Magazine Cover

Okay, now that the movie poster's done, I just have to do my magazine cover, a bit of evaluation, and I'm basically done.

I'm basically going to design the front cover of a magazine that will have a feature about our film, but to make it quicker my basic design has already been covered by a past version of myself - considering that music magazines often have features about films and things, I figure that if I just make another cover for my fictional magazine I made last year, "Amplified", I can effectively cut down the amount of time spent designing the look of the magazine, and just make a slightly updated version of the cover I made last year. Bit of a cop out, I agree, but considering that time is definitely not on my side concerning this project, the fact that I have something to fall back on is a great timesaver, and one of which I intend to take full advantage of.

Because I didn't go into enough detail in last year's blog, I had to do a bit of guesswork in order to locate the right font I'd used for the magazine last year. However, I eventually found it, and I've set to work on replicating the style I'd come up with last year, but updating it slightly in order to make it feel like the magazine's gone through a number of changes since the one I made in 2011, as well as to indicate that I've gotten a bit better at Photoshop since then. Hopefully.

The font style is "Gill Sans MT", in case there's a future version of me trawling through my old blogs desperately trying to locate the type of font I used in these two magazines. I've learnt from my mistakes.

I also decided to change the title to "AmpliFILM", in order to give the impression that it's still related to the old music magazine, but is focussed on films rather than music, and is made by the same people who made Amplifier. It's not the greatest idea in the world, but it means it looks more like a film magazine than one for music that was paid to advertise a film they didn't particularly like or whatever.

The Final Poster Ideas Thing Blog Post Yeah

I decided against going with the idea of a poker-themed poster. My basis for this is that chances are, if the poster looks too poker-orientated, then people going to see the film would be expecting a kind of “21” style film, with poker being the main theme behind the film, when in reality, the idea is of gangsters, guns, violence and crime. Poker takes up a relatively small part of the storyline and is only actually played once, instead of something like, say, Casino Royale, where poker is played at several points in the film, despite it being primarily a spy film, and thus the poker theme is warranted (the film is named after the casino the poker games take place at, for instance).

Instead, I decided to hark back to the original basis for the film, and attempted to imitate an old-style, Pulp Fiction-like poster, heavily influenced by the bright colours on a dark background style of the original Pulp Fiction poster, with similar fonts and words adorning the poster. The poster also looks very aged, as if it is from a magazine or something similar, perhaps the front of a magazine actually entitled “Pulp Fiction”, with details such as a small circle advertising the fact that the “magazine” is actually 10 cents. Another effect is that the poster seems to be ripped slightly, which is an idea I tried incorporating into my own poster.

The photos used are vastly different, using photos of the two main characters for my poster rather than in the Pulp Fiction poster, where most of the advertising is of Uma Thurman, despite the fact that she isn’t present for the entire movie and in fact spends most of it either being waited on by one of the more interesting characters or almost dying after overdosing on heroin.

Instead, I took inspiration from a Reservoir Dogs film poster, with the image of the main characters, the gangsters, standing at angles above the title of the film. This was as far as the references went, as I thought I’d found “inspiration” enough from the Pulp Fiction poster, and if I ripped off the Reservoir Dogs poster as well I might as well just copy and paste one of the posters over.

That’s not to say I don’t like the films. I do, quite a lot, hence why I pressed so hard in the planning stages for it to be similar to Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, as well as the British equivalents such as Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Layer Cake.

But yeah, the poster, when finished, will more than resemble the Pulp Fiction poster, as it will not only appeal to fans of the film, but will also hopefully attract a wider audience than those who simply like films about poker, instead attracting fans of the crime and action genres as well.

My decision to use a picture of a cityscape in the background that is quite obviously from London was also in mind of attracting an audience, driving the point home that this is a film that takes place in the UK rather than somewhere in the US, which would hopefully attract fans of films such as Lock Stock and other UK gangster films mentioned previously.

Altogether, hopefully the finished poster will be eyecatching and will attract fans of films such as Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, as well as fans of British gangster films as well.

Ideas for the poster – aka, “Poster Ideas”

For the task following our film trailer, we have to design a film poster, and either a web page or a front cover for a film magazine featuring our film. Most of us have elected to do a front cover, since that’s a part of what we did last year, and will therefore be easier to do than a web page (of which many of us have little to no experience in doing). But first, the poster.

At the same time as I’m doing the poster design and ideas and whatnot, I’m also writing up an evaluation of the finished film trailer. However, since the film trailer is not entirely finished (the first draft of it is done, but we’re currently re-cutting it and adding other details in order to make it fit the time constraints and certain other conventions including the name of the studio behind the film), and until then I won’t be able to provide a proper evaluation. So until then, I’m working on getting the other tasks out of the way.

The first stage of doing this is obviously the planning. Instead of doing sketches with a pencil and pen, I instead spent a little while just messing around in MS Paint to come up with some basic ideas. They all had a similar theme – based around the image of playing cards, with a white background and colours mostly limited to either red or black, with a few of the main characters in the foreground, and the name of the film also visible in an eye-catching area of the poster, differing from poster to poster depending on the imagery in them.

The playing card symbols (spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts) are also important, as they are easily recognisable symbols and have obvious connotations with the act of gambling, and also mean that the actual image of a playing card is not needed in order to draw attention of the intended audience towards the central theme of gambling.

The fact of the matter is, however, that the ideas I’ve got so far are just that – ideas – and I still don’t know exactly what the final poster will look like. This is kind of a big deal, considering I don’t really have a lot of time to get it done. Well, I don’t have a lot of time to a) come up with an idea, b) relearn how to use Photoshop, c) get the photos I need, and then d) actually make a poster and magazine cover advertising a film that doesn’t exist.

The Trailer

Shooting the Film Trailer

With the planning done, I worked on a couple of variations on the script until I had one that I was happy with, and not long after that it was time to shoot the trailer. We planned out the first three days of filming, but the last quarter of the trailer was still to be planned as we could only find three days in the same week where we were all together without anything else getting in the way.

On the first day, we decided to do the interrogation scene. This was going to be the last scene of the trailer, but it seemed like a relatively easy scene to shoot, so we decided to do that one first. We didn't really have any problems except for the window in the room we chose to shoot the scene in didn't have a curtain, which meant that there was no easy way of stopping the light from getting into the room, which kind of went against the idea of the room being completely dark until the antagonist turned the light on. We overcame this by just piling up bags in front of the window to block the light. Other than that, we didn't have any serious problems, and the filming went ahead as planned.

On the second day of filming, we planned to do the opening scene and the confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist, since the antagonist and the protagonist were in both scenes, and there was only one additional actor required. Since these scenes were to be shot after dark, we had to wait until the end of school, and them some - but since the school closed at six o'clock, we had to work fast. The only problem that came up was that the protagonist and the antagonist were both wearing the same clothes in both scenes, despite the fact that the two scenes were supposed to happen on completely different days. While we figured that most people probably wouldn't notice this, we decided to make sure that the characters looked like they were wearing different clothes - I lent one of the characters my jacket, and the other turned their coat inside out so it looked like a different piece of clothing. It wasn't exactly ideal, but you couldn't tell when watching the footage back, so we figured it'd look fine in the finished trailer.

Day three of filming was the day where we decided to do the more technical scene - the poker scene. This would be, we thought, the most difficult scene to shoot, so we went a little overboard with the planning to make sure nothing went wrong. We also gave ourselves a whole day in which to get everything ready and shoot the scene. We put together a relatively realistic looking poker table by putting together a few tables and a large green cloth that we borrowed from the textiles department, and the actors were all ready in time to start filming. In the end, the planning and preparation was worth it, and we shot the scene with pretty much no hassle. I'm pretty sure that if we'd decided to shoot the scene on the first day instead of the third, we'd have encountered a lot of problems, but since we left it until day three and had experience from the previous two days of filming, it went by pretty smoothly.

The fourth day of filming happened a week after the last day of filming, as we had to find a day where we were all ready to film and didn't have anything else in the way. Thankfully, this day consisted of the crime scenes we'd have in the montage, and the filming went by relatively smoothly. A different member of the group directed these scenes, but since it was a montage, we thought that it wouldn't be too difficult to make them fit in with the other scenes and decided we'd risk it. The scenes themselves were technically very easy to shoot, not really requiring more than three or four different camera angles, except for the bank robbery scene, where I had to act as a bank robber with a plastic shotgun (the way that the scene is edited, you barely see me anyway, so I'm cool with that). Like the day of the poker scene, we filmed everything with basically no problems at all.

After all the scenes were filmed, we had to edit it together. The first version of the trailer was put together quickly as a kind of proof-of-concept type deal, but was obviously not well edited enough to be our final product. For one thing, the timing was off, with characters appearing to instantaneously move across the screen when a camera angle was supposed to change, and we accidentally used footage we'd intended to scrap rather than the actual takes that we were happy with. Instead of going back and making changes, we simply scrapped the whole thing and edited it again.

There were still a couple of things we hadn't decided on, as we had decided to wait until the footage was almost edited together into a final draft until we decided on a couple of important things. The first was the song we were going to use as a soundtrack. After watching the trailer back, we decided that the song "POWER" by Kanye West would suit. Although I'm not particularly fond of West's music, I do have to admit that I like the song, and it definitely fits with the themes of our film trailer - the whole idea of the protagonist rising up to gain more and more power and wealth until it eventually comes around to bite him and he ends up in more trouble than he'd anticipated, etcetera. After we'd picked this song, we went back and did a little more editing to make some of the cuts and the scenes suit the changes in the music.

The last thing that we had to decide on was a pretty big decision - we had to come up with a name for the film the trailer was for. We'd decided to leave this decision until the end as we decided it'd be easier to make the product and then find a name that summed up what the trailer was about, than make up a name and then build a trailer around that name. We got together for a brainstorming session (well, two of us did - the third didn't actually show up) and took advantage of a whiteboard in one of the Sixth Form's rooms to write down ideas. Eventually we came up with several ideas, but the title for the film was sent to us by our absent team member through a text - "Playing With Fire".

We liked this idea a lot, most of all because it sums up the basic idea of what our protagonist goes through, playing dangerously until the tide changes and everything goes wrong, and also because we realised that our protagonist actually uses the phrase (wrongly) during the voiceover. At one stage during the crime montage, the protagonist says "when you play with fire, you get beat" - this is a deliberate misquote, meant to inject a little black humour into the film and make the protagonist seem flippant yet weary of his predicament.

With the title and the end credits basically sorted, the film trailer was finally finished. We were all happy with the way it turned out, and the general feedback from the other actors involved in the production was positive (probably because, well, they were in it, but whatever).

Film trailer scene ideas: Interrogation scene

One scene that a member of our group was eager to implement into the trailer was an interrogation scene. As the main character gradually becomes more and more of an important figure in the criminal underworld, his cousin (and former employer) realises that the main character is making far too much money to just let him go, and resorts to kidnapping him and holding him captive in an unknown location. The main character is tied to a chair, a bag is put over his head, and a member of the cousin's gang guards him as the cousin talks about how the main character is giving him problems.

This scene will require a darkened and plain room, as well as a small selection of props and another actor. The main focus will be on the main character and the cousin, and will involve, at the most, four or five different camera angles, but most likely will only need two or three different angles, as the scene will be relatively short compared to the rest of the trailer, making up around 5 / 10% of the trailer, perhaps less. The camera angles will not have to show the main character actually being tied to the chair, and will therefore only have to pretend to be captive.

Altogether, this scene will perhaps take around fifteen to twenty minutes to shoot, with the dialogue already written and the scene planned out in its entirety. The scene will be at the end of the trailer, before the teaser credits, and will end with a shot of the cousin pointing a gun at the main character's head, ending on a cliffhanger without the sound of a gunshot or anything to indicate what might happen in the actual film.

Of course, there is no actual film and therefore the cliffhanger will never actually be resolved, but that's not the point.*

The scene was originally supposed to be directed by another member of our group, but we realised that the different styles might be evident in the direction and therefore decided to have the same person directing it that had directed the rest of the trailer, in case the scene felt out of place with the other scenes.

Thinking along the lines of symbolism, the scene taking place in a cramped, unknown area will symbolize the feeling of being suffocated by the darkness and the unknown, and also the lost feeling the character will be feeling as well. The scene starting out dark but then brightening as the cover over the main character's face is lifted will be a reference to what the character sees as the veil is lifted, both literally and metaphorically, as he sees where he is and simultaneously realises that the person he trusted before has become his enemy. Essentially, the main character "sees the light" both metaphorically and physically, the veil is lifted, it all becomes clear... That sort of thing.

*In the story, the main character does actually survive, as it turns out that one of the cousin's collegues was actually working with the police the whole time. Spoiler alert. To maintain an air of mystery, however, I won't actually say who it was. Except that it was someone in the first half of the trailer.

Film trailer scene ideas: Poker scene

This scene will probably be the main focus of the entire film trailer. The idea behind this scene will be that the main character, Joel, will be involved in a poker game in which he bets a lot of money and ends up losing everything.

The poker game will be between Joel and a group of crime bosses. The crime bosses will be made up of different actors wearing clothes that look fairly business-esque, much like CEOs of companies or something, but obviously these will be wealthy leaders of crime syndicates or similar. They will be reasonably wealthy-looking, with their phones out on the table, and a stack of chips in front of them all. The direction for these actors will be fairly simple - they don't actually speak throughout the poker game, and instead just look vaguely menacing in front of our fairly innocent protagonist. The protagonist, at the same time, will look ridiculously out of place, wearing just a shirt and a hoodie.

We've decided try and find a way to make the poker table green, in order to make it look as genuine as possible, and we'll also have a lamp in the middle to act as the only light source; the rest of the room will be shrouded in darkness (unless it makes filming the scene difficult or impossible).

The only place we have access to that is simultaneously big enough to hold a poker table, yet has enough room to have the rest of the room shrouded in darkness, would be the study room in the St Marks Sixth Form block. To have it dark enough would also mean that we'd have to shoot at night, which means that we have to wait behind after school with the rest of the crew until we can film. This is fairly manageable, and with some luck we should be able to film the entire scene in one night. There's not much to it - a few different camera angles, close-ups of the crime bosses, and the cards that they have. No dialogue at all is necessary, and it should all be done reasonably quickly.

The poker table completely set up, with props and a few of the actors