Magazine Cover Audience Feedback

Graphics Debate

Graphics:

We had difficulty in selecting our graphics in the first place due to the fact that we had multiple graphics to choose from. We decided upon the graphics that were similar in style to the ones seen in our major influence, 'Welcome To The Punch' as we felt they best suited the style of our trailer. Where to place the graphics was also a problem, as we had to deter slightly from our storyboard plans originally. This was because some of the shots we used were shots we had taken whilst filming that we hadn't originally planned for and grew particularly fond of and so decided to place them into our trailer. This way we had to change the placement of our graphics slightly. However, this did not effect the editing process that much.

Audience Feedback and Changes

The editing of the trailer went relatively to plan, however, the original plan of the storyboard was not followed. It was found that especially within the editing of Act 1 the interweaving of the meeting shots and the raid shots worked much better, providing a more stark juxtaposition of equilibrium (In the meeting room) and how that equilibrium was to be broken (The raid). It also served to anchor the narrative with the sound bridges of "This is the bastard that killed my partner" and "He will be in Denmark Hill at 0800 hours" providing a basis for the cutting, and a location and motivation for our protagonists actions.

Moving away from the actual sequence of the shots, which went relatively to plan, our second difficulty came within adhering to the colour and tone aims we had set ourselves. We attempted to go about this through the Final Cut feature 'Colour Match', with examples being shown below as to the various options concerning colouring. Due to our influence within the Chibnall quote concerning the "Dynamic narrative" connoted through the "High Gloss New-London" and Welcome to The Punch's neon gloss, this colouring was a major factor in presenting the stylistics which we had discussed in our research and planning.

As well as the importance of connotations we used this tool to make some shots look more professional, especially due to the mic shadow present within the interrogation scene prior to the darkening of the shot. 

A rough cut can be seen below, with no music attached and incomplete sound.

We received audience feedback on this, both positive and negative, and went about attempting to make these things better. The feedback is as follows:

POSITIVE

• Colouring
• Snappy editing
• clear sense of character

NEGATIVE

• No soundtrack
• Dialogue needs work in terms of sound quality and volume (re recording suggested)
• Narrative somewhat unclear, needs anchoring
• Some colour matching possibly required, maybe ken burns/photoshop?

Some colour matching required? In order to provide an increased dynamism to the narrative of the trailer and properly align the shots in conjunction with the music the backing track was needed, and when sent from our producer Agile, it was found that he had not properly synced to the shot changes as we had asked him to. As such, a manipulation of the sound on the magnetic timeline was necessary in order to prevent awkward cuts and emphasise the growing tension throughout the trailers development. This was also necessary due to the required manipulation of diegetic sound with regards to volume, with the voice overs (Especially during Act 1) being vital in the development of the actual storyline. The sound manipulation on the timeline is shown below.

Finally, we experienced difficulties when syncing our voiceover moments to the shots on screen, especially the moment with the 'news announcement'. This moment was particularly difficult as we wanted it to look and sound professional, especially because it is easy for a news style presentation, as seen in many films, to come across as quite 'amateurish' and so we spent a lot of time recording different voices until we found one that worked with the overall style of our trailer and the one, which sounded most professional. Another difficult moment was in Act 2 whereby we wanted to employ a voiceover of our main protagonist talking about our main antagonist, whilst being overlaid over a shot of the antagonist walking to his car. This was difficult as I had to cut particular moments of speech apart, adjust sound levels and then place each sound bite specifically over the long shot in order to keep with the timing and pace (overall rhythm) of the trailer. Some of the small speech was completely cut out in order to achieve this aim of keeping to the rhythm of the trailer.

Magazine Construction 3

The final magazine construction changed the following points -

• "Featuring" was added underneath the title in the same type face and style in order to both adhere to the genre and make the writing on the cover more evident that it is part of the magazines features.
• A date and price were added - originally these were theorised to go at the top in yellow, but I found the contrast in colours displeasing and the placing of them to derive from the most striking area of the cover. As such, they were added to the bottom. 
• Puffs were added, drawing upon the Little White Lies tradition of having them framing the face of the main image, both in order to not detract from the central art and to draw attention to not only the main feature. Due to my target audience being those who enjoy cult cinema, reference to films such as "Drive" (Enticing Nicholas Winding-Refn fans) and Nightcrawler (Attracting a more modern audience) would increase audience interest in the magazine. Originally, the puffs were to be the same font and colour as the date and time, winding around the head in a sort of Halo arc, however, this was not continued due to the aesthetically pleasing nature of the final choice.
• A title was added, utilising the dichotomy of the word "Two" in presenting two colours with the varying backdrops of white and black, connoting good and evil. The title has a marble overlay which is shown below, and an inversion of colour was used to transform it from light to dark blue.

The final poster, including all mentioned above.

The originally attempted puffs

The original placing of the date and time, not used.

Poster Construction

The production of the poster went as follows - a draft had already been made and as such there were not many difficult decisions to be made.

• The main image was the first thing which was made, first off using the rectangle tool and duplication tool in order to make the lines - adding an outer shadow and black stroke in order to provide depth. The main image was then added, overlaying him over every one of the lines and then duplicating from a different image the gun coming out over the edge. In order to blend the two images the same thing was done as mentioned in a previous magazine post, with an entirely transparent rectangle being overlaid on to the two layers. This was then corroborated through the use of stocks downloaded off the internet, all of which can be seen below. Finally, concerning the main image, the city shot was used, being the same as that previously spoken about in my magazine cover post. 

The layers which are shown here can be explained as such; the Layer 5 and Layer 5 copy are the aforementioned internet downloaded stocks, with Layer 20 also being this. Layer 11, 7, 8, 9, 18 and 19 are all used in order to give the image depth through blur and FX as well as allowing the hands and gun to be found outside of the rectangles. Further down, the image labelled Act 1 is named so due to it being taken from our trailer through the "Save current frame" option in Final Cut Pro. This and then the background image (Layer 1 copy 4) are overlayed on Layer 2 copy 4 which is the merged under layer of the rectangles. Click the image to enlarge. 

• Following the making of the main image the titles were then made, consisting of the film title "Two Evils" and the release date, "August 2015". The same effects were used on both of these, utilising a black colour overlay with a red stroke and black drop shadow to add depth. They were placed around the outside of the gun to link the danger associated with firearms to our main character and the moralistic suggestions that the title has. The certification was a stock photo taken from the BBFC website and given a transparent background through the use of the magic wand tool.

• The completion of the right hand side of the poster was done in the addition of a slate, critics views, awards and actors names. The actors names used the same font effects as the title, while they used a bold version of the type face used in the "August 2015" font shown above. Above this, the critics reviews consisted of the same type face once again except with a black overlay and placed next to stars taken from a stock image website and given a black overlay. Finally on the right hand section of the poster, the slate used the cinema type face along with the media trope of mixing all capitals and all lower case in order to highlight important names and companies. Below this, the social media logos were taken from stock websites and google images, and placed next to colorised links to our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages which could then be followed post-viewing of the poster. 

• The final section of the poster came in the form of the tag line, first presented within the trailers narrative graphics. Again using the same type face as the title, "When you are caught between two worlds… Which way do you turn" is an all capitalised tag line rotated 45 degrees anti clockwise. It can be seen below.

Magazine Construction 2

Many developments were made between my previous construction post and this one due to my focus being on producing poster development posts. A list of improvements can be found below, with exemplar images at the bottom of the post. 

• The title was made bigger in order to fit the space at the top and provide a more eye catching spectacle, with the tag line being changed from "Definitive movie reviews" to "Definitive Move News and Reviews" in order to promote a more journalistic based criticism instead of just a media-critique magazine. 
• The image and beard were replaced due to the spots on Gabriel's head in the previous image, and through the use of the spot healing tool, were removed. The image and false beard were then merged in to one layer in order to make manipulation easier. The new foreground layer was duplicated twice; the first duplication had the cutout effect added to it and then lowered the opacity to 80% in order to provide the detail of the real life face but the artistic intention of the filter. The second duplication was placed underneath and enlarged by 0.1 in order to provide an outer glow which the simple outer glow effect found within the FX tab couldn't provide. 
• A barcode was added, simply through taking a stock photo from a google search and placing it in the bottom left hand corner.
• The main image looked relatively out of place with the three different versions of the same layer clashing in some parts. In order to overcome this I created a rectangle and placed it over all three of the layers, colouring the rectangle the same shade of teal as I did the title, and changing the blend mode to hue in order to provide a limited area colour correction and blend the three layers together. Not only did this blend the entirety of the three layers but also allowed the beard to look more in place.
• Finally, two separate images which were taken when I was on the south bank were blended, with both reflected a 75% opacity and gaussian blur at 5 pixels. This provided the perfect, stylised backdrop for the magazine cover and increased the idea of anonymity within the city, expanding upon Barthes enigma code. The image was much more subtle than the stock photo which was used prior to that, also shown below. 

The revised tagline and enlarged title

The rectangle which was used to blend the three layers and beard

The second draft of the poster, only now requiring a title and puffs

The highly colorised photo of myself which was not chosen to be in the background of the poster.

Magazine Construction 1

Starting off on my cover, my previously mentioned influence in Little White Lies and ALA-Champ will have a major effect on the way in which the magazine comes out. Starting out, the masthead was the most intriguing thing for me due to the decision to make the background black. I wanted to create a neon-styled title which reflected my film, and did so as shown below. 

Using the neon type base, the following effects were used in order to present the blue glow and the depth which creates the verisimilitude of the title. The top layer is the one which is seen on the foreground of the above image, with the one below providing the depth to the text, utilising a Gaussian blur and 15 pixels. This shadow gives the title depth in my opinion, something adding to the professionally aesthetic title of the magazine. Following this I added the main image through the Photoshop RAW image editing software. Not changing much apart from the saturation of the image, reducing the contrast and heightening the vividness of the colours in order to again provide depth, the image was taken on a digital SLR and originally with a white background, although after importing I used the magical wand tool and inverted selection in order to remove this and allow a transparent background. It was found, however, that the image chosen had our protagonist looking considerably younger than we wanted him to, and as a result utilised the brush tool in conjunction with the brush presets in order to give him a beard and make him look older. Examples of this can be found below, providing the look of my magazine covers first draft.