Poster edit - Final draft of poster

Using the conventions I found in my research of romance drama genre posters I put together this first edit of a poster, also using short film conventions by including the film festival selection logo.

Focus group:

"I think it looks really cool. It's simplistic and eye catching and gives pretty much all the information one might need. The only thing I'd say is either move the small writing and release date to the other side of that leaf (bottom left hand corner) or get rid of the left section of leaf because it just looks a bit odd. Also I like the tagline but maybe it would look better centralised"

Taking on the feedback I received, I made my second edit:

I would also add the certification of the film to the bottom corner of the poster, PG. So that the audience  will know if the film is suitable or not and to give them a better idea of the context addressed in the film.
The comma should be a semi colon, people... or people - they change. This should also be in quotation marks.

Final Poster:

I changed the font of the title to Xlegcal SC because I think it looks more professional and mature, so its aimed at the right audience. I also changed the other text to Arial Narrow for the same reasons.
I used the feedback by centralising the tagline, making the date bigger, cropping the side so there is less empty space, and making all the information the red colour and overall I think it looks much more appealing.

I chose to use a very limited colour palette; red, off white, green, and black (shadows), because it givs the poster a simplicity and also conveys the important information of the film very clearly which is the foremost thing a good poster should do. I chose these colours because of the connotations they will propose to the audience:
Red - passion, desire and love
Green - growth, safety, stability (because its a dead leaf it juxtaposes these meanings), greed, jealousy
White - goodness, innocence, purity, perfection (similarly to the dead leaf, these meanings are dirtied because it is off-white)
Black - death, evil, mystery, grief, negativity, fear and the unknown (also it does give an elegance to the poster so its better to look at, but not as a connotation)


Evaluation of poster:

I have used two different fonts in my poster, Xlegcal SC and Ariel Narrow. I chose Xlegcal SC because I wanted to use a handwriting font, this is a convention within the romance genre, also love letters and 'Dear John' letters are usually represented in film as handwritten. This particular handwriting font looks much more mature and professional, and I think it attracts the audience I am aiming it at. I also used Arial Narrow as it is a better font to communicate information, because it is easier to read at a glance. Also people are more familiar with it and that familiarity allows me to make them feel more comfortable when viewing the poster so they should look at it for longer, rather than feeling challenged by it.
There are multiple ways to address your audience using your poster. The audience is addressed via the text and title but also by the image. I think my text and my image reflect each other by using similar colours. 

I followed some conventions of a poster in the romance genre, but I also adjusted and subverted certain conventions. Through my research I found that using the colour red and having a white background are conventions because of the connotations that the colours hold, so I used white background and a lot of red in my poster for the same reason. Another convention that I adhered to was having the tagline at the top and the release date at the bottom, I did however adjust these slightly by having the font the same colour as the title and not black. I also stuck to the convention of having the credits in black at the bottom, and also showing the two names of the main actors although I chose to put them below the title instead of above for aesthetic purposes. I convention I challenged was having up to two characters shown on the poster, I chose to not use any because I think the red rose better represents my film and it also stays within a strict colour scheme. Using the two characters would give the audience more idea of the concept of the film although I chose not to use this because I wanted not corner my piece by using two white teen characters and not showing any other representations of class, ethnicity and age. By not using a model for my poster I have tried to eliminate any representational issues and aspects.

I chose for the title and the release date to be the largest font size, as these are most paramount for the audience in finding my film and therefore for me to sell it.


This is the original image. To make the image look balanced and more aesthetically pleasing I thought it better to crop it because there was too much white space around the image which I couldn't fill with information otherwise it could become too crowded. I also manipulated the image by increasing brightness, the contrast and the saturation of the photo.




The words I used on my poster I think are appropriate to the genre and the age of the audience I am aiming it at, because they address something that can be empathized with, that might even be relatable with an audience member. My choice of words reflects common conventions within the romance genre and this similarity that the audience have with this will allow my film easily place itself in a member interest in watching it.

Inspiration for my poster came from the research I did of real media romance genre film posters. This payed off because it showed me that simplicity for a poster representing a relationship is key. I think this is due to the public wanting an ideal relationship/breakup to idolise, showing that there are no complications and messiness. This permitted me to think about how it addressed the audience and to ease across the important information about the film.

On reflection I think the weakest part of this piece of work is the release date and the credit block at the bottom of the poster. This is because it looks awkward and not properly laid out, and therefore not as professional as possible.

These images, I think, are original within the genre conventions. As although a red rose is a convention of the representation of romance, it is not so commonly used as the main feature on a poster for a film. Because I chose to use a red rose, it makes the topic of the film clearly the core area of the piece. Also, because I have kept it simple, I have avoided any visual or textual clutter on the poster.

Second cut

For my second cut I tried sticking exactly to my storyboard to see how it looked:

I noticed that the dialogue does not fit as well and so does not reflect the shots that are being shown on the screen. This was also pointed out by my focus group, so I shall remedy this for my final cut.

Poster research

 My film fits into the romance-drama genre, so I looked at poster for films also within this genre:

• red writing for title
• white background 
• up to two characters shown
• two names of main actors just above title
• tagline at bottom or top, black writing 
• credits at bottom, black writing 
• release date at bottom centre, in bold

It Ended Poster Photo shoot

I decide to use a dried red rose for my poster as I think it represents the relationship and sums up my short film because a red rose is often given on valentines day to the person you love but a dried dead one is a metaphor for the relationship being dried up and dead.
In my photoshoot I experimented with lighting to change the atmosphere of the photos and to give different emotions to the viewer like sadness, sympathy and bitterness.
By trying different positioning of the rose within the frame I thought about the use of the rule of thirds and I looked forward to where I will place the title and any other information that would be needed on a poster.

Photoshoot:

These are my favourites because they have the best positioning within the frame to become a poster:

I chose this one:

Because the focus on the petals is good, there is a balanced amount of leaf stem and flower, and also there is a good amount of space around the rose for the information of the film.

First edit:

First of all I cropped it so that the rose is more on the righthand side of the frame so that there isn't empty space on the side of the poster. I then decreased the exposure and increased the contrast and the saturation of the photo, I did this to make the reds and greens much bolder to grab the viewers attention. Although I like the bold colours I think I will decrease the contrast as i have lost the depth in the photo and the velvetiness of the flower which could represent the different textures and layers to the relationship. I also tinted the photo bluey-purple to give it a colder feeling to reflect the melancholy emotions in my film.
For the title of my film I used the font 'Handwriting - Dakota', I think this is an appropriate font as it is a convention of the romance and relationship film genres because it looks like a love letter or a 'dear john' letter which are traditionally represented as handwritten.

Other edits:

I tried a combination of different things to give different effects to the viewer. To find out what people thought of my combinations I showed them to a focus group. Summed up, this is what they said:

1. Not to keen on the background in contrast to the flower, it isn't appealing to the eye and so you don't really want to keep looking at it to find out what the films about.
2. The sepia colours are good here as it gives it an aged, worn out, look which could reflect the relationship. But it doesn't really scream 'break up movie'.
3. The contrast between the background and the flower is nice.
4. The greyness of this one remind you of dead things and corpses, because of how dead things lose colour. It could be interpreted as the lack of colour represents the death of the relationship.
5. The contrast is a little too strong, the white is too clean. This doesn't represent the film well as because its about a break up and they tend to be messy, so the poster doesn't really seem to be about a break up.
6. Similarly to 1 the background and the overall photo just looks grey.
7. Although the orangey sepia is good, it looks too bright for a poster for a film about a break up.
8. Quite nice, the blueish white background is cool as it gives the image a cold look.
9. Just too grey like 1 and 6.
10. Too bright on the flower, not so appealing to the viewer.
11. The black and white is cool, this is interesting because black isn't always a nice colour so it could be uncomfortable like breaking up from a relationship. Also, because black is used for funerals and for death, it represents a death of a relationship.
12. (the original, although my focus group were not aware of this) Again, like 1, 6 and 9, its too grey and boring, there is nothing interesting to look at.

Further suggestions and improvements:

• You could try layering another image on top, but lowering the opacity like a ghost effect. 
• You could put one of the characters faces on the poster as well.
• Explore layering different colours of top for there colour connotations.

The two favourites voted by my focus group were 3 and 4. I am going to use 3 as it is much more attention grabbing than 4, and this is the most important thing a poster must do to promote the film.

Title and Credits

I decided to put my title at the end of my film because it shows that its the end of not just the film but of the relationship between the two characters.
It is also the first words you hear spoken in the dialogue.

When I showed my first cut to my focus group the suggestion was made that I combine my credits and my last shot of the car:

I decided to do this as I have enough black space around the car for the credits to be clear and it will showcase more of my skills.

Camera Shots

To show that there are two opposing characters when shooting I tried to, as much as I could, keep the right side of the frame for the male character and the left side for the female.

I did this because I wanted to show my characters as two side of the same coin, so you can see that there was once something there between them, but because even though they have left space in the frame for the other character they are never in the same shot together showing that they are now separated and it hasn't been that long because they are still experiencing the repercussions of the ending of the relationship. This shot shows the use of the rule of thirds:

The theory is that if you place points of interest in the intersections or along the lines that your photo or shot becomes more balanced and will enable the viewer of the image to interact with it more naturally. Studies have shown that when viewing images that people’s eyes usually go to one of the intersection points most naturally rather than the centre of the shot – using the rule of thirds works with this natural way of viewing an image rather than working against it. 

In the dialogue there is the line "She had these blue flowery curtains." so along the lines I have placed the curtains to show a correlation between the shot and the dialogue, this allows the audience to make the connection between the characters on the screen and the ones they can hear.
I have also filled every third with a different mise en scene to give the viewer a variety of things to look at in the shot.

It Ended - First Cut

I have done a rough first cut to look at timings on my dialogue and to compare this to how i originally planned it in my storyboard.

I showed it to my focus group and they gave me some suggestions to improve my film:

• I should break the longer shots at the start to keep it in time with the dialogue 
• Show another space, or something they shared, to reflect their shared traits like the fact that they both have messy rooms - so this could be a third messy room where they used to live together or a messy car that was shared between them
• Its good that I have 'families' of shots, for example the shots of the characters themselves. But I could add another family, of their past and the remiments of their good times like tickets, birthday cards, valentines day cards, text messages or a crumpled note.
• At the end of my film I could try fading out the 'It' and 'ed.' of 'It Ended.' to leave 'End' to further accentuate the end of the film and of the relationship.
• Lastly, I could also integrate my credits into the last car shot as there is enough black space around the car.

Shooting Location

I will need to use a few locations in my short film to represent different things.
The main two representations are the females house and the males house, I want these to contrast.
So I am setting the males house in a more rural area:

And the females house in a town:

Another contrast I have used is the colours in their bedrooms, but keeping a similarity of a messy trait in the characters to show that they once were connected:
Males room:

Females room:

When I showed my location pictures to a focus group, somebody in the group mentioned that the bedrooms reminded them of an artist called Tracy Emin who created a piece called "My Bed", where she exposed her emotions about herself and her life through the 'mess' around the bed. I think I have done this with my shots by using the busy mise en scene to represent my characters.

Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer and establish an intimacy with them, she has used an empty Vodka bottle, cigarette butts and stained sheets to show her own bed in all its "embarrassing glory". By using her own bed as art Emin is sharing her personal space, representing herself as as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.

Audience Research and Feedback

Research
Short film’s industry’s audience is quite specific compared to a feature films audience. The main groups of people who will view my short film are people already involved in the film industry, such as film enthusiasts, film critics, directors and producers. Short films are often used as a means to show ideas for feature films or for producers or directors to show their talent and to have the short film noticed and their skills recognised. For these reasons people with film industry experience are an ideal target audience as they are most likely to visit short film networks hoping to find raw talent or inspiration.Whilst is it may seem that targeting film enthusiast would be best, I would like my film to not have such an enclosed target audience and be able to reach other audience so they can watch my film for enjoyment and maybe also take something away from it. The easiest audience to affect and give something good which they can take into their everyday life is children below the age of 17. There are many fcators and scenarios which can be used to relate to them, the one which I have chosen is bullying. It is for this reason that this is my chosen target audience. Additionally since my characters are within this age range it would make sense for the target audience to be similar making it more relatable.As most short film are viewed online on websites such as futureshorts.com or youtube or at festivals and not with feature mainstream films in cinemas, it means that I am creating something that will fit into these websites and festivals as well as for viewing by a wider audience.I made a questionnaire to find out what the public think of short films and what contact they have with them and to find any other conventions associated to short film drama genre. This will help me make my film more accessible to more people whilst still hitting my target audience. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Q8HMVD7

Feedback
There are a few ways to measure the success of my film on its target audience, before I decide on my final cut I could get feedback on my first edit so I can improve to the audience requirements. After I've made my final cut I could then upload the video to YouTube and check for updates through the form of feedback comments from the public, also sending the link in an email to my friends and family for their opinions. Alternatively I could set up a film showing in our own time to invite students from all over the school. They could watch the film and I could give them a questionnaire to fill out with honest opinions afterwards. With recorded results the feedback would be easy to evaluate.

Genre Theory

Script for video post:

Carolyn Miller, 1984 - " the number of genres in any society depends on the complexity and the diversity of any society"

The term genre is French for 'kind' or 'class'. I think the genres that my film fits into are relationship drama, existential drama and docu- drama, it is also a romance although because its about a breakup it is challenging the traditional ideologies. 

Themes don't really help to focus what genre something is: David Bordwell, 1989 - "any theme may appear in any genre". The themes that are prominent in my piece are relationships, life events and human triumph. 

Bordwell's listed categories that become genres. Ones that apply to my film are period, style, narrative, purpose, audience and subject and theme.  

Robert Stam 11 years later made another list, some if these also apply to mine which are story content, budget bases and artistic status. Stam said that genres are no different from other sorts of groupings. 

Stam also stated that there was a problem with generic labels - "subject matter is the weakest criterion of generic grouping because it fails to account how the subject is treated." My piece may have monolithic definitions as it fits into many genre categories. 

In 1985, Andrew Tudor wrote about the empiricist dilemma. This is where you may try to define a genre using a body of text, but won't be able to identify the texts without a definition for the genre. This is a continuous circle like the analogy of chicken and the egg. 

The way genres are combined tells you the genre of the film. So because two of my themes are relationship and life events this tells me that my film fits into the Drama genre. 

Steve Neale - "genre are instances of repetition and difference". The repetition in the drama genre that I have used is having spoken words over the top of the shots e.g. The Lovely Bones. The difference is that the shots are continuously changing to things that are not noticeably to do with the dialogue. 

Tzvetan Todorov, 1985 - "any instances of genre will be necessarily different". So every film will approach a genre differently. 

Films have family resemblance based on similarities between texts in a genre. For example editing, music, parodies and pastiches, directors and actors.
It is also argued that there is a hierarchy of genres, for example news programmes could be considered higher up the hierarchy because they have greater influence over the media's definition of reality. Whereas Soaps could be considered lower down the scale as their purpose is entertainment of an audience. Films with anecdotes claim themselves to be higher up, as even after they have finished leave you with something more to take away.
Andrew Tudor showed how a sub-genre could be created. Tudor said that innovation within a genre leaded to differences which make it become a mould-breaker, this then creates the sub-genre for the text within its genre. Innovation and therefore differences in my piece are the dialogue of narration of a break up over the continuously changing shots, this creates its individual sub-genre of narrated-romance-drama.