movie even more. So if we finish our film if we didn't have a large production company to develop it then it most likely wouldn't be shown in the cinemas so therefore we would need a smaller production company like Film 4 to take on our film as we would have a greater chance to have this size of production company invest in us then Universal. These are all important if we were to distribute our film by using cinema's. 

I want to use iTunes as one of our distributors because iTunes is so high profiled. This means that if we managed to get our film onto iTunes this would be great publicity for us as iTunes takes advantage of their website to advertise upcoming movies and they send you emails telling you when to preorder and when the film is officially released. Also iTunes sometimes cuts deals with companies where they release the movie a week or two earlier than it would be released on DVD. I believe that this is a great thing for customers as they can simply download the movie on ay apple device they may own whether its an iPod touch or an iPhone, iPad or macbook. They only need to buy it once and the film will be permanently downloaded onto their apple account. There are only a few cons for customers when it comes to downloadable movies on iTunes. This is that there sometimes is a lack of special features and subtitles and also sometimes the picture quality isn't full HD, for most movies on iTunes there is an option to purchase and SD version which is a lower resolution and there is and HD version which I believe is a 1080p version which costs a couple pounds extra to purchase. I believe downloadable movies are the best way to watch media content. As a company we would get a lot of money from using apple to distribute our movie but I'm sure they'd ask for a respectable cut in terms of the money made.  

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Music

For our music/effects we used a lot of sound effects that were from the website I previously spoke about called free sounds, we got a lot of ambient sounds off of here. The sound effects and the background tracks we chose were chosen because we thought that they gave a intense and dramatic feel to the scene in hand. An example of film that use dramatic music to prove a statement and make the viewers know that something intense is going on are films such as kingsman, a good example in this film is towards the end scene where the main character is killing all the soldiers. Also a few other examples from other films are star wars, star wars is great with their backing tracks and sound effects, they really make the audience sucked into the film because everything is intense and makes you fixed to it. Also the film jaws is a really good one, this is when the shark is approach someone and the intense music gets louder and louder, it builds up momentum and is extremely dramatic. This is all good because scenes like this tend not to require much dialogue at all because everyone knows whats happening and that through emotions and actions instead of dialogue.

Locations

We used Heron Tower in London as the building were the main spy is working, this is a upper class area and gives off the impression that what he does is important. This area in a way reflects on films like James Bond because James Bond is known as an upper class man and with areas like this we were able to create a similar feeling of upper class that we get from Bond. 

Black park was a good location because it is extremely close to pinewood studios, pine wood studios is highly regarded for movies such as Harry Potter and also James Bond and also Avengers and many others, we thought it would be good to create our film in such an area. 

The final location was the Car park in Reading, this car park only featured slightly at the start of the trailer, it sets the scene for the prologue, we chose this because we thought it was a good and dark environment with a slight edge to it. All these locations did us all favours when it came to post production when we edited the film because even though they were all very different we were able to piece them all together and edit them and make the whole thing reasonably cinematic. 

POV and Wide Angle

Point of view was used a fair amount in the production of our trailer, it was mainly used for the hostage situation. I will show a screen shot of an example of that now. POV is good because it is so realistic and gives viewers a good idea of what it would be like to be in that situation. 

Wide angle shots weren't used much, this is due to the visualisation that we wanted to not give off too much off the character before the film is actually released, we wanted to leave an anticipation and not give too much away. 

Mise en scene 

Miss en scene is the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play. So for mine en scene we though the London shot was very basic, there was the computer the poster and the macbook where the agent is typing. Also there was the massive importance of the other agent missing which is on a posted at the start where the agent places it down on the table. 

Black Park focused on things that were smaller and minimalistic such as how the agents hands were tied and how he isn't wearing a coat because he's been stripped of most of his positions by the Russian enemies. There wasn't a great deal of detail in terms of the shot itself. 

A good scene i though was with the drill scene in how it was intense and dramatic and it was just left on a cliff hanger, this is god because it leaves the audience wondering whats happened to the agent or what will he do etc. We used a lot of hand held camera shots to create a good deal of tension and made sure a lot of the characters were centre framed. Here is an example of what I mean in terms of centralising the character in the scene. 

Sound design 

We used alot of artificial sound in 'Captive', we used things from the website free sounds to get us sound effects such as someones footsteps, we actually used a piece of tin foil to create the footstep sound effect. We recorded this sound at kierans house before the shoot. Below I will display a very helpful youtube video that is a recording audio tutorial. 

We tried really hard to make sure that the sound was well influenced and that it was used in the right way effectively to make the scene itself much better.  We also used alot of ambient sound (AKA ambient audio, ambience, atmosphere, atmos or background noise) means the background sounds which are present in a scene or location. Common ambient sounds include wind, water, birds, crowds, office noises, traffic, etc.

Color Correction 

In the black park scene we needed to do alot of colour correction, this was because the atmosphere and lighting in black park was actually very light and we preferably wanted the scene to look much darker to make a more intense and eery atmosphere. 

This screen shot is what we used when it came to colour correction in black park. In our other locations we didn't need to make the footage different much we simply tweaked it slightly, we wanted to keep it as raw as possible so we didn't make it look too fake and we wanted to keep it looking cinematic. 

Letter Boxing 

Letter Boxing is done in every film, basically it is when the film is taken from a from rectangular shape and converted into a thin film trim. Every film has the aspect ration letter box of 16x9 at 2-55-1 and condensed to a thin film trim. 

Below I am going to show two screen shots of the same shot but one is film trimmed and one isn't. 

As you can see these two look different, the trimmed one is the top one and the raw one is the one below. We have trimmed the final version because it gives off a much more cinematic look and gives a better viewing of the film in the end. 

Audience research and film ratings.

We have chosen to rate this film at an 12A. This is because the film can be watched by anybody, if they are under the age of 12 they will need to be accompanied by an adult. If the person is over the age of 12 they can watch the film in theatres by themselves if they wish, we chose the 12A route is it opens us up to a larger possibility of being able to generate more sales from our film and create as much revenue as possible by sales of tickets as everyone can watch the film.

What is the difference between a 12 and a 12A?

The 12A requires an adult to accompany any child under 12 seeing a 12A film at the cinema. This is enforced by cinema staff and a cinema may lose its license if adult accompaniment is not enforced for children under 12 admitted to a 12A film. Accompanied viewing cannot be enforced in the home, so the 12 certificate remains for DVD/Blu-ray, rather than the 12A. The 12 is also a simpler system for retailers. It means they cannot sell or rent the item unless the customer is over the age of 12.

Secondary research into film genre's.

The secondary research will help us see what genre the population most like and gives us awareness of the film industries as a whole. This research will be using third party sources. IMDB is used as its website  displays every film and TV show and rates them from the publics opinion and has critics comment on them too.

Films that are similar to the type of film that we want is James Bond and this is because its an English / Londoner agent who's employed by MI6 to hunt down and kill or capture the enemies. 

James bond and mission impossible are similar to our film 'captive' because they both contain kidnapping / capturing of someone. The spy theme is the same throughout. 











These screenshots show how much both the films that are similar have made in the box office and it shows that spectre was a huge hit. Both films were a big hit but James bond spectre was a bigger hit as it is one of the biggest movie franchises in the world. 

Box office mojo is a very good and reliable website as it shows films ratings and reviews and also ranks the films in order from highest rank to lowest, it also shows how much money was made from the film by the screenings from movie theatres. 
The two images above are genres of films one being Spy and the other being Hostage, I placed the two images here  because we are aiming to create a spy/hostage type film so we had to look at what the films were popular, we researched this to help develop our knowledge and improve the overall outcome of the captive movie itself.