The Advanced Portfolio Evaluation Question 2-Amie Nelms

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

Film Poster

This is our poster for our short film 'All My Love'. This as well as the film and our review for 'Little White Lies' magazine (as I will talk about later on) would be part as a marketing pack for our film. I'm now going to explain how each element of the poster communicates to the audience what our film is about.

Representation of Characters

Rich

• Suggestion he is a ghost though the high contrast used for the picture
  
• His facial expression and body language of hugging Amie, suggests he is caring and loving in their relationship.
  
• The way Amie's gaze is at the camera suggests she doesn't know Rich is there-ghost
  
• Costume-dressed in white, ghost, dead, clear indication
  
• He's holding the letter she threw away-emotional memory, sensitive, sentimental value

Amie

• Wearing black, grieving for loss
  
• Facial expression and body language positioned at camera, unaware that Rich is there
  
• Although I do feel her facial expression doesn't really convey the pain, heartache and sadness that she is feeling, as is in the film-might be unclear to the audience the tone of the film.
  
• However, this picture could be seen as her life without Rich-him not letting go, however she has moved on-parallel to the film (goes from black and white to colour), in colour now, she's moved on.

Themes and Issues

• Relationship-couple in an embrace
  
• Supernatural-body language, unaware he is there

Location

• Park setting-the grass on floor, highlights where the film is set

Colour

• Black and white fonts-film is shot in, influenced by characters costumes
  
• Picture in colour-could be symbolic as the 'moving on' stage, when Amie has walked away
  
• High contrast-ghost like, supernatural element to film
  
• Green-grass, her life is brighter now, more colourful-moved on

Font

• Simple font, title 'All My Love' with opaque quality-to emphasise supernatural element
  
• Title 'All My Love'-'M' and 'L' joined, could represent their once strong relationship

Other Features

• Actors names-tells audience who's starring in the film
  
• Cast and industry information at bottom (small font)-informs audience on who the film is created by and what roles the took
  
• Star ratings-encourages audience to go and view, indicates to the audience how good the film is
  
• Reviewer quotes-to encourage audience to view film, reviewers opinion is trusted/influences people whether to see film or not
  
• Lottery funded logo-shows that this is a small budget independent film,
  
• BBC Film logo-tells audience who funded this film, media literate people would be encouraged to view this film due to this connection


• Date it comes out-informs audience on when they can see this film, during summer holidays, when our target group will be free to spend their leisure pound/have time to view the film.
  
• Where the quotes and star ratings come from-Cosmopolitan and Glamour magazine, aimed at females, 12-24's, same target audience as film, will want to see the film due to their favourite magazine advices to see it; "Tear jerk" and "Romance" echo relationships and romance.


• Web address-people with internet access can find out more about the film-target audience is the most likely group to do this as they have been bought up with the internet; is popular due to social networking sites etc.


• Tagline-"The boy. The girl. The letter"-nouns show to the audience the importance and significance of each mentioned to the film; hints what it's about.

I did some research into film posters earlier on in our project. I also did a few sketch ideas on how we could construct the basis of the poster. So here is what I blogged regarding the conventions and information to include on the poster...

http://advancedportfolionelms.blogspot.com/2010/03/film-poster-sketches-amie-nelms.html

When sketching ideas for our poster and later on in the process, we experimented with different poses of the characters. We knew we wanted them laying down, but wasn't quite sure how to portray their relationship through body language.

We took a look at the poster for 'The Edge of Love', as we thought the two characters laying on the floor was a casual, simple but effective way of showing a relationship between two people. We tried to mimic this pose when creating the image for out poster, but found the composition didn't really portray that there was a romantic relationship between our characters (Amie and Rich). We liked the simplicity of the characters laying on a blank background (wooden floor) and wanted to incorporate this into our own image.

We then viewed the film poster for 'The Time Traveler's Wife'. We liked this image as the two characters loving and caring relationship is reflected through their close embrace. We managed to incorporate a similar pose for our characters with the idea of the simple background from the previous poster. I feel that this combination shows that the image doesn't have to be extremely complex to communicate something-ie. a relationship. Most of it is communicated through facial expressions and body language.

Film Review

For our film review we firstly looked at the house style and conventions for the magazine 'Little White Lies'. Here was the research I previously wrote on the blog about how 'Little White Lies' designs their magazine...

http://advancedportfolionelms.blogspot.com/2010/03/little-white-lies-magazine-review-amie.html

Here is our finished review which I designed, with Emma creating the copy, with a few suggestions from me...

I tried my best to match all the layout features as closely as possible. I used 3 different fonts ('Elephant' for 'Anticipation, Enjoyment and In Retrospect', page number and issue; 'Haettenschweiler' for the film title and the coloured boxes ; and 'Bookman Old Style' for the main copy. I over came the problem of unavailability of making the stand first bold, by copying the first line in a separate text box, and layered it over the top to create the bold font.

Due to 'Little White Lies' magazine having a running theme throughout the magazine, we chose the film 'An Education' for ours. This was because we felt that film ('An Education') would suit our target audience. We took the colours from the front cover of the magazine and introduced them in the 'Little White Lies' style in the boxes.

The target audience of the magazine however, is of a film literate audience who tend to be slightly older. This will introduce our film to the target audience of the magazine (mainly males, although females do read it), hopefully persuading them to view this film after reading the article.

Within the copy, Emma chose particular lexis and semantic fields to reflect the genre and strong qualities of our film.

Semantic Fields

• Supernatural/fantasy-Lexis: eg. "imagination", "ghostly", "spellbinding", "haunting".
• Social Realism-Lexis: eg. "depressing side of life", "dramatic climax", "glumness", "stereotypical conceptions of femininity", "black and white cinematography".
• Romance-Lexis: eg. "hormonal teenage romance", "teenage girl", "emotive dialogue", "affectionate", "failed relationship".
• Media terminology-Lexis: eg. "Ghost busters", "extreme long shot"

I also previously looked at ways to promote short films. Here's what I came up with...

http://advancedportfolionelms.blogspot.com/2010/01/short-film-promotion-research.html

Amie Nelms