Evaluation 2

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

This is our script for the commentary we created discussing our ancillary tasks as well as our final trailer.

Poster

For our ancillary tasks we did a poster and a magazine cover. On our poster we chose to have a brick wall in the background, as through research run down brick walls were a typical convention for the social realism genre. This image is also a connotation of each woman hitting a brick wall in their lives. In the foreground we have a photo of the three protagonists in our trailer. Our aim was to show each woman’s character (problems) through body language – left is the alcoholic, middle is the grieving woman and the right is the get around. We thought conveying their characteristics were important in order for the audience to get an insight on the characters. We used a cold effect on the photo of the women; we think it made it look more edgy, which is what we wanted. We played around with different compositions of the poster to get the most realistic outcome – these are available on our blogs.

Camerawork

First woman – The first woman, we used a range of camera shots to try and focus on her emotion, as this is essentially the most moving storyline of the three. The camera shot of the graveyard; we have used a slow zoom to fit with the soft mood. We used a medium close up shot with a shallow depth of field her, this brings all of the focus to the character in the foreground. We chose not to use any close up shots in order to keep the camera and audience distant – mirroring the character herself.

Second woman – We started the second characters section with her coming out of different doors, resembling the fact that she sleeps around. Then we did a point of view shot of children playing in the park, which shows what she could be thinking about and what her future could hold. The shot of the girl in the mirror was a common shot when doing research and so we felt it was an effective shot to include. The mirror could also present that idea of her being trapped in a frame, which is metaphorical of her being trapped in her life. Because the room in which we filmed this scene in was very bright so we blocked off a couple so that we had a more professional looking set.

Third girl – We used a medium close ups from the side of the character as she was doing shots, it was effective because of her costume changed; showing that its something which happens daily. From our audience research that fact that her hair was different each proved to be reflective. We did an overhead spinning shot that mirrors her spinning out of control, which is then reflected by s party scene. The mise-en-scene here was lots of colourful strobe lights and people partying, making this seem more realistic.

Editing

For the first grieving women, we used four dissolves transitions to convey that the images of her husband are a past thought, this also fits with the soft slow mood. The frame of the women in the grave yard is in black and white to emphasise the mourning atmosphere/

The second girl, the inter titles was included in order to fit into the typical conventions of a trailer, the black frame then smoothly goes into the dark mise en scene of the first shot. The slow motion added onto the point of view shot of the children conveys the women confused state of mind. Each story line ends with a black or clear frame showing it is the end of each story.

For the final girls editing we used slow motion on two shots; the first being overhead spinning shot and the party scene. This was to show her puzzled, out of control state of mind. We also used cross dissolves to show it is a reoccurring situation/

Magazine Cover

Our second ancillary task was the magazine cover, we wanted to emphasise that women are the target audience; therefore, we used flowers as a prop in the shoot which are connotations of beauty and peace. The puffs around the frame all link to the world of media and our film. We took out the background leaving a blank canvas and put a soft touch on the edit. The title ‘Crosscut’ is a media jargon and sounds catchy as a magazine name, also it would feature multiple films therefore crosscutting between different genres. We included a date and barcode to fit to standard conventions. Changing the font colour made the magazine look artier, making it fit into the creative media world.