Poster/Webpage Image

We have made a final decision regarding the image we intend to use on our advertising products for the film (above). We feel that the image above conveys enough about the film that it could be used promotionally- we can tell that the characters are not the so-called 'cool kids' you would find in a typical teen drama, but the bottle of vodka visible in-shot is out of place amongst them, giving a hint as to their situation. The pattern on Anthony's shirt is also visible in this photograph, and the red spatters could connote blood, implying the danger they find themselves in. Both of these indicate that the protagonists are out of their depth, and that the humour lies in this fact. We intend to use a tagline to further this humour and make it clearer to the audience.

We also liked the fact that the photograph is reminiscent of promotional material used for the first series of Skins (shown above.) Skins was proven to be universally popular amongst our target audience, as revealed by the surveys we took. We felt that this picture pays homage to the image in a way, and this will subconciously connect with Skins fans and make our film appeal to them more.

This is a very basic mock-up of what we would like the poster to eventually look like. This was only done using Paint, so the image quality is not very good and the variety of fonts, colours and effects were very limited. However, we wanted to demonstrate an idea of composition.




We also decided to make a mock-up of a webpage. Again, this image is of low quality and has all the same problems as the poster, but we wanted to demonstrate where we intended to place things and show what we intend to include- e.g. the links to social networking sites, which we found were important in promoting a film intended for a teenage target audience, and a 'Soundtrack' tab, which, to a degree, provides a ready-made audience made up of fans of the artists you have included.

Costume

My group carefully considered how we were going to dress our characters. Below is an annotated photograph of our three main actors and the outfits we chose for them.

Above all else, we wanted to both comply with and violate conventions of the teen drama. We complied with them by giving our characters a stereotype to fit into- they are 'geeks' or 'nerds' and we dressed them accordingly, in sensible clothes. We wanted them to wear simple jeans, plain T-shirts and hoodies (in Sophie's case, a lumpy, shapeless man's jacket.) However, the reason that we did this was to subvert stereotypes about the genre- typically in teen dramas, the main characters are the 'cool kids', and are highly sexualised accordingly. We wanted the 'geek' stereotype to assume the role of the 'cool kids' without taking on their behaviours, thus we wanted to convey our character's innocence and naivety through their clothes. We felt this also heightened the absurdity of them finding themselves in such a dark situation.

We also wanted to emphasise the rural setting of our trailer. Commonly, teen dramas are set in gritty, urban surroundings and feature streetwise teenagers taking on dark situations. In order to contrast our protagonists' innocence with the grit of our antagonists, we thought a country setting would be more appropriate. As noted on the photograph, the girl's jacket especially panders to this theme, as it connotes dog walking and a simple, rural lifestyle- quite the opposite to the drug dealers that our characters find themselves involved with!

Risk Assessment

My group have completed a risk assessment- we considered the possible dangers posed by our filming and came up with solutions or ways around them.

Webpage Analysis

Today, our group began more detailed research on the webpage that we have to produce as part of our brief. To deduce what the common themes were on webpagesfrom our genre of film, I annotated a few- pages for Cherrybomb, 4321 and Shank.


These are printscreens of the webpages for the aforementioned films. I have added annotations on what I considered to be relevant aspects of the pages.




(Click to view larger versions of the images and read the annotations I have made.)

Common threads throughout the pages were:

Links to social networking sites- Facebook, Twitter etc

- For the purpose of spreading information about the film- it encourages fans of the film to show their support for it and in turn, the page is more likely to be viewed by friends of the fans and so on.

A prominent photograph of the actors (the same one used on the posters)

- Cross-marketing; the same photo is used on all of the advertising material to make it more well known and ingrained into the minds of film fans. In several cases, the most famous actor (e.g. Noel Clark in the 4321 webpage) is the most prominent as big stars have a built-in fanbase.

Soundtrack listings

- The Cherrybomb webpage lacks this (perhaps due to being low-budget and not being able to afford licensing for music) but both the Shank and 4321 pages have a page with a complete list of songs featured in the movie. The purpose of this is that fans of the music featured in the film may be inspired to watch it based on it's inclusion of something they already like.

Shooting

Day #1: Cuckoo's Hollow/ Gunthorpe Garages

During the half-term holidays, my group and I came together to begin filming our project. We decided that it would be best if we used actors for the film and the three of us focused entirely on filming.


The main locations we used were Cuckoo's Hollow in Werrington and a set of garages in Gunthorpe, which we chose to use instead of a set at Walton as originally planned. The reason for this change is that the Gunthorpe garages looked less decayed, and based on the idea that our film is a comedy, we thought it would be funnier if the story was set in a very leafy, green Suburbia kind of setting.


These are our actors: Anthony Race, Sophie Wardell and Joe Stimson. We dressed them all in the similar costumes of jeans and jackets to make them look both similar and entirely plain- we didn't want them to look sexualised in any way.



This is a photograph of Dan positioning Joe in frame for one of the scenes in the trailer.

This is an image of our characters after they have been drinking in a humourous scene. We took some better quality photographs on the camera and are considering using this as our promotional image on both the poster and the webpage because it sums up the 'misfit' social position of the characters.



This is a photograph of Kayleigh, myself and our three actors after a hectic day of shooting!