ADDRESSING THE AUDIENCE

The Facebook pages for American hollywood film 'Source Code', and the British Steven Speilburg 'War Horse' masterpiece.


Facebook pages are a very convenient way to communicate with an audience - with Facebook as the most popular social networking site in existence to date, it is a fantastic medium to spread word of a film across as many people as possible. Following up on this, Louis and I made our own Facebook page for Gaia's Army.

The page will be used as our primary medium to publicise the film opening; the poster, pictures from on location and screenshots from the film have already been uploaded. Minor levels of audience interaction are being experienced however we hope that once the final product is uploaded, this media can be used to receive as much audience feedback as possible. 

A LITTE EXTRA 'STUFF'

Gaia's Army promotional poster

 The website in early design stages of photoshop. The text "Gaia's Army" was made in After Effects, because photoshop wasnt able to create the electric blue filling in the white frame of the letters. The shot of the dying GA Agent is a screenshot from the film, the background masked out in photoshop, the wall faded. I colour corrected it with high contrast and no saturation to create the silhoutte type effect. The image of Earth is from google, as I - fairly obviously - can't take a picture of the Earth from space, but if I had a way I would.

The release date for the film was made up on the spot, as the film won't actually be released - but it is based on the release date for the final Harry Potter film, which was offically released in the UK on the 15th July 2011.

DISTRIBUTION

Distributors, the secretive 'wizard of Oz' behind every film. Throughout the production of a film the distributor is constantly working to pulicise to ensure the largest viewer audiences possible. A films' budget is often a distributor's budget; sometimes the distrbution even costs more than it does to shoot the film. Posters, websites, interactive experiences and trailers, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds for films are all managed by the distributor.

Sara Frain: On how a distributor approaches a marketing plan: Play clip >

Part of the research I did involved looking at the Film Distributor's Association, on which I watched several videos in which various figures, such as Sara Frain (video above) discuss the various aspects of distribution.

Trailers:

Distributors usually have a range of audiovisual 'content' to work with as they prepare campaigns, including short and extended clips, approved by the producers; making-

For Gaia's Army, we need to find a British film distributor who would be willing to take the risk of taking on our film. Early ideas included Lionsgate (which I used for my GCSE Thriller opening, Dead Capacity last year) and Momentum. We have decided to use Columbia Tristar, after looking it up on IMBD and looking at films it has previously publicised - our opening has a similar feel and tone to movies which this paticular distributor has taken on in the past.

The website for American thriller 'Source Code'

Another of our optional tasks was to create some publicity for our films; so I researched several websites for thriller films for ideas about what goes where, and what is 'what' in the first place. 

Website for Dan Radcliff's new thriller/horror 'The Woman in Black'

THE EVALUATION QUESTIONS

The Seven Evaluation Questions:


1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Answered


2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?



3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Answered


4. Who would the audience be for your media product?
Answered


5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Working on it (YOUDO)


6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Working on it (film, voiceover)



7. Look back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product? 


By next Monday Qs 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 will be done :)

FINISHING THE FILM

The visuals of the film are complete - the shots are colour corrected with After Effects' curves controls, the visual effects shots are spliced in with what I call 'the narrative edit' (which is the main chunk of the opening; the flow from shots to other shots, conveying the story), and the running shots have been warp stabilised on AE to create a stable, electric throbbing effect.

Myself, getting into character whilst doing ADR

All that remains to be done is the audio work, as the sound captured on location is messy - full of vehicles, bus brake screeches, other peoples footsteps and voices when we don't want them there. So in the previous lesson we decided to completely re-record all the audio/dialouge, to dub over the sound we have at the moment in a process called ADR, or Additional Dialogue Recording/Replacing.

Louis, my partner, doing ADR in the music tech studio

I learned this was not easy - on a previous project which I am still currently working on named 'Psyched', I took Louis aside to do a small portion of ADR to dub over one of the scenes. So being the second time we had gone about this process, we had already learned how to seamlessly record sound using vocal/condenser microphones recording directly into Logic Pro 9 in our school's sound studio (located in the music department). 

PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

Finally the GCI in Gaia's Army is complete. I only had toe join the pieces of the puzzle now; the CGI amd the mac-track shots are already spliced, and as I type the closing sequence within the opening sequence is rendering out of Adobe After Effects. Below are screenshots from splicing together the number tunnel which connects to the grid, and the mactrack shot in which the screen of the Macbook explodes into pixels, revealing the CGI underneath. 

 

 Above and below; tracking the Mac laptop. The greenscreen and blue crosses were an image on the screen made in photoshop. In the edit I realised it would be far easier to track the layer and attach the screenshot of iTunes over it, rather than under, to save me greenscreening.

 

Above - Louis' body passes infront of the blue crosses, making it impossible to track - so I moved the track points to the zoom H4n (Sound recording device which reeaally should not have been in shot...oops) and to a piece of paper and the shadow it makes, because the trackpoints fix onto what they track by measuring the contrast in the area selected to track - so the white agaisnt black in the triangular shape makes a perfect tracking spot. 

Below, the screenshot taken on Louis' Macbook which we placed over the greenscreen Mac, and then exploded.

Waiting for AE to render out the project

CONVENTIONS OF THRILLER

A screenshot from a Skype call I had with Louis, during which we talked about and summarises the conventions and other various aspects of thriller movies. I recorded the conversation podcast-style with my Videomic Pro (boom-pole mounted) and Zoom H4n, which records what the microphone hears to an SD card.

We used this call to answer the first evaluation question, the recording can be listened to here.