Teaser Trailer

When looking through a lot of the footage we have from the past 7-8months I found footage from when we wanted to create a short teaser trailer for Dirty Diamonds. The teaser trailer would be Dirty Derrick talking directly to the camera before killing the person who the viewer is seeing a Point Of View (POV) shot from. This teaser trailer would not be a scene from the film but a trailer to create interest and hype for the feature length film by showing the main character and the type of person he is. A teaser trailer is usually released a long time before the film and main trailer(s) and purpose is to create an audience, inform people, create hype and start an advertising campaign- this is very important in making your film successful at the box office.
I decided to edit the footage we already had to create a short teaser trailer for the film as we didn't want the footage to go to waste and it would not take long to edit.

Using Microsoft word I  created an information card that would be displayed at the end of the trailer showing the name of the film, when it is due for release and the website/facebook adress which would allow the audience to learn more about the upcoming film. I also placed an age restriction card and our company logo at the start and end of the teaser trailer. In order to create a better impact on the audience I added sound effects at the end of the trailer using to soundboard built into iMovie.

Many films and TV series use these kinds of teaser trailers in their advertising campaigns, one example I found was for the TV series 'Breaking Bad' created by Sony. They created a a teaser trailer online that the viewer could interact with allowing them to make decisions for the person held captive by the lead character 'Walter White', in this trailer Walter White talks directly to us the viewer. This trailer was created to attract an audience before the start of season 2. This is a YouTube link to the trailer- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpHhjToM6qI

I have uploaded the Dirty Diamonds teaser trailer I created to YouTube: 

Evaluation is complete !

I have now finished editing the electronic evaluation with no problems and the three of us answered the fourth and last question about technologies. Also today in school me and Rudi began editing the four questions speech and trying to shorten the 40minutes of audio down to 20 which was a challenge as we had to rid of a lot of good information. Rudi has now taken the questions home to finish editing which should not take long- we decided that I would upload the first 8 minutes onto YouTube and then Rudi would download it to his laptop to add to the other half of the evaluation tonight once the last question is complete and we have one complete file of about 28minutes long. We believe that the YouTube time limit for our account is 20minutes so we may need to have the evaluation across two separate videos.

As soon as Rudi has finished the fourth and final question Myself or Rudi will upload it to Youtube and Blogger hopefully this will be tomorrow.  We faced a few problems doing this evaluation but it is finally complete and the three of us hope it is very descriptive and creates a good understanding of how we created Dirty Diamonds.

A few screenshots:

Updated teaser poster

I showed our original teaser poster to our class for some feedback in order to improve it if they had any suggestions. Our class gave us some good feedback with many different points:

The class stated that the logo on our original poster didn't look good as it had more color that the poster and some people thought that it looked like a person holding a gun. We agreed that the logo didn't look the best so we decided to use two different logos one for 'sharkbite' and one for 'sound sheriff' as they were both black & white and also looked very suitable- we placed these in the bottom left and right corner.

Someone in our class also suggested that we add a date for the films release or at least mention a time period is due for release so we added 'In Theaters 2014' to the poster I believe this has made the poster look better as it isn't as plain as it was previously.

Another person in our class suggested that we mention something about ourselves the producers in order to help attract an audience who may know our previous products. We decided to add 'From the producers of million dollar punch' at the top of the poster to show the previous film we created. I am glad we did this as it has hugely improved the look of our poster with more detail.

The three of us in the group also decided that we should change the logo a little bit, James had the idea of having two paralleled lines on the top and bottom of our poster to make it look better. After trying this we all agreed that it looks far better as it looks slightly more stylish and better placed so we have kept it in our poster.

I believe that our new poster looks far better than our previous one and I am happy with the work we have done. The feedback from the class helped us create this new poster so was very helpfull. 

evaluation draft

The four questions that

must be addressed in the evaluation are:  In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

-We use many similar styles and fonts of other media products to give ours the same feel to it for example in our poster we used a sort of western old fashion style writing that we drew it ourselves.  The short trailer was made to feel in the 2000's.  The reason why we went for old fashion is because Dez has previous history as the gang used to be his fathers until it was handed down to him.

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  How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? 

This was about all the posters and magazines that we researched for our influential magazines and posters; also about how we used the same ideas for each of our posters and magazines we developed.

 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

-Learning that making mistakes are part of improving and learning.

-Communicating with the class makes you understand the adjustments you have to make and see it from their personal perspective.

-gives you motivation to make improvements when given feedback.

-First time will not always be the best, always room for improvements.  For example in our teaser trailer we could of added better footage and maybe identified out main character Dez in a clearer way.  So but getting feedback from the class about how we could identify our character better gave us the opportunity of improving that and filming more footage of Dez.

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 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We are yet to come up with a draft for this question so will update when completed.

Dirty Diamonds Teaser Poster

Here above is the teaser poster for Dirty Diamonds. Our inspiration for this idea was initially from "Drive", from Drive we used the Font of the title which was hand written, what we got from the font is a stylish and modern look that represents our film well as our film does not include a neat style. The hand written style looks rough compared to neater typed writing fonts such as Minion Pro and Times New Roman found on Microsoft Word - the neat look would not have suited our film.
I created this logo by using my graphics tablet connected to my laptop on Photoshop, I used the graphics pen   to sign the words 'Dirty Diamonds' as if I were writing on paper and the three of us agreed it looked very good just like the logo for 'Drive'. 
Under the logo I placed the website for the film www.dirtydiamondsofficial.com as I saw this on many teaser posters that I looked at, companies add websites on their posters in order to get people to visit the page and increase the chances of people watching your film at the cinema or purchasing the DVD/Blu-Ray. 
The image that I used on this poster was from a photo-shoot Myself and James did in which we used a glove on my patio floor surrounded by scattered diamonds, we hoped that this image would create an enigma as it is clear that someone has been killed or injured whilst holding these diamonds but you do not know who this person is or anything about them so it is a mystery. The image is also very dark similar to the style of Dirty Diamonds. 

Updated ARCANE Magazine Front Cover

With the Feedback we gathered from our previous magazine front cover, we took the opinions and changed the magazine i.e. Changing fonts, change of color's etc. What this next "Draft" will show is the progression we have moved from to create a better front cover and show what we have learnt to improve.

Final Magazine Front Cover
As seen above there have been a lot of improvements to the second version. during the process of actually coming down to edit was hard as we had difficulties agreeing on different font styles, where to place certain captions, what colour's should be used instead of another etc, overall we had trouble in finding what could agree on. In time we came to an agreement on the majority of changes.

What were the changes?

1. Rearranged the 'Date' and 'Price' to the left of the magazine front cover, as of other existing magazine layouts. 
2. From our Feedback we decided to change the style of how "WORLD WAR Z" was laid out, and decided to have it all in one line as it looked neater and cleaner in terms of placement and look
3. Furthermore we changed the font color of "Dirty Diamonds" to a beige color in order to have a match with the catch line and the title, to relate them as of the edition of the magazine. In addition to this we decided to have "Dirty Diamonds" in one line as on real examples they convey their title as shown.
4. Change of color to the caption below the title as we thought it would be seen better than before.
5. We added another caption at the left side of the magazine front cover, as we thought before the left side of it was very bare with information. We found that this type of style was featured in a number of other magazines, such as: Empire and Total Film.
6. There was a little complaint about the 'Gold Caption' at the bottom as of where it is placed, but we thought that it looked more effective to just leave it as it only looks better there.
7. Lastly we changed the size of the 'Barcode,' as we recognised in one Empire magazine the 'Barcode' was much bigger than ours before.

Electronic Evaluation problems

I have been editing the electronic evaluation for quite a while and have came across many problems, one problem is that some of the MP3 files that we recorded will not open in iMovie and is proving difficult to do so and we have also lost some of our electronic evaluation images and audio.
However I have spent the last few hours putting the evaluation together and editing some of the recordings we have, Myself and Rudi will also try and convert these MP3 files into iMovie tomorrow so that the evaluation will be complete and uploaded to blogger. We are hoping that we will not face any more problems and the evaluation to be uploaded early next week at the latest.

The three of us also completed a 2nd and final draft of our magazine cover earlier today based on the feedback we received from our class- Rudi should be uploading the updated magazine cover very soon.

Feedback on ARCANE Magazine

This is our feedback that we gathered from our class, we found that our magazine has improved but still needs improving:

Good Points:

• Black and White effect is effective as it suited our film
• Direct mode of address, meaning showing our film in the right way to the audience.
• Good Clean style 
• Very Sophisticated

Bad Points:

• Seems a bit arty
• Change font color as little is red
• font seems randomly placed
• Too bigger space where world war Z is.
• More Color is needed 
• change the catch line
• Include the actor's name within the magazine to inform the audience who he is.
• Change the Capital B of Bastards to lower caps b. 

New Magazine Cover

The three of us have created a new and improved magazine cover as we disliked the last few that we had made, we think this new poster is suitable and very similar to real life examples of magazine covers.
We looked at Empire magazines as Empire is a well known and popular magazine- Myself and Rudi also enjoy reading it. We noticed a pattern in Empire front covers where the main character is the largest image on the cover and sometimes the only image in order to show the actor who is in the movie and the type of character that is in the movie - tough characters often hold weapons and look scruffy whilst smart characters are cleanly dressed and look away from the camera. I have shown a few examples below:

                                                                                           

 In all of these Empire covers the biggest image is of the main character in the movie that is the focus of the particular issue. In the Skyfall special Daniel Craig as James Bond is the only image on the page and this looks very neat and clean as it is a clear image of the character in black and white, the image suggests he is classy as he is neatly dressed in a suit- his glance to the right of the page suggets he is wanted or looking for a person and the confident way he holds the gun upright suggests he is used to killing with a firearm.

In the Joker issue of Empire the Joker gives a very intimidating look at the camera/reader suggesting he is an enemy in the movie this is also shown again as he is sat in a prison cell. The joker is dressed very scruffy and dirty suggesting that he does not care about his appearance which is the opposite for the profile of a good character (protagonist). The fact that the joker is smiling whilst in prison also suggests that his character is slightly crazy and doesn't mind getting caught.  

As the image of the character is important in showing the type of person they are we tried to do the same with our magazine cover:

 Our character Dirty Derrick looks directly at the camera with an intimidating look similar to the Jokers issue of Empire in order to show that he is the main antagonist in the our movie. This is also shown again as he has his fist raised in the air as if he is ready to punch someone and he is scruffily dressed in a waist coat with no shirt- we hope this gives the impression that he is ready to fight and is not scared of anything.
In order to allow the reader to know what movie the character is from we placed the title 'Dirty Diamonds' in bold red letters across his chest- this is similar to the inception issue of Empire where 'Inception' is across the character of Leonardo DiCaprio. To allow the reader to know his name we have added the short description 'We explore the dangerous world of Dirty Derrick' under the title - this also proves that Dirty Diamonds is the main focus of this issue.
We added a short and snappy description taken from an article onto the front page in order to attract the reader and persuade them to learn more about the character we also placed the page number where the speech '...the new boy in town' was from. This was done with the Jokers issue of Empire with 'He's a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown'.
We noticed that in a lot of magazine covers the image often covers apart of the logo for example Johnny Depps head covers the 'M' in one issue of Empire shown above. Our teacher told us that this could only be done if the magazine was widely popular otherwise people may not be able to read the title, so as 'Arcane' was a new magazine we created for this task, the logo could not be covered so instead we had Dirty Derricks head cover apart of the underline of the title and we think this looks very good and professional.
As the issue could not only be about one film we needed to have short pieces of text showing what else is shown in this issue but we also did not want the magazine cover to be cluttered as we wanted a clean cover similar to the James Bond Empire so we added text talking about a upcoming summer blockbuster 'World War Z' and the famous director 'Quentin Tarantino' who has just realised a successful western movie. 

Electronic Evaluation Update

I have been recently editing our electronic evaluation and have completed most of it, However our group is unhappy with some of the speech we did as we feel we could have answered the questions far better this is why we plan to redo these questions either in person or over a Skype call - I will then put the new audio into the evaluation and match it with image and video in iMovie so that we have a complete and quality evaluation.