Film Poster.

I have created a film poster for our film Thirst.

Here are some posters that inspired me:

These posters all show a clear Idea of having one central image with a film slogan and the film name in large font. it should not be cluttered.
The simple image of a protagonist along with a tagline that draws the reader in should make the viewer want to know more about the film.

Representation in vampire films - Jake

Here is a good example of the representation I wanted in the film. The two male leads, the original victim and assailant, fighting. Not only for revenge but also for their masculinity and honour. This paints males as warring, honour-bound fighters. This goes conforms to the stereotype that men are destroyers.

Here is an example of age, the old vampire who is supposedly more powerful is being beaten by the younger less experienced vampire. It also shows the woman vampire to be powerless at the beginning, this conforms with the ideology that woman are weaker than men, but at the end of the clip the female vampire slices the bad vampires face in two, this goes against most ideas that woman can't slice a mans face in two and also goes against the ideology is set up earlier that woman shouldn't fight.

Here is the actor who played the protagonist, I decided having him goes against stereotypes now that women were always the victims, I decided to go with someone a bit different, hence the long hair on a male. I think I should have gone for a more innocent, smaller victim who conforms with the usual stereotypes of horror films.

However, I think it's quite an interesting idea having him actually slightly taller than the vampire and appearing to overpower him but being scared of the vampire, this shows the true power there. This is most noticeable in the chase scene when he sees the man and runs, showing the terrifying aura the vampires are able to put out if they want. The feedback agrees however that a more innocent victim would've made the movie more effective.

Media institution - Jake

Here is the movie poster I created, I think it's a bit too cluttered but the vital points of a poster are there, the tag line, the title, the date, the technical information at the bottom and the age of the film. My aim for the poster was to be quite gritty, like the desire for the film, this way people won't get confused looking at the poster, expecting to see hollywood budgets. The tag line needed to describe the film, which I think it does quite well: "The prey must become the predator." It's imperative, the prey isn't going to maybe become the prey, they know he will. They know at some point in the film, there will be a role reversal, the anticipation for this will hopefully help add to the tension.

The date for release will be June 13th, I feel this is a good date as it will be in the cinemas for the summer holidays so the target audience will have more time to go and watch it. Alternatively, I might have the release date as the 25th of November, this way we can try and release it for christmas, going against the usual four month period, and we can showcase it at Bang! A local short film festival that is over 23rd to 25th of November, this film festival gains a large following each year and reviewers review the latest short films, this will hopefully get assistance from film reviewers and gain something of a following.

The advertising we do will probably be done via posters and social networking sites, such as facebook as this is quite easily done and low cost. If we were to go with a larger distributor we would probably have TV adverts, internet adverts and billboards but I like the feeling of being a small film and so the advertising will probably be quite minimalist at first. We would hope to gain more of a word of mouth advertising, hopefully with the help of a cult following.

If we were to go with a major distributor I would have Warner Bros as they have a good track record with successful advertising, for instance the Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows advertising in the baker street tube station, this is good advertising as not only did the many people who travel on the tube daily, it also gained news coverage which is good national advertising that creates itself. Another thing is, the larger the distributor, then the more cinemas the film can get into, so we can have a more saturated release.



An independent company I would choose would be Fantastic Films, using Fantastic Films to distribute the film would allow for a much more cinema screen releases than we would be able to do without a distributor.

The media institutions and distribution.

For small independent film producers there would be many ways to distribute our film on various scales and ways. The smallest way would be to use an independent theater to screen our film, our local cinema that takes part in this is called the Broadway and it also holds a film festival called the Bang! short film festival. Many theaters across the country hold small film festivals for independent film makers and this is a good way to broadcast your product.

A way to get a larger release but still maintain a smaller scale and not go to a major distributor, is to go to a smaller distributor. An example of a company like this is Fantastic Films International, these distributors help getting the films they accept in to a theatrical release at many theaters as well as helping the making of trailers and posters. By using smaller independent companys like this it allows for the film to have a much wider release than it otherwise would have, it also helps in generating interest and exposure to the film.

The largest scale possibility would be to present your film to a larger distributor like Lionsgate or Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. these larger scale distributors as well as distributing their own products also distribute the products of other smaller companys and teams. This rout would have the largest theatrical release and have the largest advertising push behind it, however larger companys do not like taking risks so more adventurous films may be rejected.

For a Full scale film release the standard rout would be a standard release this would include:

1. Theatrical release, this is where the film is release in theaters and is the first release.]
2. DVD release, roughly 4 months after the theatrical release it is made available on DVD.
3. TV release. roughly 2 years after its initial release it is made available for TV institutions.

Other release methods are available however release strategys like simultaneous release are controversial and typically do not receive the same level of funding and promotion as standard releases.

Advertising.
Advertising takes many forms and depending on the level of release and the amount of money available many techniques can be used.

• TV commercials while being expensive are an effective method of creating interest for a film to mass audience. however it is expensive and so typically reserved for the largest distributors and their largest films.
• Online adds depending on the popularity of the site can vary in cost, they often have links that lead to a trailer or movie website for more information.
• Billboards are a classic advertisement method and are usually placed in places with busy traffic. they usually display large images that are iconic to the film and large important information like the name. 
• Social networking has also been used to create viral video's that advertise some films. even using sites like twitter to raise awareness for films.

What I have learnt about technologies? - Jake

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? on Prezi

Technologies we used during film production.

The use of technologies over the production. 

We have used many technologies in to construct this product. Some like the sites Google and Facebook, witch helped in organization and finding much of the information we used, were not new to me. However many technologies like the physical cameras and the software like Garageband, Photoshop and I movie i had little experience with and so my skills with these programs have expanded and improved vastly.

By having software like I movie and Garage band available to people with no industry experience or contacts is a good thing as it means that people who are not part of a major production company can make smaller movies with cheap and easily available technology.

Addressing our audience.

In order to properly address the likes and dislikes of our selected target audience we decided to research into multiple films as well as their ratings and user thoughts using the IMBD website. you can see this research as part of our planning, we did the 5 films:
Blade(18)
Underworld (15)
Dracula(1992) (18)
Twilight (12A)
30 days of night (18)
As we can see over half of these films were an 18 rating however we felt that our audience was more of a mix between that of Underworld (15) and Twilight (12A), this is due to them being more restrained in the violence and gore, even though Underworld includes a lot of this it does not go over the top like some other films.
We also saw that Twilight had a vastly different gender mix than the other films. Underworld was the second film we targeted and we also saw that that had a much better ratio of female to male viewers even though it was still heavily in the favor of the male audiences.

We planned to Immediately engage our audience by starting with the initial event that caused our protagonist to become a vampire, this involves a tension building sequence followed by a short chase as the vampire catches the main character. we wanted it to appear that the character was in danger but not reveal too much about the vampires at the start so we only had short shots of the vampire in an outfit that was deliberately stopping the audience from seeing any identifying features. By starting with initial action we hoped to engage the audience in the film and grab their attention, this then goes on to wondering who the victim is and starting to get involved with their story and characters.
We decided for our main character to be a quite normal boy of the targeted age group, this was because having a character similar to the target audience made them easier to be understood by the audience and makes it easier for the audience to quickly engage them, this is also the reasoning behind the fairly plain costume for this character. Because throughout the entire sub-genre there is a clear male viewership trend having the main character as a male makes it much more relatable to the majority of the audience.

Our title sequence was designed to bring up questions as to who these missing people were and to who the killers are. By also having pictures of churches along with shots of blood this introduces the idea that nowhere is safe as churches are meant to be safe, it is also helped that old churches are often found to be creepy by many people. Unfortunately the screen with the institutional information was not polished enough and so ended up looking unprofessional and the font seemed to obvious for our film, if i was to redo the project i would allocate more time to polishing this aspect of our film.
The idea behind our music was to compliment our piece. the fast and slow parts along with moments of relative quiet and noise was meant to mimic and increase the effect of the film. I do not fee that this was achieved throughout the piece and in places it becomes more like an action piece not a horror as well as being too dominant.

We handed out surveys to people within our target audience and then showed them our film. From their feed back we can tell what they liked about our piece and what we need to target for improvement.
We got some positive and negative feedback. People liked the suspention created and the fast pace however they thought more camera angles could have been used and that it could have been more intense.