Question 4

1
HOW EFFECTIVE ARE YOUR ANCILLARY TASKS IN
COMBINATION WITH YOUR MAIN PRODUCTION?
2
MAIN FOCUS (CHARACTER)
For a while I speculated about using the main
characters actual face rather than a mask, but
after looking up film posters online for horror
films which use masks, almost all of them used
this as the key focus for the movie poster. The
posters would often use the mask as the main and
only focus and have them taking up almost the
whole page, but I decided to challenge this
convention as the mask we used for our film was
fairly basic and did not have the same kind of
effect. For this reason, I placed the model on
the far left, this allowed room for the
background layer to also take focus and make the
title stand out even more as there was nothing to
distract the reader as much on the right have
side of the poster. I think this convention is
extremely powerful if it is done correctly but as
for me, it was unlikely to work, I challenged
this horror convention.
3
BACKGROUND LAYER
There are a number of different locations which
are stereotypical for the horror genre. For
example, these are old houses, which often tend
to be haunted for the film, or woodland areas.
This kind of setting emphasises that the
character is in a wide open space away from other
people and the tall trees make for perfect
shadows due to the semi-selective lighting. For
our film, a scene is set in the woods for one of
the murders, this is why I chose this image. I
took it while we were filming one day after we
had used the setting. Later on Photoshop, I
cropped the image and added a dull-purple filter
onto the image. Reds and blues are often
associated with the horror genre for their
chilling and dangerous feel. To the right are
some images of film posters which I used in the
research section of my production process to
decide on how my poster would look.
4
TITLE AND TAGLINE
For this feature of the movie poster, I looked at
similar genre based films to understand how the
title is produced and what the tagline should be
like. Although I did not use everything I
learnt, I took a lot of concepts on board.
Firstly, the actual font for the title. Most
titles were either black or white, depending on
their background, and most had a serif based
font. These were all conventions that I decided
to use for my poster. For the tagline, the films
usually incorporated two blocks of writing either
set apart by ellipses or commas. This was yet
another aspect of the stereotypical genre that I
decided to use. For mine, I kept the tagline
simple, the use of repetition in the first word
also highlights the title which means an endless
loop. This hints to the audience what the film
would be about if they didnt know.
5
OVERALL REVIEW FOR FILM POSTER
My perception of my ancillary tasks overall is
mainly positive. I think that although the
editing is in some places is slightly
unprofessional, the poster overall grasps the
main key concept for the film in terms of genre
and allows the audience to perceive the poster in
a way that they chose as it doesnt give too much
away. I think that it fulfils the expected
criteria for the given task as the graphic
element, background, colour schemes and editing
has all been done in a way which represents a
stereotypical horror film poster. Furthermore,
the graphic features which were incorporated such
as the age rating badge, reviews and credits all
enhances the posters authenticity to give off an
overall professional looking design.
6
RADIO TRAILER
I think that the radio trailer I created was
fairly respectable considering I had no past
experience with the programmes I used (garage
band to record and sound cloud to upload). The
radio trailer includes a number of voices overs
which were created for a montage of news clips,
these were used for one of the later scenes in
our film but I felt it worked well as an opening
to the radio trailer. In between this was
scripted content from the film from various
scenes and additional sound effects to give more
indication of what was happening to the listener.
For example, one of our scenes shows a person
being killed through suffocation, but I used a
gunshot noise to make it more clear for the radio
trailer that the person was being killed. The
backing track included a drone sound effect and
light music throughout. This was a lo-fi track
which makes the audience feel slightly
disorientated. The final section of the track has
someone whispering the film title with a
stereotypical slow tempo style nursery rhyme
track, another typical convention for horror
films. Below is a screenshot of Garageband for
one of our scenes for our film.