Our Trailer and Ancillary Texts

MUTE Trailer

MUTE Poster


 

Little White Lies Magazine Cover: The MUTE Issue

Evaluation - Question 4

Evaluation - Question 3

Evaluation - Question 2

Evaluation - Question 1

Trailer - Finished

This is our finished trailer for 'MUTE'. We are really happy with all the aspects of it particularly the editing and sound. We were also very impressed with both of our actors performances as we feel that our trailer is believable and portrays the concept and mood that we were trying to get across to the audience.

Poster - Finished

This is our finished Poster:

Many of the posters that we looked at for research had lots of minuscule credit tags such as the 'Identity' and 'Thank You For Smoking' poster:

                                             

We did decided to include features like this but only to a certain extent as we felt that it may have taken away the minimalistic approach we were going for in order to entice the audience as oppose to drown them in production and distribution information.

Poster - Photoshop Development

We decided to go with this image as we thought it was the most communicative an digestible for the audience.

Here's a sketch of our proposed poster.

To start off the photoshop development, we unlocked and renamed the layer as 'Base Image' in order to not confuse it with other layers. And to also have a 'start fresh' point if anything went wrong during the editing process.

Next, the crop tool was used to make the image portrait. The reasoning behind this was that most posters we looked at in our research were portrait unless the film was mainstream produced by a conglomerate and was to be posted on billboards.

In order to make the focal feature of the poster (Noah) more prominent, we roughly lassoed around him and copy and pasted it to a new layer. We then subtly increased the contrast, the sharpness and then used the blur tool around the lasso line in order for it to make a smooth transition into the background.

The next step was to alter the image qualities. We first experimented with the contrast. This gave the image more depth allowing the two movements to become more explicit.

Next we made some colour variations using the colour balance tool. The one that we liked the best was the teal coloured image just above. We thought it looked the most professional subdued colours matching the tone of our film.

With the base of our image done, we then moved on to creating and introducing the graphics such as; the mute icon, film title, the tag line, the release date and a few credit tags.

The first was the mute icon. We sourced this icon off Google Images and imported it into our poster. Surprisingly, the image scale was almost perfect, to improve it we used to transform scale option from the 'Edit' dropdown menu.  We positioned just lower of the chin allowing Noah to still be the focal point of the poster.

We also added the release date to the bottom of the poster as it's a vital element to be included in all successful film posters. We chose to use a pixelated font to match the pixelated mute icon. We got this font off of a font sharing website and saved it as a picture to edit in Photoshop as it didn't come in white which id the desired colour. We altered the colour by selecting the font within the image and using the invert colour tool changed the text colour to white. The same effect could have been achieved with the paintbucket tool. We did the same with the film title and the tag line. 

 The original font.

 The selected font prior using the 'invert' tool.

After the colour alterations were finished, we used the 'copy and paste' tools to transfer them onto to poster image.

When transferring the text over to the image, we really started to see how blue the image was. It started to look like an Instagram filter, which is not at all professional. To change this, we altered the vibrancy, the hue and the lightness of the image. This gave the image a more predominate forrest green tint. 

However, Noah's face still looked a little washed out. We then selected the layer just including the Noah, excluding the background, and further increase the vibrancy and saturation. This gave Noah's face more of a human colour.

The next step was to add the credit tags. In our research we noticed that the credit tags within a film poster are often in a slim, narrow font differing rom the rest of the text. We searched on the font sharing website we used previously and found a suitable candidate. 

We used the same method as we did before with the film title, however we didn't invert the colour this time as we were placing it at the top of the poster where black would stand out more. 

We also wanted to add our prestigious 'Palme D'or' award to the poster. We did this by finding the logo on Google Images. Unfortunately we couldn't find a PNG file so we had to use a JPEG instead and just got rid of the white background. As we did with all the other elements, we copied and pasted it to the poster image, re-sized and positioned it.

We had now finished our poster:

We are very pleased with the final outcome as we feel that it effectively communicates the tone and the emotion of our trailer. 

Poster - Before Photoshop

Today we went out to shoot our poster. All of the shots have been taken with a Nikon D40x. Throughout the shooting session we kept the camera on shutter priority mode to allow us the alter the shutter speed to achieve the movement trace effect. We kept experimenting with different speeds to achieve a wide range of tracing and blurs. This also involved Harry a.k.a Noah endlessly making movements in order for the camera to trace his movement and translate it into a stylistic photo smudge. 

Here are just some of the numerous shots that we captured.

On location shooting for the poster.

This is one of our favourite shots. Using a relatively low shutter speed, it was enough to trace the image yet still vaguely focus on the moving object, hence why you can see both Noah's two positions within the image.

These two images didn't turn out as well as some of the others did. This is because we used an extremely low shutter speed and we must have jolted the camera slightly. Thus why the backgrounds are totally blurred along with Noah's movement.

We still think that these images are cool and very creative. However we don't feel that they are as clear in terms of communicating with the audience.

This image is again one of our favourites from the shoot as it was the most successful in terms of blur movement tracing. The consequence of Noah shifting his head from side to side quite quickly again on a very low shutter speed blurs the focus of his face giving the effect of no facial features which is quite abstract. The out of focus stillness of the woods in the background gives the effect that Noah's face is like this in still everyday life.

We decided to shoot at dusk. At this time the lighting was perfect for the mood of our poster. Shooting in the woods was very important because we felt it was the best location to portray the sense of isolation. Another favourite shot of the session was the last image, as it was the most successful movement trace photo. We will be taking a couple photos forward for photoshop development and then deciding what one one to use as the official 'MUTE' poster. 

Poster - Our Minimalistic Poster

This is a rough copy of a minimalistic poster that we made that we would have released after the film was made and people knew the storyline and could therefore understand the concept. 

To make this poster we used photoshop and images from google of silhouettes of footprints and headphones. The idea is to show that he is very isolated and alone as he is the only one at the platform which is shown by the yellow line reading 'MIND THE GAP' which is a clear sign of what it is. The cross represents the silence that Noah displays as it is where his mouth would be.

Poster - Initial Ideas and Influences

In order to do research for our film poster we looked at several films in the same genre such as drama/thrillers and psychological films. Because although our film is a psychological drama with elements of thriller we didn't want a poster that was too scary or gave off an impression of a different genre. We also wanted to see similar posters that just had one characters face or the character with a very plain background.

One idea we have is to feature Noah alone on the poster and cover his mouth somehow to symbolise his silence and inability to speak. We would either do this with some form of material over his mouth or maybe using photoshop get rid of his mouth. Here are some of our influences:

Silence of the Lambs is such an iconic film as is the poster made for the film. Although we were thinking of possibly having a photo of our main protagonist, Noah, with his mouth covered by something, we feel that we would need to use lighting and photoshop very carefully as we don't want to make it look too scary like these two posters.

Silent Hill is also a horror film which you can see from the poster due to the photo and also the font used for the title. Although we think this looks very effective as they have completely gotten rid of the mouth of the little girl rather than covering it with an object or a piece of material. They have also used an effect to make the girl's face appear as though it has been cracked which again gives away the genre of the film, horror.

Another problem we faced when deciding on initial designs for our poster was that we were unsure of whether to create a poster featuring a photograph or whether to have an iconic symbol showing themes of the film rather than any characters. Examples of this are:

We really liked all of these posters because they are very minimalistic but effective in showing the genre of the film without revealing the plot or any of the characters.

After seeing these posters, we decided to search for other minimalistic posters and found a large collection of them that people have made for several famous films. These were never official posters for the films as many of them only display a logo or image relating to the film, however we think that they look very stylistic and unique. Here are some of the ones that we thought were very clever and particularly liked.

Although we thought these minimalistic posters were very different and edgy we did decide that they only really worked because the films are already very well known and have distinctive concepts. For example when looking at the breakfast club poster, shown above, to someone who has seen the film it is an extremely clever representation of what the film is about. However for audiences that are not familiar with the film or the storyline it may come across as confusing and there could be misinterpretation of what the poster is showing.

As a result of our research and planning for our poster we decided on a more naturalistic approach and chose to use photography and photoshop to make it.