Musical Compositions

Originally we decided to compose our own music due to the restrictions from the exam board , as you can see in previous posts we used garage band.

 We found that this wasn't very effective for our trailer as most romance films use well known top hits in their trailers.
We did some research and found that we are allowed to use music as long as it isn't signed so we spent time after school looking up unsigned bands on the internet. We found a website (www.unsingedbandweb.com) which allowed us to look through loads of songs by unsigned bands and download them. This website was particularly useful as it listed songs by genre , as our movie is an independent production we decided to look at the 'alternative' genre.
While browsing we found a song which we fell in love with;

This song was absolutely perfect from the lyrics to the composition and timing , the song is all about trying for someones love which is exactly what chase and cindy end up doing with each other . the music timing was also perfect (after a small edit) which ment that the tempo sped up right at the moment of the montage which was very effective.
unfortunately this song didn't go well with our clause in the trailer as we needed something sad and desperate. so we decided to use two songs, after some more researching we found this song;

We thought the lyrics and composition worked very well with our trailer with the first line being "don't you hid your true feelings , dont lie to my face" which is exactly what chase is doing when cindy over hears talking about her , although she thinks he genuinely feels that way. We mixed these two together but there were some difficulties with voice levels .

at one point you can't hear what chase is saying , when he says 'great' sarcastically' , to get around this we decided to have antar do a voice over but unfortunately it was the last day of the project and he was at the hospital. We decided to try out Mr southworth imitating antars voice , we found that this actually worked perfectly and you couldnt tell the difference.             

Design of titles for trailer

We decided to use titles throughout our trailer to break up the scenes, we had to come up with short catchy lines and a design to use throughout.
Because our film idea is based on a video diary , we found a font linked to that theme which sketches out he words like they are being written. We thought this coincided with out diary theme well.

Looking at previous romance trailers such as "Friends with Benefits" we found that the titles were quite simple , as you can see from the snapshot to the right it is a short phrase with three simple colours. there are also not a lot of effects with the title coming in from the left hand side.
We liked the simplicity of this and decided to use something similar for our trailer.
We already had the font that we wanted to use and all we had to think about was the colour scheme and what it would say. As the beginning of our trailer starts with a short clip of 'chase' and then a short clip of 'cindy' we decided to use the phrases "one boy.." and "... one girl" before each clip. Because our film is a romance we decided to use the colour white and burgundy , originally we chose red but found that the colour was too bright and not kind to the eyes.
Our first idea looked like this ;

We then decided we needed a line to bring out the story line to the audience , after a lot of thinking we decided to go with "do opposites really attract?" which links with the theme of opposites throughout the trailer. As we are using the same colour theme with all of our titles , it also has a burgundy backgroundand white writing with the same font. 

After playing around for a while we found that the titles looked better with a white background and burgundy writing as it was more simple and effective. 

For the title "do opposites really attract?" we decided to add emphasis on the word opposites by leaving it as the last word on the screen.

We decided that having the rest of the words disappear straight away was to harsh and broken for a romance so added an effect where they fall away. We found this was very effective. 

We decided to place this title right before our shot of chase and cindy together when they don't like each other as it adds to the story line and gives a hint to them becoming friends in the future. 

We decided we needed another title towards the end of the trailer to make it more symmetrical as all of our titles were at the beginning. We decided to go with the title "how will it end ?" to leave the audience in anticipation and questioning to find out what happens. 

We originally placed this title after the last scene, but then found that when watching the trailer , it felt as if you had seen the whole movie in the trailer except the ending , so we decided to place this title right before there is the disruption of equilibrium making the audience feel like they haven't seen everything.

The Completion of the Hats and logo;

We decided to use a plain hat and draw our design onto it with marker pens as this would give us more freedom to be creative with it, we purchased to plain hats in black and white online. While we waited for them to be delivered we came up with the design we wanted to use on the hats , we searched different fonts on www.dafont.com and decided that the graffiti fonts worked well , we then downloaded the font and used photo shop to get the size and outline of what we wanted on the hats and then printed it off.
Our logo is our initials put together (ANC - Antar , Nikita and Chloe) , we all decided to choose a colour each for our initials , which was blue for Antar , pink for Nikita and green for myself. 
After printing of the graffiti outline of our initials , I cut them out and drew them onto the top of the hat. I then coloured in each letter in the chosen colour and to add definition went round it in a bold black. Finally we chose a darker shade of each colour and shaded round the outside of each letter and merged the colours together where the shading joined.
As the hat suited Antar's appearance the most we chose him to be the person wearing the hat in our logo. We then had to decided how we were going to take the shot. We decided that a plain picture wasn't very creative and found that having the word 'productions' written on his hand made it harder to see what it said. We decided to have Antar holding a plan piece of paper and would then use live type to write the word "production" on it and add effect onto it. 
When filming we decided to start with a close-up of the antar wearing that with it his head tilted downwards so that you can see the logo, then as he tilts his head upwards , the camera zooms out and tilts downwards to focus solely on the white piece of card in between his hands. 
We had to shoot this a few times as it was difficult to zoom out smoothly while tilting the camera smoothly but we found if we shot it in revers then it was easier because we could get the framing of the card perfect. 
We then uploaded it onto the computer and reversed it. We then changed the contrast , brightness and colours on it to make it more abstract as our "company" is an independent company. 
To add in the writing on the paper , we had to take a still frame from the end of the shot and transfer it to livetype. We decided to use a blue coloured font to go with the contrasting of the hat and then added an effect when it comes on to make it slide onto the screen at the end of the shot as we felt this looked effective. 
We had a few technical problems as we found that when the edited frame on livetype was added to the original shot it changed the size of the shot lightly making the shot inconsistent. We solved this by cropping the original shot closer to the size of the edited frame and also changing the colour of the edited frame so you don't notice the small jump in size between the two frames. We had to edit it in small amounts to get it as close as possibly but finally managed to make it perfect.

Magazine cover development

For our magazine cover we decided to take influence from the 'Little white lies' magazine covers. 

We found that their covers consisted of one main character who had been edited or drawn to look like a cartoon. As our cover would need to have both Antar and Cindy on it as they star equally in our trailer. We decided that instead of using the 'Little white lies' cover, we would create something very similar, but change the name and some stylistic features (e.g having two main characters on the cover rather than one, changing font styles and sizes) 

We thought this was a good idea as it allowed us to have more freedom. It also gave us the advantage of changing the name of the magazine to 'young film' as it relates to a younger audience which is intended for our trailer. 

To make our cover cartoon like we took pictures of Antar and Cindy and then edited the whole picture and colours on photoshop creating distinguished shadow lines and features. The video below shows the pain staking task of changing colours and features by selecting small sections at a time and changing them. On the right is an example of cindy before being edited on photoshop and after.

On the background of our magazine we decided to create synergy between the movie trailer, poster and magazine by repeating faint 'rec.' moving in the same direction across the background. This is relevant as the trailer is about video diaries.
For the name of our magazine 'young film' we decided to have a caption underneath , as it is an independent movie magazine we created an acronym for the caption. The acronym is of the word film and the caption says 'fun and independent little movies'.
For the positioning of antar and cindy we decided to have them next to each but facing away from each other as the movie trailer is about how they originally don't on with each other. To express how they become friends throughout the trailer we made the expressions on their faces happy and content.
The magazine in general with its cartoon images is very creative and therefor gives us a good reason for it to be displaying an independent film on the cover.

Catch-up; Problems we have encountered and other information.

We have been spending most of our time filming and editing our trailer. We have come up with obstacles during filming and editing which we've had to deal with.


- One of our first issues was after filming the 'locker room' scene and editing it we realised it would look better with a close up on cindy or chase's face. We decided to make the close up of chase and went to film it the next day. What we didnt realise is that the lightbulbs in the locker room had been replaced consequently making the shot a lot brighter meaning the continuity between the shots were off.
To overcome this , we changed the close up to one of cindy's reaction because she isnt actually standing in the locker room. We found this worked and during editing managed to match cindy's close up of her face and her slamming the door back to the medium distance shot of her closing the door which looks very effective.


- Another problem we encountered was our storyboard. We were unable to do the scene where Cindy and Chase give each other tasks such as joining the school band and starting cheerleading. This was because couldn't find a cheerleading costume and the shot was too similar to previous shots that we have. Not having this shot meant our storyboard no longer made sense. There wasn't evidence for how Chase and Cindy suddenly went from two people who didn't like each other to them falling in love. As we were going through our many different shots of Chase and Cindy together we came up with the idea of having a short montage starting of with them being distant with each other to them having fun and playing around. We also had a shot of Cindy and Chase sitting down and chase slowly takes his hand out of his pocket and slides it over to take hold of Cindy's hand. What we did was split this clip into three parts and interalced it in the montage ending with them holding hands. This looked very effective. Of course montage's are usually scene in horror and action films but can also be in romantic movies. To make sure we didnt give of the wrong effect we had to make sure our clips weren't too short but also not so long that they took up a vast amount of the trailer time. We decided to make each clip about a second and a half long which we thought gave a very good effect to the trailer.


- There were also some problems with the editing , this was because we had an idea of having home video's by Chase and Cindy throughout the trailer. To make this clearer we wanted to add an effect to the shots by overlaying an image of the typical "REC" sign and framing so that you can clearly see it is a home video diary. Mr Go found the image we needed and we tried it out on his MacBook which worked perfectly , but when moving the image of to the Mac that our clips are on , we found that it didn't work on that specific computer. To overcome this we have decided that we won't overlay the image until our trailer is finished. Once it is finished we'll export it into quicktime and transfer it to the MacBook and edit it in. Because our trailer is yet to be completely perfected we haven't been able to do this yet but we are positive that this is the solution to our problem.


We have started making our title cards , after experimenting with colours and effects we decided to go for a plain white background with red/burgundy writing. The effect we chose for the words make it look like it is being sketched onto the white background which is perfect for our trailer as its all about home video diaries and school projects. We had to come up with what to put on the title cards and in what places we were going to use them to split up clips. Our trailer starts with a clip of Chase's video diary and then Cindy's video diary. We decided to keep it simple and put "one boy... " before chase's and "one girl" before Cindy's as this is what our film is about ; one boy and one girl falling in love. we also need to come up with a cliche line and we went with "do opposites really attract?" . we liked this as it relates to our film which is about two opposites coming together. Our last title card says "how will it end?" this is because our last shot is Chase chasing after Cindy. We feel it leaves the audience wanting to find out how it ends and challenges them to go watch the film.

logo development.

so we were thinking about how we were going to do our logo with the hat which says 'A.N.C' and the hand next to it saying 'productions'. Antar was saying that he didn't think that the word 'production' would fit well on the hand and suggested changing it to a piece of card next to the hat instead and animating it. we decided to try out the original idea first , even though the hat hasn't arrived yet. 

We then realised that the word comes out backwards as you can see above. With surprisingly little difficulty we wrote the word productions on backwards and decided to picture it again. 

 

Although we managed to solve the problem of the words being backwards we then had to think about the distancing from the camera and making the words bolder.  So here is what it looks like closer. 

We decided this looked good but we really needed the hat to put the whole image into perspective. so we are we going to wait for the hat to arrive and then experiment more. 

Song Choice

While in lesson today we had an assitant teacher , while explaining to him our idea he pointed out that he had heard the term 'Indie Cindy' before , which made me remember where i'd got the inspiration from . which is a song by hadouken consisting of these lyrics

Hadouken! - That Boy That Girl lyrics
That girls an Indie Cindy, 
Lego haircut and polka-dot dress, 
I don't care if she thinks she's indie, 
how she's different is anyones guess


These gave us a great idea for our teaser trailer as there is a point where the character 'Chase' Is singing onstage , at first we were undecided on what to have him singing , but now we have decided these few lines above would be perfect for this section.

We also considered a track similar to this for the backing track for our actual trailer as we are undecided yet on what we are using. 
Although this doesnt emphasis the sad moment in the trailer its very upbeat and modern which goes well with the attributes of our trailer. As these songs are all made through technical programs on the computer it would be quite simple for us to make something similar or make a cover of one of them.

Research in to Independent Production Logos.

As our teaser trailer is going to be for an independent film we decided to look more into independent film company logo's as research to give us more reasoning behind our logo. We came to find that a lot of them are quite simple, yet effective which we feel is exactly what our logo idea is aiming to be.
We have decided to use a mixture of technology and photgraphy to create our logo giving us an interesting range of techniques which is much more creative. We like the idea of using graphical letters in order to encorporate the 'Productions' part of our logo rather than writing the word on our hand like we originally planned. In order to do this our aim is to use a blank piece of card being held by the person wearing the hat stating 'ANC'.