How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

What was the intended outcome of the production?

The intended outcome of our production was to produce comedy for a young audience. We wanted it to contain numerous one liners and moments that would amuse an audience aged from 16-24 years old.Much like the Scary movie franchise, also distributed by Dimension Films, is based on many other films and references lots of different well known films. This have spanned lots more films of this sort such as Date movie and Superhero movie.

We intended our film to be a somewhat spoof of the many other vampire films that have been introduced into the film industry recently. The biggest one is ‘Twilight’ which is now one of the most popular movie series ever created.We moulded our main character of Steve the Vampire on Twilights main male character ‘Edward Cullen’.We mirrored scenes from the movie in our production such as the one when Edward is perched in a tree.

Edward Cullen

Steve the Vampire

We particularly looked at the hit parody ‘Vampires Suck’ for some inspiration into what spoofs are like especially when mixed with the vampire/ supernatural genre .This particular movie was based entirely around ‘Twilight’. The majority of the characters are the same and the main parts in the script are the same. There are just extra twists in the plotline which is what makes the movie so comedic. In particular there are many references to other Movie and programmes such as ‘The Jersey Shore’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’.We also looked at many other Vampire films and television programmes such as...

How effectively were storyboards and ancillary task plans followed?

Storyboards- For the storyboards we used the shot list and did a drawing for every shot so we could get a rough idea of what our actual film would look like. When we were doing our filming we used the storyboards for help, and referred to them numerous times to make sure we didn’t miss any shots. They were very helpful in the end and we could see why they are used in real filming.

Gaby drew our storyboards with simple black pen and went over some bits in marker. We also wrote extra annotations on the back to remind us of particular ideas when we were filming. We didn’t include an awful lot of detail in our storyboards for the simple reason that we wanted to them to act as a template for a film not a guide to follow religiously. We found that some of our best shots were produced due to improvisation or an idea on the spot.

Ancillary Tasks- The ancillary tasks were equally as helpful as it forced us to look into already existing film posters and magazine covers and to learn what made them so effective. We looked at magazines like ‘Empire’ and ‘Total Film’ to get a good idea of what magazines look like and what makes them appeal to a reader.We incorporated bits of our film such as the one liners into the ancillary tasks, for example the slogan is on both the movie trailer and the poster, it was also one of the considered Titles for the film.

How were these outcomes achieved in terms of matching mise-en-scene, including page layout and camera shot choices?

For the Magazine Cover, I took the picture of Steve the Vampire and placed it slight off centre but just him on

the cover. He is the main character of the film so I thought it would be best to have him as the main part of

it. Also when I looked at Empire and Total Film the majority of their covers displayed the main character of the film

they were doing a feature on.This is what swayed my decision to have both Steve and

Nora on the front cover.

I mostly looked at one particular cover of ‘Empire’ as a guidance for our ancillary task as it stood out to me slightly

more than the rest.I liked the colour scheme because the mix between red, yellow, black and white words made the more important

words or phrases stand out more and seem more important. I also like that in most of ‘Empire’s covers the

background meant something, it was just a random colour or pictures. This is why I picked red as our background

colour because everyone associates red with blood and therefore vampires it also made Mitch’ (Steve the

Vampire’s) blood ridden lips stand out more.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-721oqMw5I-M/T4vZqbvKJvI/AAAAAAAAAGA/QC7PHQy4FSM/s1600/mag+cover+finit.jpg

With the Film Poster I wanted to give it an Old-School feel to it

hence why I used a picture of an old fashioned school for the

background and a nice handwriting font for the title.

The background worked well as it related to the film being set in and around a high school. I felt that the old mansion feel it had to it echoed the sort that was

seen in old vampire films such as ‘Dracula’ and ‘Nosferatu’.

I wanted to keep the theme of red flowing in the poster much

like I did with the magazine cover as it symbolises blood and

vampires. I put the picture of the cat on to remind the audience

that this is at the end of the day a comedy and not to be mistaken for a serious vampire movie. The

slogan is also a reference to vampires as vampires ‘sink their teeth’ into people. I again looked

at other examples of movie posters particularly comedies

and rom-coms rather than supernatural movies that often

were rather dark colours.

What stylistic techniques were used to support your trailer?

As I have already stated we used the same slogan in both our trailer and film poster: “Here’s something to really sink your teeth into”. We did this because if this line was remembered not only would the audience remember the film they would also remember that it is a vampire orientated film and a comedy. Also if you want to ‘sink your teeth’ into something then it means it must be gripping so we felt that this acted as a good slogan for our film.If we had had a bigger budget, like most films, we would definitely have made a website and ventured into other marketing ploys to promote our film. The trailer and our ancillary task work well together and I do think that the stylistic techniques used in making the film poster and magazine cover do support our trailer.