Film Review

Another Ancillary task requires me to make and construct a magazine review for my mask task of making a film. To get an idea of how these are constructed I went online and looked at current film magazine reviewers such as Empire.

Something all of my research tells me to do is learn the content thoroughly so I can talk about absolutely everything. This is where I have a advantage because I was the one creating the film and the ideas behind it are all my, so I already know about all the connotations and preferred meanings behind the films meaning.

The next tip I received was to form a specific opinion on the film that cant be misleading, like rating the film 3 stars out of film as a example. Although this could be difficult for me because I am biased towards my own film so after I have completed my audience research I will show them the film and ask to perform a anonymous survey rating the film. I will take an average from these results.

Another tip is to grab the reader immediately so briefly review a key feature of the film by quoting it and then leading it on to relevant points, but I have to make sure that I look out for spoilers because if the audience thought that I was ruining the film they wouldn't read the review.

This leads on to the next point of briefly recapping but not too much so that the user gets bored, I will have to find the balance between recapping but not over-recapping.

The next point is obvious but worth mentioning and it is to make sure you are keeping your reading interested. I can achieve this by reviewing the key points of the film not all the small talk shots. Another way is to use metaphors, paragraphs, adverbs etc. This is used to make the image of the films purpose inside the readers head indulging them even more.

Finally it is key that in my film I will stay honest throughout trying to completely reject the idea of being bias in any way possible.

Animatics

I started of by creating the storyboards with pen and paper to get the initial ideas out in physical so I can further improve the ideas. After consideration to changes I made my animatics by taking the pictures as stills and uploading them to the macs so I can edit them in Final cut Express and iMovie.

I was already familiar to using iMovie because I used it in my AS project but Final Cut Express was a new program to me buy luckily I already new how to use Sony Vegas Pro. These programs are very similar but just organised a bit differently but once I had figured my way around I had it sorted.

Posters

For one of my ancillary tasks I have chosen to make a poster for my film that will express the nature of the film without giving away too much detail. I don't have any knowledge about posters so I decided to research about some of the 'great movie posters'.

Two posters stood out particularly for what I want to achieve in my poster, here are the examples:

The 'Casino Royale' poster uses various shadows and different focuses to help make specific images of this poster stand out. For example the title of the film along with his face half shadowed which could be a connotation for having a good side but also a evil side to him.

This poster for the 2nd Matrix film film in the trilogy focuses on being very simplistic featuring mainly only black and white shades on the foreground and background. This not only helps the text stand out because of the green glow around the edges symbolising the Matrix code, but also the character 'Neo' can stand out a lot more who is very recognisable for being this character.

When making my poster I will use techniques that they have used to make a great poster, and one thing I have learned is to attempt to include semiotics with several connotations with a proffered meaning.