Magazine Cover - Finished Design

This is our finished magazine cover for Little White Lies magazine. We are very pleased with the final outcome and we feel that it conveys the emotion and drive of our appropriately.

We compared our cover with a past cover from one 'The master' which we researched when conducting our 'What is a Trailer' research. 

We asked potential audience members what they thought of the comparison and the accuracy of our cover. 

The response was very positive as most members said it effectively reflected the essence of the film whilst still keeping with in the Little White Lies illustration style.

Magazine Cover - Progess

From our sketches we liked 'two faced' the best as we feel that it best portrays the mood and synopsis of our film. We felt it was also suitable for Little White Lies as they have an abstract style for all their covers. 

Instead of taking a photo of Noah, we thought that it would be better to draw the idea. This would create an edgy illustration thus again fitting in with the style of Little White Lies. 

To start the making process, we scanned in the outline of the ideas sketch. Once we had it up photoshop, we realised that the scanner hadn't picked up all the sketchy strokes that we had drawn. So we decided to abandon this method and instead we took a photo of it. We had to draw it out again but this time onto tracing paper and then put it up next to a window to let the light shine through it in order for the flecs to come though. This method worked out very well as it transferred the image to computer exactly how we wanted it to. 

The reason why we wanted the flecks was because we thought it would create quite a cool natural effect when coming to colour in the image using the colour fill tool. 

Carrying on the making process, we wanted to get rid of the white background. This actually proved quite easy as we used the magic wand selection tool allowing us select areas of the background to then delete it using the backspace key. However there were some areas that were harder to erase as they weren't picked up by the magic wand tool. In order to get rid of these problem areas, we used the quick selection tool and targeted the problem areas. After this, we were left with an outline.

The next step was to colour up the image. We used colours that were quite subdued and 'moody' to again reflect the themes of our film. We did this using the paint bucket tool. 

Once the image was coloured up, we wanted to add the the 'Little White Lies' logo.

This was our finished magazine cover, however we wanted to experiment with the image a bit more with colour as we felt it lacked the usual vibrancy of a LWL cover e.g.: The Django Unchained issue. 

We decided to mock up different colourways just to see if it resemble a LWL cover even more.

                         

We examined our first draft to see if there was any room for improvement. We noticed that there were some vital details missing e.g.: The price, date , issue number and LWL's slogan: Truth & Movies. To add these vital details in, we had to select the text with in the LWL logo and nudge it down in order to make space. We then just simply added in the details using the font tool with similar fonts to the ones used on the actual magazine.

 This was the end result of all our hard work on Photoshop:

Magazine Cover - Ideas

These are a few sketches that we have done for our LWL cover. 

 Beau's sketch

 Ellie's sketch

Beau's Sketch

We have decided to go with the last sketch as we believe that it truly expresses the tone and emotion of our film. The others we feel are a little vague and lack expression of our concept. 

Magazine Cover - Research

There are quite a number of british film magazines and we have chosen to look at probably the three most famous ones; Empire, Little White Lies and Total Film.

Empire

Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media, it's first issue was published in July 1989 and it reviews both mainstream and art films but predominantly the former. Empire's magazine covers are very straightforward as they just use one photo from a film, that they are talking about in the issue, for the background of the magazine. As well as the main film that they are focusing on, the cover also displays photos from other films and text with different headlines. As our film isn't particularly mainstream, we feel that this magazine wouldn't be the best option for our film as they mainly target at big budget blockbusters.

Total Film

Total film is a UK-based film magazine published 13 times a year (every four weeks) by Future publishing. The magazine was launched in 1997 and offers cinema, DVD and Blu-ray news, reviews and features. Total Film is available both in print and interactive iPad editions. Like Empire, Total Film focus on big blockbusters such as Inception and The Amazing Spider-Man. We don't feel as if our film would be suitable for Total Films magazine as it wouldn't attract the correct audience for both the magazine and our film.

Little White Lies

Little White Lies is a bi-monthly, British independent movie magazine that features writing, illustration and photography related to cinema. For their covers, LWL mostly chose films that have/will win awards and merits not just because they are the most popular at the time. 

While Empire and Total film are very similar in terms of layout and style, Little White Lies has a completely different and more stylistic and simplistic effect. This is why we feel that LWL will be the most suitable for our film.  

Audience feedback on the Audio

The Editing Process - Sound

This is the speech that we have written to use as the voiceover for our trailer. It is supposed to be a doctor giving a diagnosis to Noah's mother about why he can no longer speak. We made sure to find a correct diagnosis and symptoms of selective mutism before writing the speech as we wanted it to be as naturalistic and believable as possible.

"Mrs Bloom, your son Noah has what is known as selective mutism. It is a childhood anxiety disorder where a child cannot speak in almost all social situations and often only in front of family members and close friends. However your son seems to have completely shut down. This is rare but has been linked to the result of some sort of psychological trauma. He may or my not speak again."

The first person we asked to record the voiceover was a drama teacher, Mr Beardsworth. Unfortunately we weren't able to use it due to the amount of background noise in the recording making it sound unprofessional and his voice was being drowned out. As well as this, there were several pauses when he was speaking and he accidentally fumbled a few words. Plus, through no fault of his, his accent didn't sound as professional as we would have liked because we needed someone quite posh to represent a doctor from London. Here is the first voiceover that we recorded but chose to not use.

We only realised that we needed to change this after very helpful audience feedback from people that we asked to listen to the first audio and give us constructive criticism on it. Nearly all of them told us that we needed to change it as they couldn't hear what he was saying clearly enough.

The second person we asked to record our voiceover was an english teacher, Mr Pickard. When reading through the script he sounded much more like a doctor and we liked the pace and rhythm he had whilst reading. As he is very well spoken it sounded a lot more like a doctor and we were very happy to use it for our voiceover. Here is the voiceover that we chose to use.



As well as the voiceover we also had music so therefore had to cut the voiceover and move parts of it around in order to adjust the sound levels for particular parts. When cutting the voiceover up we decided to overlap some of the audio as it not only made it run for a shorter amount of time but it got rid of the pauses and made the diagnosis clearer and more to the point. We also used an effect called 'telephone' which we added to the voiceover because it helped cancel out some of the background noise and gave the audio a sharper sound.

As you can see from this screenshot of the sound from our trailer we had to alter the levels of music and  use fades in order to put our voiceover in and be able to hear it. We were especially happy with our choice of song when doing this as the fades aren't obvious due to the repetition and echoes of lyrics which also helped with the timings as we could adjust and cut parts of the song to fit our trailer how we wanted it. This also made it a lot easier when ending the trailer as it could fade out without obviously missing out large parts of the song.

The Editing Process - Titles

For both our film title and coming soon title, we developed graphics on Photoshop for the best aesthetic effect. We did this by pixelating the words and duplicating it many times in different shades of grayscale.

We are very happy with the outcomes of the graphics as we feel it effectively reflects the tone and emotion of our trailer. 

From our research, we contracted that almost every professional trailer has a whole screen full of credit tags at the end. So in the spirit of being professional we intended to do the same. We did this by selecting the 'trailer' option in the titles sections of Final Cut Pro X. 

To edit the text, we opened it in Motion. After we did this we changed the background image to just a plain black screen. 

This is the end result of our end credits.

For our actor and director titles, we just used a standard white font as we didn't want to disorientate and distract the audience from our trailer.

For text transitions we used 'wipe', 'cross dislove' and 'simple'. We felt that these transitions were appropriate for our film as they were quite subtle yet affective in keeping with the feel of our trailer. 

The Editing Process - Shots

After filming it was time edit the shots that we had taken. Here are a few that we have selected that show the transformation from the original to the finished clip to be used in the trailer.

This clip is of a boring shot that we edited into a sequence of shots in order to make it more interesting.



One of our luckiest shots that we filmed was the tube entry shot. We thought it was one of the best shots that we captured. However, it was incredibly long so we had to alter the speed in order to include the whole of it.

Deciding on Music

James Blake is an English electronic music producer and singer-songwriter from London. We used one of his songs in our AS piece last year entitled limit to your love and we felt that it worked really well and fitted the mood and genre of our piece which was a psychological thriller. We chose to use a James Blake song again this year because while we are both familiar with his music and he is very successful, we know that his songs aren't particularly well known and are quite different.

When deciding on the song we narrowed it down between:

• I Never Learnt To Share

• Life Round Here

One particular aspect of these songs that we thought would really fit the mood of our trailer was that both songs aren't entirely made up of lyrics but also feature a lot of music and echoes. The repetition of lyrics in both songs fit the concept in our trailer as it also involves repetition of the tasks and places that Noah is visiting e.g. he travels a lot via trains and tubes as well as walking around alone. 

We chose to use the first song 'I Never Learnt to Share' because it conveyed a darker mood that we wanted to capture through the lower and quite slow beat. 

When reading the lyrics to the song we could see reflections and similarities to our themes of isolation and silence which are very relevant to our trailer. Although these lyrics are about people not talking to one person and ours differs in the way of the singular person won't talk to anyone we still feel that the key ideas are shown. For example, the lyrics "But I don't blame them" can express how our character Noah blames himself for not telling anyone about what he witnessed, resulting in his silence, and the repetition of the word speak throughout the song emphasises to the audience his inability to speak.