Evaluation Part 2 - Adam RUTHERFORD

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

As a group we spent a lot of time on our Poster and Review considering how we could best represent our film through them. The Poster was much more personal as obviously we created it to sell the film and try and give the audience a decent idea of the narrative whereas the review had to fit the visual specifications of Little White Lies magazine, with the text being an honest assessment of the quality of our film. Despite this, the combination of the two create an effective marketing package and an honest representation of our film.

Poster

When creating the poster for 'Three Words" our main aim was to successfully communicate the appeal of the film to our target audience while also trying to express the narrative.

To do this we needed to consider :

• Image
• Font
• Colour scheme
• Text Content (reviews)

 Image

We decided straight away that we would have both of the characters together in the poster to give the audience the general feel of the film straight away. It is obvious from the poster that the two characters are in a relationship, however because of the body language and the fact that Chmiel is in black and white show that there is something more here then a couple in love. Unfortunately a couple of people we received feedback from thought that Chmiel was going to die in the film, because he is in black and white in the poster. This obviously wasn't the intention, however I can see how this has been interpreted. The intention was to have Barkley in colour and Chmiel black and white to represent her warmth and love for him, and his feelings being completely the opposite. Looking at the poster now I now see we should have tried something different as we could have still got the message across just by Chmiel's body language, meaning we needn't have bothered with the black and white.

Font

After we had finally decided what image to use we began checking fonts out on Dafont.com, a website with literally any font you could want. We wanted one ideally with hearts in it to express the genre of our film better to our audience. We came across two we really liked, one with every letter written in hearts (see image below) and the other block capitals with the first letters of each word in hearts. As you can see above this is the one we ended up using.

We also decided that because the font was so appropriate we would use it in the opening and closing credits of our film. This ended up working really nicely, as not only does the font create a rom-com kind of feel, but it also helps the poster relate to the the film.

Colour Scheme

We found the colour scheme to be trickier then first anticipated as it needed to be prominent but not over exaggerated. We decided straight away that the colour scheme would be red, as it is the colour that symbolises love. When researching posters in preparation for the ancillary task two British film posters stuck out in my mind, mainly because of their use of colour scheme. They were 'Fish Tank' (Arnold, 2009) and 'Somers Town' (Meadows, 2008). The reason these two stuck out was because they were two very plain posters, but brought to life with colour. The 'Somers Town' poster (see left) has a grey background but details such as the sky, the arsenal shirt, and the yellow window add something else to the poster. I decided that it would add depth to our poster if we made two red bricks in the image to go with the colour scheme for the text, using 'Somers Town' as inspiration.

Text Content

Obviously in a real life scenario we wouldn't get to write our reviews, but we were able to use ours to help sell our product and even point towards our narrative. Our quote from the Guardian "Fantastic modern day love story" helps us because not only does it make the film sound good, it also helps the audience see what kind of genre the film is.

The most important text we had to worry about was the tag-line, a crucial part in any film poster. We took a long time deciding what to use, and all had completely different ideas of what would go. We finally whittled it down to "Tom, Kate, Love?" and "Choose them carefully", the latter being a nod to our title. In the end we decided on the former, as it fitted with the story, and was also three words long.

Review

The template for our review was based on the independent film magazine Little White Lies. The layout, colour scheme and general content is based on the front cover of each particular edition, meaning that when creating our review, it was certainly not just the content of text we had to think about.

Layout

To make our review as authentic as possible we needed to get the layout as authentic as possible. We screen-grabbed an image from the film and blew it up to fill roughly 2/5ths of the page. We then split the text up into four columns leaving a small section at the bottom for the ratings system.

We decided we would base our 'magazine' on the film Alice and Wonderland because of the vast amounts of imagery we could create to go alongside our review. If you look carefully (image to the right) you can see Tweedle Dee/Dum poking out from around the side of the orange box and the king and queen of hearts to the right of the screen. We also put a "spade" next to the page number (bottom right).

This meant we also have an accurate colour scheme. Basing our cover on an image of the 'Mad Hatter' we used the colours orange and light green for the boxes above the text in our review.

Text

• The writing style in the main body of text was very much inspired by Little White Lies, obviously to keep our review authentic, but also because we are admirers of the style in which they write their reviews. Because of this we made sure to use the correct film terminology, for example describing Barkley as  "The female protagonist". Our main intention with the review was to appeal to both our target audience, and also the target audience of Little White Lies; film literates who tend to be slightly older. This will introduce our film to the target audience of the magazine (mainly males, although females do read it), hopefully persuading them to view this film after reading the article. 

• It actually took a surprisingly long time to write the "Anticipation" "Enjoyment" and  "In Retrospect" sections for this review, as we didn't want to undersell ourselves, but at the same time we wanted to try and keep a certain level of when rating the film. The comments we came up with in the end were I believe fair, because we admitted that there would be a low level of anticipation for our film, however we described the film as "surprisingly compelling" and gave it a 5 out of 5 in the "In Retrospect" section - a rating normally saved for the best of the best.