Second Poster Idea

After the failure of my first poster idea, I still wanted to do something adventurous and different with my poster. I was looking at posters like Scarface for inspiration -

I liked the two-tone colours and the minimalist design. I felt that this reflected strongly the thriller themes I wanted to convey - the main flaw of the previous poster.

I started with this scene from the film. I chose it because I liked the framing and I felt it could create the correct mood.

I started by posterizing the photo - First I desaturated it so it was only two colours (in this case a sort of sepia) and I coloured in parts of her face, hair, and the background to make them less textured. That ended up looking like this:

That looks a little odd currently, but photoshop's posterize function fixes this:

I added in a review (from The Guardian at this point, although it was my plan to change it later) and a specially-desaturated version of the title.

I was already much more pleased with this poster - however I felt that the traditional thriller red was shockingly absent. To remedy this, I added a red gradient fill layer in all the white spaces - the gradient was to give the background a little more colour than it would have otherwise.

I really liked the result - however, I felt it wasn't complex enough. I decided to adapt this into an even more adventurous poster design - one that I felt would reflect her dual nature.

Rough Cut 4

Here is our fourth rough cut - this is our final version without music or titles, we have exported it for the music to be composed to it

What we have changed

• We have moved the idents to the start of the trailer as we felt where they were they were breaking the tension we had built, this allowed us to put the voiceover of Ruby over the idents, integrating them into our film more 
• The bus stop scene has now been rotated to be straight
• We have added in sound from the digital audio recorder from the scenes we filmed later and fixed all of the sound for these scenes
• We added in black video as markers for where all of our intertitles will go
• We recorded the extra digetic sound we needed including an extra line of dialogue 

Points to improve

• We still need to make a main title

• We have now made intertitles and a billing block but need to add these to the trailer

• We now have the video to compose music in garage band against so we will begin this very soon

Rough Cut 3

Here is our third rough cut

What we have changed

• We have added in the shots from our two further filming sessions since the last rough cut 
• We have continued the colour grade, using it to make several scenes appear to be at night such as scene 14

Points to improve

• We need to sort the sound in the scenes filmed in the last two sessions 
• We need to rotate the shots at the bus stop as we were on a hill 
• Also we need to film some diegetic sound for the bus stop and kitchen scenes
• We still need to make titles and a billing block
• We also still need to compose music in garage band and add it to the trailer 

Rough Cut 2

Here is our second rough cut

What we have changed

• We have hugely cut down from our first rough cut of 2:47 to 1:24 as we knew we still had a lot to film and titles to add in
• We have added the sound from the digital audio recorder 
• We have gone through colour grading every shot in the trailer

Points to improve

• We still have several place holder scenes to be filled as there is much left to be filmed
• We need to make titles and a billing block
• We need to create compose music in garage band and add it to the trailer 

Properties - Plates

I made a number of breakaway plates for when we had to smash them - I poured plaster of paris into the bottom of a large bucket and left it to dry for a couple of hours. One of the plates broke in half whilst I tried to extract it from the bucket, but otherwise the plates turned out nicely, good and smooth and perfect for smashing!

Ident 2 - Fireline

For our second ident, Fireline, I decided that we wanted some fire (inspired by the title) to spread out into bubbles across the screen. I executed this by using various effects, mostly CC Particle Systems, using the 'Fire' physics mode, and a particle type of Bubble.

I also increased the birth size and decreased the death size to make the particles grow smaller as they rise, giving a stronger idea that they come from one point. I changed the longevity and birth rate to have the particles last less long (to give a fading away look at the top of the fire) and spawn more frequently (to give an idea that this is a roaring fire) respectively. I made sure to change the colours so that the particles were a gradient of orange the whole way through the animation. I adjusted the velocity and other parameters - from here on it was just a case of fiddling with things until I got the look I wanted. I also used a motion blur, Vector Blur, Fast Blur, Directional Blur, and Echo (although faded these out when the fire turns to bubbles) to blend the particles together and give more of a firey look. I also added a curves adjustment to make the fire more orange and a turbulent displace and a Glow to tie everything together. I then played around with the Direction, Resistance, Gravity, Extra, and Velocity settings to get a bubble result I was happy with.

Rough Cut 1 - Audience Feedback

We showed the rough cut to a group of people to hear their feedback on what they liked about it and what they thought we could improve on.

What they liked

• They commented on the fast editing of the diary between the close ups of words and the mid shot of the whole open book
• They also liked the colour grade of the whole trailer
• They thought is was very easy to understand what was going on

Points to Improve 

• Change the edit in scene two to slow down the pace of it so it does not feel as rushed and confusing
• Add in the music which will hopefully lift it all 
• A lot of work needs to be done to the diegetic sounds, which we will fix by adding in the sound from from the Digital Audio Recorder.

Initial Poster Idea

Initially, I wanted to go for a poster to reflect the happy nature of the first act of the trailer, but with some deformity showing how everything is not as it seems. I decided to go for this shot from the film as I thought it was a very nice looking shot and I could do lots with it.

However, I could not find a still from the film where both of the actors were looking nice - as you can see here, it looks like our main actress is mid-sneeze. I chose to use two different stills, which I carefully blended together to give the result below.

I'm really pleased with the result - you can hardly tell that there are two shots there - the discolouration on the girl's hair was actually an in-camera error. After blending the photos, I added a levels adjustment to increase the contrast a little - the final grade is on the top, original on bottom for comparison, as it can be quite difficult to see the difference otherwise.

I added in the title from the film - this creates a brand coherency we were keen to achieve with our ancillary marketing products.

I then started to add some film festival logos, like these ones:

Giving a final, unfinished result:

However, in the end I decided that my initial idea was flawed - I felt that this kind of poster didn't truly reflect the thriller genre, and wouldn't be able to get across the intended meaning effectively. I scrapped this project, and started again.

Rough Cut 1

Here is the first rough cut for our final product, we have put all of the clips filmed on day 1 and 2 of filming together along with the idents. The colour grade has begun on some of the shots but there is still a long way to go on many. Currently the only sound for all of it apart from scene 1 is camera sound so this will need to be replaced with sound from the Digital Audio Recorder. Also currently it reaches 2 minutes 48 seconds in length with still 4 scenes to film, making it well over our target of 2 minutes so we plan to cut a large amount of it down.