Improvements on Final Typography

After the evaluation of the trailer using comments from YouTube, it was mentioned how we could make our typography more creative to grab the audience and create a much more gritty sense to our trailer.

I decided to make it more interesting by using a paintbrush tool on Photoshop at different opacities. 

 

I felt this mirrored gunshot splatters and blood against the typography. I needed to make sure that this typography did not over power the poster and make it look crowded.

 

This is our groups final typography.

 

YouTube Feedback

Conventions of a Website

A website needs to follow certain conventions so that certain information can get across to the audience in a particular way that is easy to locate. 

The conventions of a good website include:

Trailer 
The trailer must be placed on an appropriate area on the screen, as well as it must start automatically to create a professional feel to the website. 

Layout
The layout must be clear and user-friendly so that the viewer doesn't waste time around the website, and they can find the information that they need to quickly. In addition to his, the website must fit on a screen comfortably and there must be no need to scroll down. 

Critic Reviews
These often appear on a variety of websites to give an insight into the film from related magazines or newspapers. 

Image
An image of a character(s) or location may appear on the website. This may be taken from the film itself, or taken especially for the website. 

Conventions of a Film Poster

Film posters are vital in the combination of a promotional package. 
The film poster must include specific conventions to meet not only the genre, but of a normal website. 

These include:

Typography 
The typography must be effected and easy to read. The Typography must also dominate the screen, but not take over.

Image
An image from the film, or one specifically taken for the purpose of the poster must be included to alert an audience of what they are going to expect from the film. Showing locations, or actors. 

Billing Block
The billing block is vital on each website to give credit to producers, actors, and directors. The main actors may also appear on a separate part of the poster. 

Release Date
A release date is often featured on a poster to alert an audience. This could also be shown as the film is 'coming soon' 

Tagline
The tagline for the film is often shown on the poster to give an insight into the narrative.

Evaluation Question 2 - Seyi

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Colour Scheme

The  colour scheme is mainly constant within our poster and website that we have created, due to the lack of text within our trailer the dark red isn’t used until the title appears right at the end of the trailer as we were creating an Urban Drama where the protagonist is in a lot of danger due to his involvement in drugs, we decided to use a strong dark red colour as the colour red can give off a strong sense of danger.

We avoided the red being bright as it would stick out too much in some of our media products as the backgrounds weren’t vibrant images, also, the darker shade of red makes the overall effect more menacing. This colour scheme was first incorporated within our poster, we used this dark red colour scheme for the main texts on our poster such as the title, the twitter and the website, the colour scheme is extremely effective for our poster as it is a brilliant shade of red that sticks out on the background, the rest of the text is white such as the billing block and the tagline, this ensures that you can differentiate between the importance of the text on the poster, so the text that we wish to stand out the most does exactly that.

The colour scheme within the website is also effective as the now the tagline is in the dark red colour, matching the title and the links for the home page, gallery etc, there was little text on the website as the only text needed would be the links, the title, the tagline and the reviews, so the significant text would be the title, the links and the tagline as this would allow our website to conform to our other media products as we have tried to make the colour red a stand out factor.

Layout

The layout of the poster highlights the fact that we created a character specific teaser trailer, even though it is an urban drama we made sure that we kept scenes with others to a minimum, this character specific factor has been brought over to our poster as we made sure that the protagonist was the only person pictured within the poster. We positioned him in front of a high rise block of flats and placed these block of flats in front of an image of the London skyline which was taken from an aerial angle, to give off the concrete jungle effect that we were trying to establish. The layer of images that we have put together gives an effective layout as it keeps the focus on the protagonist however, it shows the protagonists surroundings as well which is what has put the protagonist in his dire situation.

The previous pictures we took that we wanted to use for the main picture for our poster were never as effective as the chosen picture as they didn’t show an establishing shot with a significant object in the background as they only showed small items such as walls with graffiti on them or a bridge.

The layout of the website also uses an establishing shot

this time in the form of a time lapse, which is in the background and is continuously running as you are on the website. The same high rise block of flats is shown but it is shot from a different angle, allowing it to lie on the left of the screen with the protagonist in front of the block of flats, while the our teaser trailer lies in the space on the left, giving the viewer a clear space to watch the trailer without any objects distracting them or taking their attention away. At first we wished to incorporate a bridge into our image for the website and place the links onto the bridge, however there was no way we could use this idea as there was no way we could fit the bridge onto the screen while showing the protagonist on the webpage as he is a significant factor within the teaser trailer, therefore as a result we used the time lapse for the background of the website and used Photoshop to crop an image of the protagonist in front of the block of flats.

Evaluation Question 3 - Seyi

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Collecting Feedback

Our teaser trailer was aimed at teenagers to young adults, so people within the 15-24 age group as we knew that this type of production would grasp the attention of young people, so we launched our first method of acquiring audience feedback which was presented in the form of an essay. We used SurveyMonkey In our survey we gave the participants nine questions about all aspects off an Urban Drama trailer, ranging from questions about the music all the way to questions asking about the type of protagonist they would want to see. By posting the link on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook I managed to compile a total of 66 responses which were enough to compile a good amount of data telling me what aspects of Urban Dramas makes them appeal to them.

The questions that we took on more on board than others were the ones that had a direct impact into the type of trailer we were going to make, for example a question we created asked how intense they wanted the stereotypes of the characters to be, we felt this would be an extremely important question as there are many different types of Urban Dramas, some which exaggerate the stereotypes of Urban London e.g. Anuvahood, ones that stick to the reality of the situation e.g. Kidulthood and some that move away from stereotypes such as Top Boy so in order for us to fully understand what type of Urban Drama interests the viewers things like this needed to be clearly established in order for us to create it.

The audience swayed towards the concept of using an accurate use of stereotypes so we ensured that nothing within our production was too eccentric e.g. using weapons not available to young people in London. We consulted the participants of the survey about the type of music that they thought would be effective within the trailer as within Urban Dramas music is an extremely important tool which is used to set the tone and pace of the trailer. The participants chose the ‘Fast paced grime music’ option, grime which is a genre of music specific to Urban areas of the UK was a perfect choice as in order to keep the trailer centred around Urban Culture.

YouTube Comments

Our other sources of audience feedback was YouTube as we used it to get feedback on our first draft of our trailer, so we encouraged people who watched our trailer to leave comments below on the effectiveness of the trailer, what they believed the narrative was and which shots they found most effective. We received a lot of positive feedback on our first draft which was far from finished, this feedback included comments that stated how clear it was that it is an urban drama and also that some of the video effects used were effective for the genre e.g. a black and white effect that we placed when the protagonist was sitting at a bus stop. Also the viewers commented on the effectiveness of the locations we used which shows that our extensive location scouting proved to be very effective.Statements that showed us how to improve our trailer included how the ending of the trailer was extremely abrupt, which caused the trailer to appear as if it has come to an anti climax, as it builds up so fast and ends so quickly.

Improvements

When we assembled all of the comments together we began to change our teaser trailer accordingly, our ending shot was changed from a extremely low angle shot of the protagonist stomping down onto a victim to an aerial shot of the protagonist on the floor.
In the YouTube comment above we see that some of the main criticisms included the typography of the title, issues with a shot at the start where the protagonist is in a room with his mother and also issues with the aerial shot of the protagonist on the floor.


 Firstly we removed the typography from the start of the trailer completely and took the advice of the YouTube comment and changed the typography of the title completely by giving it an eroded effect. Secondly we received criticism on the aerial shot of the protagonist on the floor in pain, a comment we received stated that the shot was way too light to appear menacing, we soon went back within our editing process and altered the lighting of the shot, making it appear darker overall, using the conventions of the colour black e.g. mystery and danger to aid our teaser trailer. Finally also trimmed and sped up a few of the shots at the beginning e.g. the shot where the protagonist is in a room with his mother of. because some of the feedback indicated that these shots were too long and made those shots look too staged. 

Evaluation Questions 4 - Mollie

How did you use your media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Final Cut

In previous projects we used the software iMovie, we were satisfied with this but we wanted to make the software go further, as after planning our montage we knew that this would appear more professional so we researched this extensively as a group we decided to use Final Cut Pro for its more advanced editing opportunities. This allowed us to show a more creative flair when creating our project. The tools were also much easier to use especially when speeding up certain parts of the trailer.   

Recording Studio
We researched what would be the best way to convey our narrative through our trailer, as in previous projects we didn't have the success we hoped for as we used actors. Therefore we only had the single protagonist during our A2 project and instead of using dialogue we opted for a voice over. 

We decided that the use of a voiceover allowed us to meet the conventions of an urban drama trailer better, as we saw this used in a variety of previous films such as Adulthood and Ill Manors. So our group recorded this in the recording studio using the software Logic Pro 6. This highlights our creativity and the fact we wanted a crisp sound to our voice over.

Photoshop
This software allowed us to have a creative flair to our ancillary texts. I had no prior experience to using Photoshop so I took it upon myself to test out a variety of tutorials that I could learn the basics from before it came down to the creation of our poster. Through this, I learnt about the free transform tool, as well as the variety of paint brush and eraser tools. I also learnt the effect that different opacities had on an image. 

After deconstructing a variety of previous film posters, I was able to come up with the conventions of a film poster that I knew I could work with to meet and challenge. One of the urban drama film posters that we sourced our inspiration heavily from was that of Shank, we also liked the colour scheme that they used and it created an 'action film' sense to the urban drama genre. I sourced inspiration for our typography and created a variety of ones that I thought we would be able to place on our poster. My favourite typography was the eroded one. This created a gritty sense to our poster. However was hard to see on the final product. I used this tutorial to follow and go through the basics of what was needed. 

I followed these steps very carefully, and learnt about threshold layers, and how to work with contours and highlights. This was vital in the eroding process as the highlighted parts of the layer were where the eroded parts of the typography were.

By using the previous basics of Photoshop that I had learnt before, the opacity and knockout tools were easy to use and I was able to use this to create this typography. 

I was also able to use this software when it came to the construction of our poster, as the knowledge that I had gained from creating typographies and following tutorials allowed me to play about with many tools that would make the poster appear very advanced.This was especially the case when it came to erasing the image. 

I also used my knowledge when it came to sharpening parts of the image. I wanted to create a 3D effect against the background, so I used the sharpen tool so that I could outline the square and rectangular object's edges. 

Wix.com

I previously had experience when it came to producing a website, but this was new software. I really liked the user-friendly nature of this and the fact that I didn't have to use HTML when resizing or reshaping and image or a piece of text. The website was easy to make improvements on, and I was easy to work with the grid on Wix.com.

  

Oh Snap!
I wanted to create a series of documentary style time lapses throughout our trailer. 

I researched a variety of apps and looked at the best reviews on the app store before deciding that I would pay to use this Oh Snap! app, this app was only available on iPhones. This allowed me to create easy time lapses by placing my phone in a steady position and setting a timer - that was adjustable. I had many attempts with this, and learnt the best way to and time to record them. Previously deconstructed trailers such as Ill Manors used time lapses to highlight the location of the urban drama film, so I knew of the high effectiveness this time lapse would have.

YouTube

We used YouTube for a variety of things, from tutorials to deconstructions to source inspiration for our media product. We also used YouTube to help us gain a soundtrack for our trailer, and then we used a YouTube converter to download the audio to place as an MP3 in our trailer. We also relied heavily on YouTube for our audience feedback. As this allowed us to collect information in an organised way and act on it for our final media product.

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey was used to create a survey during our research stages so we could gather audience feedback for what they wanted out of our Urban Drama film. Which we could then use to help us during production. We used YouTube in the process of evaluation by opening the comments up to the audience for constructive criticism that we could use to make our teaser trailer professional.