CONTRUCTION: INSTAGRAM

Social Media as a Distribution Tool

Filmmakers should use social media to help distribute their movies! This is because 74% of people in the age range of 18-65+ are on Social Media, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They can use these social media not just to connect with audiences of different ages but different types of audiences that are interested in different things. This is a very useful way of distributing your project as it spreads your film to a huge range of people for free! Instead of just uploading your film to YouTube or Vimeo, you can tweet about it, make a Facebook page and even use Instagram to give your target audience some behind-the-scenes insight. 

Our group has used Instagram in two different way; the more traditional platform as away of linking our audience to our film and then in a more imaginative way we have created Instagram accounts for each of our main characters who post as if the character is real, to be specific the character of Ular and Eve. I understand how vitally important it is to create synergy across all platforms to build our audiences.

A significant benefit of using social media like Instagram is the fact that it is interactive, that is a two-way street of communication, with the chance of going viral. 

I researched case studies such as Liongate's clever marketing for a popular song "The Hanging Tree" to spread the word about The Hunger Games - Mockingjay Part 1 which resulted in over 20 million views on Vevo's YouTube channel. A second case study involves a low budget Indie film "It's a Disaster" it was decided to release this entire movie in Vine in six second segments, according to the jokey press release. This stunt got everyone talking. A third ingenious way of connecting with audiences is the marketing strategy of using Alternate Reality Games, these create a fictional world in which people can interact with each other across different platforms of Social Media. 42 Entertainment have created several popular ARG's for films like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Our choice was to use Instagram as well as Facebook and Twitter. Below is a screenshot from our Instagram feed:

Source: Movies and Social Media: Marketing Films with new media by Caitlin Neely (03/06/15) CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE

PLANNING: INITIAL IDEA FOR FILM POSTER

I have been mentally brainstorming an idea for my film poster ever since we finished our initial ideas for the film trailer. As one of our main characters is a very mysterious man who is inherently sinister I decided that he would be the main subject of my poster. 

My idea is to have Ular in the centre of the poster with his sunglasses on the tip of his nose, snake designed contact lenses in and scowling at the camera with an evil smile on his face. I will then edited in different screenshots from the trailer around him and in the lenses of the glasses will have profile shots of Adam and Eve.

I think that this idea will be hard to pull off as the editing will be very difficult to make sure that I do not overload it with different images and that the images don't look out of place. But I look forward to this challenge as I really enjoy editing and expanding my skills as an editor and this task will give me a great chance to improve.

Here are two examples of a similar design to what I hope to achieve.

Although neither of these two films are related to my film trailer whatsoever, these poster have a similar look to what I want my poster to look like. The Ferris Bueller's Day Off poster works best to try and show of how I want Ular to look in the poster and the positioning of his glasses, but the poster for Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain is a great example of the angle I want to take the picture.

CONSTRUCTION: INTERROGATING OUR CHARACTERS

During my research into the practises of professional filmmakers I came across the film website FilmEscape. On this website I discovered an article by Charlie Sierra in which she discusses the book 'Riding the Alligator' written by Hollywood director Pen Densham. She talks about a chapter in this book in which Densham describes a checklist of questions that every director should ask their actors to get a better understanding of the characters. 

Click here for the article

After reading the article we created a brief script for each character as our interrogation. We decided that we would ask each character five questions, four of which are tailored specifically for the character being asked and then the fifth question being the same for each character. The reason we chose to ask each character the same fifth question (which was "How far would you go to get what you want?") was to get a strong understanding of the contrasting personalities that the characters have.

 Adam Character Interrogation

As Adam is hopelessly in love with Eve his responses to the questions were planned to be very enthusiastic and loving even though deep within he knows that Eve doesn't feel the same way.

Eve Character Interrogation

As Eve is a very confused and unsure character we made sure that her answer were very vague and kept the audience (and Adam) wondering where her loyalty and love lies.

ULAR Character Interrogation

We created these character interrogations to help the examiner understand the thoughts, feelings and motives that our characters have. As Ular is a very mysterious character we kept his answers short and very vague.

CONSTRUCTION: EQUIPMENT

In the production of our film trailer there were many pieces of equipment that we needed to create the best possible content.

Nikon D5200 - As I already had my own camera, as a group we decided to use it instead of a camera provided to us by the school. We made this decision because it gave us a lot more freedom when it came to filming as we didn't need to wait for permission to go out and film.

GorillaPod - A Gorillapod is a very small and lightweight tripod with flexible legs that can wrap around and grip to anything you need it to. We mainly used it as a stand for the camera light we used.

Manfrotto Tripod - We used a very high end Manfrotto Tripod that the school provided us. We were very grateful to use this tripod as it is one of the best that an average consumer can buy. It was exactly what we needed to get steady still and moving shots.

On Camera LED Light - As a group we decided to invest in cheap on camera LED light to help us light our scenes. We would attach the light to a Gorillapod so we could easily set the scene and have the light in a suitable area.

Rode VideoMic Pro - During my practical work last year I discovered that sound is incredibly important. Therefore I invested in a Røde VideoMic Pro which is a very good quality on camera microphone that can really improve the sound of your film. This is was very important as an audience is more forgiving for poor video quality if the sound is good.

PLANNING: SOUNTRACK AND VOICEOVER

As a group we have decided that the majority of the sound in our trailer will be sound effects, a soundtrack and a voiceover. We decided not to have any actual film dialogue in the trailer as we discovered last year that it is too difficult to get good sound levels and quality for dialogue and in my experience sound is almost more important that a good quality video.

We have been constantly brainstorming different song choices and ideas and we still haven't come up with a concrete decision on the soundtrack yet.

For the voiceover we are currently creating the script and have also planned to use the poem 'A Sick Rose' by William Blake. We have decided to use this poem as part our voiceover as it perfectly and beautifully represents the decay of Eve's innocence and if spoken correctly can sound very sinister which is exactly what we want from it.

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

CONSTRUCTION: EXPERIMENTING WITH ADOBE inDESIGN

In our lesson today we had someone come in to teach us the basics of Adobe inDesign. Adobe inDesign is a professional standard software used to create publications for magazines, websites, you name it! 

We spent the lesson experimenting with all the different tools and methods of editing that we would expect to use when creating our film poster. There are an endless amount of features that can be explored and used on inDesign but we only looked at the basics. The features we looked at were mainly to help us create the text of the poster and the different effects that you can use to make your text stand out more.

Here are some screenshots of my experimentation of inDesign

PLANNING/CONSTRUCTION: inDesign PRACTICE

In todays lesson we had a special guest teacher to come in a teach us the basics of inDesign. inDesign is a programme that allows you to create professional standard publications. For this practice we used draft images that we captured yesterday to experiment with and test out the different features that can be used on inDesign. 

Here are some screenshots from my experimentation: