A2 Media Studies

For my A2 Media studies course I decided that the brief that would most suit my capability and media skills would be brief two, which included making a short teaser trailer, movie poster and either a website or magazine cover promoting an upcoming movie. I started off my brief by researching different types of movie genres such as action, horror, thriller and comedy and drew out different aspects from each that I would have been interested in working with, such as the Hollywood blockbuster style of action films or the psychological edge given to some horror films.
After collecting all of my research on each genre I concluded that the genre I would enjoy working with the most would be the action film genre. I therefore began looking at different movie trailers and teasers to try and gain some influence and knowledge which I could apply when making my trailer. I also began looking at different movie posters from other action movies and chose to create a magazine cover for my movie instead of the website, therefore looking at magazines such as Total Film for ideas. I decided that for my movie I would have a character that had the ability to see into the future and was able to use this to his advantage for good, or for bad. We decided that our teaser trailer would consist of our main protagonist walking, whilst a voice over talks to the audience about his power until it is eventually shown in a short look forward into the future.
When creating my trailer I needed to take into account things that would be relative towards the action film genre, such as guns, explosions and action sequences. I applied this into my film by including a short action sequence lasting about 5 seconds, showing the audience that the film will consist of these typical action film features. My film roughly revolves around the idea that the main protagonist is going to be/become a superhero, using his power to help the city he is in, but I wanted to give my idea a small twist by not revealing my character’s true intentions, hinting at the fact that he could go down either path. I wanted my character to seem confused and torn between what is the right thing to do and what he actually wants to do, for example, our character knows that it is wrong to rob a bank but realises how easy it could be due to his powers and therefore feels the temptations. When filming our trailer we used a Fujifilm finepix S2500 HD digital camera, we decided to use this camera instead of the ones provided at our school because we felt that providing our viewers with the chance to view our project in HD quality would give the overall performance of the film a greater effect on the audience. When putting my film together I used the editing software ‘Sony Vegas HD Studio’, I was very familiar with this software and so putting together convincing transactions and effects wasn’t too difficult. I used a white wash effect when creating our characters precognition, combined with an effect called ‘glow’ which created the brightness of the white wash. I had to go through each frame and slowly increase the glow effect until the picture had completely faded away, and then reverse the process by decreasing the glow. When creating my trailer I wanted to have a soundtrack that would fit to the structure of the film, as so took Phillip Glass’s ‘Priut Igoe’ and used the time limit of my film in order to cut out and replace specific parts of the music in order to make it fit to the cuts and action in the film, (as you can hear in the final cut, the music starts of quietly in the background, becomes faster and louder when the action begins, and then returns to being quiet when the titles run).
I visualised my film as a dark, powerful and mysterious film and so wanted my movie poster to capture this in one image. I looked at movie posters from films such as ‘The Dark Knight’ to draw influence and decided that I didn’t want to give anything away in my poster. I decided that the best way to do this would be to have my character facing away from the camera, therefore not revealing his face to the audience, therefore creating a narrative enigma. I used the lighting that was provided at the location to capture the dark, mysterious glare that you can see in the poster, I achieved this by lowering the camera angle and facing it up toward the light, creating glare on the lens. I also had my character stand up high on a wall to create the effect that he was standing on top of a pedestal, high above all other normal people, in order to state his power and dominance. We downloaded the text used in other movie posters to use as our small print at the bottom of our poster; we did this because we wanted to make our poster seem as authentic as possible and so small details such as the small print were important. When creating my movie poster I used Adobe Photoshop to edit together my original image with the title and text.
When creating my magazine cover I research other magazine such as Total Film magazine, which I drew heavy influence from. I wanted to use the same mysterious style that I achieved with my movie poster and so used a similar picture to the one I used in my poster. I used the same ‘back to camera’ style that I had used in my movie poster but with the lighting, I chose not to use a flash and so achieved the smudged orange effect in the picture. We used different font from dafont.com to create an authentic feel to our magazine cover and also came up with short catchy slogans to describe the content of our magazine, like ones which are used on traditional magazine covers. I also used Adobe Photoshop to edit together my magazine cover editing the original image, applying effects to it, placing on top of it the titles and text and then saving it.
We put our project onto YouTube and Blogger so that audiences could see and comment their thoughts about our work. We have received decent feedback for our work from other YouTube users and friends/teachers that we have shown our work too.
I believe that I have increased my media skills whilst creating my media project. I have learned new skills and editing styles that helped me to create an authentic and good looking final piece. I feel that I have created a decent final product and believe that my knowledge and skills that I already knew helped greatly in doing this. Being able to use editing software such as Sony Vegas and Adobe Photoshop was incredibly helpful and aloud me to push my skills and create a decent final product. I was able to record the voice over at my house using the music software ‘Logic Studio 9’; I chose to use a voice over instead of speech because I didn’t want to give my character a voice until the film was released, adding extra mystery to my character.