Analysing postcards and posters

Film Posters:

As you can see, film posters often stick to conventions, but depending on the genre of the film they conventions vary. A lot of modern horror films use close ups of the eye, in order to show a claustrophobic atmosphere, where as comedies are more likely to have two of the main characters back to back. A recent trend is to have the main character situated with their back to the photo, to create a mystery to the film. Another recent trend that is used all around the world is to use a contrast of blue and orange. This creates the feeling of action and drama wanted to pull in the widest audience.  Most of these posters have the title of the film situated at the bottom third of the poster, and if not then in the top third, with the name of actors at the top. A different way of marketing posters is to have the text cover the entire picture much like the ones below.

Postcards:

It is very common for short independent films to make postcards instead of movie posters, this is because they may find it harder to make movie posters as it would cost more to print than a postcard. An advantage of making postcard instead is that they are cheaper and easy to leave at cinemas and film festivals.   As you can see a lot of these postcards follow the set conventions, however, they also have more freedom to break them. Unlike ‘Hollywood’ films, there are no restrictions on what you can do with a postcard (other than the size), so that the more you break bounders, the more interesting it will become.   

The back of the post cards are very simplistic, as seen in this example. They typically hold the title of the film, production notes such as director and cast, a place for a stamp and any company logos needed. There is also room for an address to be written in order for the postcard to be sent.

Underneath are three of my postcard designs. I have tried to stick with a simplistic design to stay true to the style of our film, and the black and white nature of the subject matter. This will also hopefully help to catch the audience’s eye, making the title clear and easy to notice.

This is the design that I have deiced to follow. I feel that is simple enough to easily catch the eye of my audience; however it holds enough ambiguity about it to create an enigma about the shadows.  I will also try and find a font that best matches my film when creating and editing my final piece.    

Influences on ‘Living with Ronnie’

At the start of the course, with one of our teaches,  we studied ‘French new wave’ in brief, looking at the work of Jean-Luc Godard in particular. This was a good starting place as it showed us a different take on film making, other than the typical Hollywood style of modern films, and emphasized the existents you can go to with a minimalistic budget. We learned that by using the camera in interesting ways and holding our shots a few seconds longer it can become a really interning way of film making.

We then moved on to look at other film makers that interested us. This included films about schizophrenia from film makers such as David Fincher, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Kelly and lastly David Lynch. Firstly looking at Fincher, we watched the legendary, ‘Fight Club’. This was an incredibly helpful film to watch when studying ideas on how to translate schizophrenia on to the screen. We kept returning to this film for inspiration, and this lead to us having a flash back scene at the end in order not to leave the audience in confusion, but to leave enough up to debate.

After this we looked at the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and psycho in particular. This once again showed us how to film schizophrenia, but in a totally different way. It showed us how to build suspense and the importance of a mysterious element. This re-enforced our understanding that when filming schizophrenia, we should leave the audience in confusion, until the end. We also looked at a few scenes from other Hitchcock films such as vertigo, and this gave us the idea to use a crash zoom or ‘Hitchcock zoom’.

One of the later films we watched was Richard Kelly’s ‘Donnie Darko’. This was a completely different take on schizophrenia and showed us the pain and suffering that the illness can have on the person. However this film also gave the condition a Sci-fi element that we didn’t necessarily want. The main thing we took from this film was the fact that Frank’s voice was in Donnie’s head, and how you could shoot this affectively.

Finally, we looked at David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. This helped us develop the style we wanted and lead us to put the film in black and white in the editing stage of the process. We loved the nightmarish feel the film had and felt in some ways we wanted to emulate that. This lead to use trying to leave corners of the room covered by shadows in cretin situations, creating a mysterious atmosphere.

     

Eraserhead Trailer:

           

Draft scripts and feedback

We originally showed our script to producer Becky Knapp (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1172489/) who likes the main premiums. However Becky went on to say that the ending didn’t do enough for her and that she was worried the audience would be left unsatisfied. Taking this into consideration, we took the script and wrote approximately two more pages in order to complete the story. Firstly we needed a bigger ‘trigger’ for the character of Edgar to realise that he was schizophrenic. We therefore wrote the confrontation scene and the flashbacks, not only in order to clear up any ambiguity, but to give the most realistic partial of the illness possible.

We also need to show more of an indicator that Edgar was schizophrenic. This was partly because of our talk with Becky, but also because a lot of the people who read our scrip were not picking up on the fact that Edgar was schizophrenic. Therefore we needed to make it slightly more obvious that Ronnie wasn’t real. This is where we felt the flash backs would come in handy, shooting these final scenes in colour, even if it is faded, would show the audience a final reality. However we still wanted to leave the film on a note of ambiguity, hence the crash zoom. The audience are hopefully left wondering if Edgar is going to get better f become more deluded with paranoia.

Upon showing our later drafted script to some of the same readers, they seemed much more understanding, and in turn seemed more interested in seeing a final product.