Final Ancillaries

Double Page Spread Ancillary (Making Of)

Here is an example of a shot we directed Adrian to take. Though the angle is regarded as  strange, we felt it would be good to use a variety of shots, focuses and angles when we collected all the pictures in the end and picked what we thought were the most appropriate ones for the film.

Here I'm using the Burn & Dodge tool to manipulate areas of the image so darken/lighten them.  If  I thought the image needed a darker or grittier tone to it I went over certain areas with the Burn tool. If it became too dark, I reverted that with the dodge tool.

This is a plan of the double page spread conducted on the programme "Pages".

Here the text is being manipulated to make it look more visually pleasing, and aesthetic to the eye, There were a few things we regarded as "tacky" which we decided to omit.

This is a separate image of a brick wall taken on site. We originally thought the lighting here wasn't great, so we took a picture of the chicken and another of the wall. We cropped and layered the chicken in front of the wall and used the "healing tool" to make it look like one image. However the general consensus of the group was that the brick wall would make the typography too difficult to read, so we abandoned this and stuck with the original image.

As a group we went through the film to take any screenshots for stills we thought would make a good background image for the double page spread. However we didn't find anything worth using so we stuck with the original image that we deliberately took for the ancillary.

Double Page Spread Draft

This is a draft for our double page spread. The photo in the background is a representation of a still in the film, and I split up where the writing could be over the page. This is obviously a rough draft and is subject to change.

Final Ancillary (Poster)

Here is the final ancillary produced through photoshop and indesign. The font took a while to choose as there were so many, for both the title and billing board - we tried to stay away from stylised fonts, as well as "plain" fonts. The spacing of the words more or less fell into place.

The Making of the Poster

Poster Final Draft

After exploring our options we decided to go with the poster that can be seen below. It is mainly based off Oli's draft of the poster as we found that it was the most effective and induced a little bit of narrative enigma.

As you can see, the poster is still missing the title. This is because we yet have to decide on one. After the change from Sweets to Diamonds the title 'For a handful of Sweets' obviously doesn't work anymore.

At the moment it looks like we will go with 'For a Handful of Rocks', but this is not 100% decided yet.

Poster Draft #3

Here is a rough sketch of what our film poster could look like. We took some photos at one of our shoots to get the photos for the ancillaries.

Poster Draft #2

Another idea for a poster originated on the stereotypical mug shot. This links to the Villain/robber theme of our movie:

Poster Draft #1

With everyone presenting an idea for our poster, this is what I came up with:

I wanted to show the three characters, all facing away from each other. This tells someone looking at the poster immediately that there is a conflict between the three. It also introduces all the characters.

Poster Ideas

Here we drew out a few first ideas for our poster:

Short Film Poster Analysis #3

Multiple layers have been seamlessly combined which adds death and interest.

Light and dark areas have clearly be carefully considered when combining a variety images and text together. When adding text onto our posters we need to be mindful of the background and text colours.

Relevant hints relating to the film displayed though the cleverly implemented cross word puzzle and mis-en-scene.

Hiding the characters characters identity creates mystery and narrative enigmas.

The white credits stand out on the dark blue surroundings.






3 close ups displaying the main characters.

A single photograph fills the poster while the three main characters over laying the top half . The image has clearly been manipulated to create this saturated grainy feel.

The colour palette can bee see in the three main characters as there bodies fade into the surrounding clouds connoting death and loss.






Ultimately what i have found is the majority of the successful posters and reasonably simple and to the point in dressing relative narrative.

Short Film Posters Analysis #2

Feature Length Poster

Short Film Poster

Similarities:

• Close ups.
• Reveals Mise En Scene (related to close ups?).
• Title relates to the film somehow.
• Billing Board present.

Differences:

• Close ups are graphically contrasting. Drive includes a filter and is taken from the film. Curfew has two simple close up shots purposefully chosen for the poster. Could be to do with the simple techniques that short film purport.
• The feature length movie has a longer billing board.
• The short film has no mention of the casting in bold, unlike the feature length film which explicitly states "Ryan Gosling" as a selling point.
• Instead, the short film displays in bold the movie and culture festivals it was shown at and won at for "Best Short Film".

Short Film Poster Analysis #1

Looking at these two posters of short films, we can observe the following similarities:

The protagonist is not clearly identifiable

However, this is not necessary as the protagonist is most likely played by an unknown actor. Showing their face would therefore not attract fans of said actor due to the lack of his publicity. Instead, hiding the face creates an enigma which the audience will want to see solved when watching the film.

Plain Background

This puts the focus on both the artwork and the title. In addition to this it makes the designing process of the poster easier and by that often cheaper.

Images fit the title

For the poster to raise interest in a potential audience it needs to make sense at the first glance.

Title stands in the foreground

The title, in combination with the image(s), forms the most important part of the poster.

Catchphrase

As we can see, the poster on the right has a catchphrase on it. The purpose of this is that somebody who sees the poster will remember the film because of the witty sentence.

Billing

Similar to feature film posters, short film posters list the names of people and organisations that have taken part in the production of the film.

Short Film Posters Intro

Today we had a conversation with our Media teacher about the characteristics of short film posters.

We talked about:

- Positioning of the title 

- Billing (ie. credits)

- Focus on the protagonist/the actor who plays him

In the following posts we will go into depth how different short film posters were designed.