Evaluation
Our film trailer follows a British Gangster genre, with influence from films such as This Is England (2006) and Reservoir Dogs (1991), Outlaw (2007), Get Carter (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Harry Brown (2009). The main plot is of three teenagers, using patriotism and violence to ironically solve the level of local crime. The film follows Propp’s theory of there being a certain types of characters, however unlike many films where the hero is in the right, here the hero are the three teenagers who are troublesome and creating fear within the public yet right in there own cause.
With my poster, it subtly follows the conventions of a gangster film poster. Though there is no clear image of violence in the photo I have used, e.g. characters holding weapons, they do look a little intimidating and in control. To enforce the use of violence I have added a blood splatter across the title with some spots on the characters. It is made clear by the age certificate box that the film contains strong violence. However though this subtly shows the convention, the film poster for Outlaw is subtle in showing the violent nature, using only a small image of a gun beneath the title and with the sub-title ‘Fighting back 2007’.
I used the film magazine Little White Lies for my choice to create the magazine on. This was because they are a British company and follow different budget films, for example they reviewed This Is England. The style of the magazine is quite unique as they use cartooned versions of actors and characters of the main film they review, often using bright colours depending on the mood of the film. My front cover used the same format, with the three main character’s head positions in the middle in a cartooned appearance. I again went for the subtle approach of violence, creating a small splatters on the middle character, then over top this a blended in bloody Union Jack. This was also to show that the film is British. I have had responses from other people telling me that they thought my magazine cover was an official cover from Little White Lies, showing that I have successfully recreated the style they use.
The trailers style is based upon Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange’s trailer, which was very fast paced and used a more electronically composed version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Put together along with some quick flashes of text and the trailer became very successful, though the intention of it was to shock, nowadays we see it much more comical, due to other films that are more shocking. We began the trailer quite slowly, using scenes that lasted over five seconds, then inserting quicker scenes between to slowly build up the speed and pace. Then towards the middle we used a series of quick scenes that flash and make the trailer a lot faster now. We also decided to insert subliminal messaging based upon the nature of the film. Though they are very quick it and often aren’t notice by some viewers it works well in suggesting that the main protagonists are very controlling and are trying to influence others to their violent and patriotic ways.
The technology we used to complete this was extremely useful with only a few errors, but nothing major. For the magazine and poster Photoshop CS2 was the easiest software to use, as I knew how to use it more than other programs such as Adobe InDesign CS2, which is mainly used for illustrating magazines. To film the scenes for our trailer we used a standard digital camcorder then uploaded the footage to a computer. We hit a slight problem here because the camcorder which was Sony brand, converted the footage to a different file format, which Adobe Premier could read., though this problem was quickly solved back by converting the files to AVI. Using Premier was easy enough to use, as all you needed to know was the basics, then if unsure on how to apply effects, tutorials on the internet would help.
