REVIEW: Editing final product

For the final product we had to chose the picture and layout we wanted, then put them all together. This was to make the poster complete so then we could start editing it and developing it into a professional film review. Editing the final product ment after trying out different pictures and layouts we chose our favouirite and put it in to place which left us with a successful review page and a product we were pleased with.




This was our final complete version of our magazine film review.

REVIEW: Drafting layout

We had to make our layout as convincing as possible to be a real magazine article. This meant using an appropriate layout, and colour scheme to suit our film and also to look like a proper magazine review.



This was our first magazine review we completed. We wanted to use a colour that would be suitable for boys and girls so both genders could relte to our film. Howver we discovered this looked very boring and dull, and decided we should use a red as this symbolises the feelings and emotions in the film and is also a neutral colour for boys and girls.

The font we used was broadway. We used this for the title only as we wanted to try grab the readers attention. Howver we decided to use the same font as the text as this looked more professional.

The image was a suitable image, however, the mis-en-scene draw the attention away from the character Vickey's face and the character wasnt centered properly in the frame meaning the spacing wasnt used afficiently. We learnt to used a sceen shot of Vickey from the film which was centered correctly and had nothing in the back ground to draw the attention from her face. This shows the audience who the film is about.

We had a pull quote placed at the end of the review. We decided for our next draft to move this to the middle of our review as we thought this would be important for the audience to read.

REVIEW: Choosing most appropriate images from film

When it came to the film review we had to pick an image that was suitable for the film and aimed towards the correct audience, yet we didn't want the picture to give away to much information about the film. This image is quite important as it is with the review so it has to suitable for what the review suggests about the film and the picture could possibly give the wrong impression of the review if not chosen carefully.



This first image shows the character to be a young girl with a pink setting, aiming the film towards the correct audience. However, the expression on the characters face, showing she looks confused and venerable is giving to much away as we could tell from this picture that the character is going to have problems in the film and shows that she isn’t happy.



This second image is very much like the film poster, which is the character looking into the mirror. Again her expression looks venerable. Having the review mention that the ending is shocking as she is getting ready for a night she will always remember, we didn’t want the picture to show sadness or happiness as this will let the readers know straight away that something bad may happen, or if happy that the night all goes well. We wanted the reader to be curious about the film and what events the film may have in store.



We chose this picture for our magazine review as Vicky is not giving any definite expression. She doesn’t look happy or sad yet from the pink setting and the young female character with a full face of make-up, we can still sell our film to young females.

REVIEW: Drafting text

PLOT: A young teenage girl is getting ready for a night that we think will be a fun night out. However, at the end we find a twist that she is not going where we think she is.

WHATS GOOD ABOUT IT: The emotion is shown very well and it has a real eye opener at the end. It makes you think of other aspects of teenager’s life instead of it being all fun and games. It gives a lot of insight into the quiet teen’s life.

This was the first draft to our magazine review, but however this was far to short. This short bit of text was not going to sell our film to an audience and would not carry the right information that a normal review would hold. We decided we had to develop this review and make it longer making it more convincing to be a real magazine review. This then sold our film more and gave the audience a better understanding of our film.

REVIEW: Analysing design & language conventions of magazine reviews

I looked at a review from the magazine Subshot. This wasn't a film magazine but i wanted to get a wider variety of ideas of a magazine review. By looking at other types of magazines, it gave me a wider variety of inspiration. By looking into other types of magazine reviews and other types on magazines, it made me realise what the conventions of a magazine review, and just reviews are. I knew it wasn't necessary to have a snap shot of the film in the review but I knew you had to have a film related picture on the review.

REVIEW: Researching different film magazine audiences

Researching into different magazine audiences helped us as to what magazine our film review would be most suited and also to what the layout and colour schemes would be.

For example: For a thriller we gathered we would be using dark colours to suit the film and a chick flick would be pinks and reds to show the feminine aspects. Also a chick flick would be suite to magazines such as Bliss and Reveal as these are women's fashion magazines.

POSTER: drafting/editing

This was our first attempt to making our film poster and discovered it could be improved a lot. The image was originally quite dark so we had it lighten it and we used the same font throughout the poster. This caused it to look quite boring, and we also noticed there was a bottle in the right hand corner which was not supposed to be there.


This was the second draft of our film poster, and we decided to use a different image to show her emotions a bit better, and also using different fonts to make it less boring and not all on one level. We used mis-en-scene by adding a photo in a picture frame in the corner of the poster to show the contrast between the emotions on Vicky's face and the emotions in the picture as she looks very happy in the picture and not so happy in the large image.


We decided to go back to original image but edited it a little to make the contrast of the colours more appealing. However this poster still didn't meet the expectation we was aiming towards.


This is the last film poster we completed and this happened to be the one we decided to use as our final film poster. We liked this image as it showed a little emotion yet not to much as she looks in a way happy yet her head is down showing she may be embarrassed or sad, and maybe trying to hide her emotions. This related a lot to our film, and also we used mis-en-scene and added a glass of wine to the picture. This glass of wine represents a girls night out and having fun yet also portrays maybe she is depressed and wanting to drink her troubles away.

POSTER: Exploring fonts

We chose century gothic as the font for our title as we thought it looked most professional. We had to decide whether we was having it in one line or two and how the text would be placed, whether to have one colour text or two colours and also whether to capitalize all the text or not or have it italic, plain or bold. We found that two different colours looked more interesting and having it in two lines also was more clear and separated the title to the tag line in italic. We did this to show to contrast between the two and the meaning of the tag line to show there is more to come.

POSTER: Setting up mise en scene

The mis-en-scene in our poster was aimed to be as little background props as possible as we wanted to have the main focus on Vicky’s face. We wanted to use a medium shot of her face so we used a reflection on the mirror as this has two meanings. One meaning is the girl looking into the mirror as one person, being sad and unhappy with her life, and then we have the reflective image. This image looks kind of confused but yet as if she’s trying to look happy. This reflection is what the character Vicky wants her reflection to look like. We also see a glass of wine. We put this in the middle of the image as although its small and not the main focus but it shows a sense of feminism and good time. However, the wine also symbolises Vicky wanting to drink her time away as she is depressed and unhappy. Finally, the bedroom door is closed in the background. This door being closed behind her is representing her being closed away from the rest of the world, and that she is keeping herself to herself and not interferes with the rest of the world.

POSTER: Sketching possible images/fonts

We made a rough sketch as to what our poster could possibly look like. This gave us the opportunity as to whether this idea was going to work or not. After several attempts we came up with our idea and what we think will pull the audience in the most by just seeing the poster and hopefully pulling in the correct target audience.

POSTER: Pitching ideas for poster

Pitching ideas for our poster meant finding various pictures related to our film and seeing which worked best. Also we had to find the best layout and design to suit our target audience as the poster being unattractive or being dull could not be attractive at all or could possibly be attractive to the wrong audience.

POSTER: Analysing conventions of film posters

Beginning to create a film poster for our film meant looking into other film posters and analysing them so we had a clear view of what conventions a film poster will contain and also what will make our film poster most affective to the target audience.

These are a few of the film posers we looked at and these were also poster made by students. These were of different genres which helped us to understand the certain images, colour schemes and even text fonts to include in our magazine as ours is directed at young females.

FILM: Shooting schedule

To organise ourselves properly we made a filming schedule as to when we would be filming. We made a table of days and times we were to film so we were all available to take part in the filming process as a team. This was very useful to us as there ended up with no confusions or complications, helping us to manage to film the whole film within less days than we expected.

Filming Schedule



Thursday 22nd October 2009
Lesson 3 & 4
Laura Amie Rosie Luke
Planning the schedule for filming



Monday 26th October 2009
11am-5pm
Actors: Victoria Hatton
Rosie Amie Laura and Luke
Location: Rosie’s house



Wednesday 28th October 2009
3-5pm
Actors: Victoria Hatton
Rosie Laura Amie & Luke
Location: Rosie’s house
Notes: Re-filming scenes



Thursday 29th October 2009
6-7pm
Actors: Victoria Hatton
Amie Laura Rosie and Luke
Taking pictures for the film poster



Monday 2nd November 2009
3pm
Actors: Victoria Hatton
Laura Amie Luke and Rosie
Taking the establishing shot and re taking a picture for poster

FILM: Organising locations, actors, etc

We came to the stage where we were ready and knew exactly what we was going to film and the ideal setting we had in mind and planned in our script and story board. So the last step was for us to find a location that was always available to us and a young female who was willing to take part and play the character of Vicky.

We decided to use Vicky Hatton and use Rosie Hatton’s house as this had an everyday house hold environment and completed the perfect setting required for our film.



Vicky was available the majority of the time which made this helpful in case of re-filming we could give short notice and begin the re-filming as soon as possible. The location also was very available to us leaving it up to us from this stage as to when we will film, what day’s times and was our responsibility to get ourselves organised and prepared to begin the filming.

FILM: Storyboarding

We created a storyboard to plan out what we had to film and the order in which our scenes would be in. This helped us when we began our filming as we knew when and where we were filming and exactly how our story was going to run. This made the filming process a lot easier and quicker.

FILM: Scripting

We came up with our idea and how our story would run. We had to write it as a script so we knew just how our story was going to go and what will be happening in each scene. We had no dialogue in our film so the script was just screen directions. It wasn’t until we was scripting our film that we came up with the ideas we used in our film as the more we was adding to the film the more the film made sense. Our script was then complete giving us a clear idea as to what our film was about and how the character was going to be presented in the way we originally decided.



As you can see, the script was clearly laid out and easy to follow and made this easier for us when it came to planning the story boards.

FILM: Developing a pitch

Developing the pitch was the part when we actually began deciding what our film was going to be about and how to the story was going to be structured. We had to have a beginning, middle and end within five minutes so we could only have one story line. This made it easier as we could focus on the one idea and adjust it to create the clearest yet most interesting story we could.

We began to pitch our ideas. A few examples of the ideas we came up with were:
- A girl being stood up at a cinema,
- The story of a play ground of young teens,
- A girl getting ready
- Lost in the woods
- Abandend house
- A girl wanting to be famous

We decided amongst our group to do the story of the girl getting ready. We decided what our character would look like and how we would present her in the film to direct her to our target audience making our film successful. We also had to think of the characters interest and hobbies, because although this information would not be shown in a five minute film, yet it has some kind of impact on how she will be represented.




We then had to arrange the plot, knowing what our film was about and how our character would be represented, the next step was to plot the story so we could have more of an idea as to what our film will be aiming towards to lok like as a film.

FILM: Research into the target audience

The target audience to any type of film is important as not all films appeal to everyone. The characters and story line has a big impact to who the film may be directed to. We decided to aim our short film to young females aged 14-18. After choosing our audience we then had to look into what kind of hobbies these people have and what will interest them. We had to look into what types of magazine they would read and where would be the places they are most likely to visit as to advertise our film we wouldn’t want to advertise a poster at a football ground as this will not be reached by young female girls interested in music, parties, make-up and girlie clothes, which was our target audience.

FILM: Researching other short films

FILM: Researching other short films
When beginning our media coursework to create a short film we had to do research into other short films as to find an idea and also how a short film is structured. We looked at several films made by other media students, how ever our film was to be based on realism and be in a sense, realistic.

A few examples of some of the shorts films I watch were:







These films are all made by students and are short films, some are better than others and the conventions are used very cleverly. This research gave us an idea of what conventions we should be using and how to use these effectively.