Evaluation Part 2 - Keira

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

POSTER:
For the poster we found it difficult to think of an image that could sum up the content of our film and create intrigue without being too stereotypically rom-com in style. We had to be careful to not make it too cheesy, so we studied other social realism posters to inform us of some of the conventions of the style.

 

• The font was the first thing we decided on. Using Dafont.com, I searched for one which used hearts (to connote the romance side) and got a few examples, from which the group chose the best one. We chose 'loverboy' because whilst clearly showing that it's a story involving a relationship, the hearts are cracked slightly which could suggest to the audience that it's not entirely happy. We tried the title both completely in hearts (as above) and just the first letters of each word in hearts with the rest just block capitals. We decided the latter looked less busy and wouldn't overdo the hearts idea to make it too rom-com and not enough social realism. We used this font both for the poster and in the film itself in order to create brand identity for the target audience so that they could recognise the link between the two subconsciously and build up an association with that font and our product. This would mean that whenever they saw that particualr font or something similiar they would think of the film. On the poster, we have made the title 'embossed' and put a drop shadow on it so that it stands out more against the brick wall background. The letters are the same colour as Kate's clothes which gives a hint to the target audience that most people will sympathise with Kate more. It also heightens the contrast to Tom being desaturated so that it is more noticeable.

• The image was taken with the idea that we wanted to show the characters' feelings towards each other without making the ending explicitly obvious. We chose the brick wall as a background because it's miscellaneous and could be anywhere, following the idea that this story could be applied to many relationships in different situations rather than just the particular context that we have put it in. It also shows the urban setting which is a traditional convention of social realism - it's rare to find them taking place in the countryside, so we wanted to reflect this also.
• We tried the image with both Tom completely desaturated and Kate in colour (suggesting the warmth of her feeling towards him and the unfortunate lack of feeling of him for her); and the other way round (suggesting how they see each other). We decided that first option was better as it seemed to more obviously put across the message we wanted. Looking at the poster again, a drawback to this idea is that the viewers may assume that Tom's character dies and that the film is about Kate clinging on to him because she doesn't want to let go. This is similar to the poster for 'P.S. I Love You', a romantic film in which the man passes away, and in the poster we can see is slightly desaturated and darker than her. So in hindsight perhaps it would have been a better representation of our film to leave them both in colour, or perhaps just desaturate Tom slightly rather than entirely.

• As our film has a similar target audience to 'Fish Tank' and 'Sommers Town' (16-24, but predominantly the teenagers of that group), we looked at these posters in detail and took certain aspects. In 'Fish Tank' (-->), there are two clear colours used for the text (blue and pink) to represent the main character (perhaps suggesting her conflict between being a tomboy but also a girl). We took this idea by using grey to represent Tom and his lack of feeling, and the red of her scarf for Kate to illustrate her vibrance and that she's loved-up. 'Sommers Town' inspired us for the use of black and white with colour, picking out certain images (the football shirt, for example) to draw attention to and catch the viewers' interest. We have drawn most attention to Kate because our target audience is more towards females (as she is the character whom we intended the viewers to most sympathise and feel sorry for) and we have taken the idea from 'Fish Tank' of colouring parts of the background wall behind:

We have put our two subjects in the centre of the frame because it will draw the eye and is more aesthetically pleasing

• 
  
  I came up with the tagline on one of my draft posters: 

I wanted it to be three words long (to echo the title) and be simple yet memorable. I first thought of  'choose them carefully' , but decided it sounded too threatening and better suited the thriller genre. Then I thought of 'But they're not always the ones you want to hear.' which, although suiting what the film was about, somehow seemed too long and complicated. I thought of 'Tom. Kate. Love?' because it mentioned the two characters (which might stick in people's minds better, especially if they know anyone by those names which is likely), using punctuation to make the words more poignant and the 'Love?' to pose a question and create intrigue. This was also inspired by the '500 Days Of Summer' tagline: 'Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.' which uses three very short and simple sentences in a twist on a well-known phrase which is bound to be memorable. I tried to create a similar thing, as in fact this tagline could easily work for our film also, but swapping the 'girl' and 'boy' over.

• 
  
  The whole idea of the poster is to communicate why people should watch the film, and for us the main reason is that it's not a conventional love story. I think we have achieved this to a certain extent, but it was difficult to push this without giving the end of the film away, and as such we have ended up with quite a vague poster which gives no specific information about the film (other than that it's a love story) and could be misleading. However, I think it would generate interest effectively for members of our target audience which is the primary aim of the film poster.

Another criticism I would make is that the awards and reviews look cluttered as there wasn't much background space on which to write them without covering up the main image. Ideally we would not have included these at all, but all the posters we've studied in the social realism style had them and we felt it a necessary convention as it would generate more interest from the industry were we to release it for real.

 
I had alot more involvement with the review than with the poster as we allocated 2 people in our group to do the poster (Dom and Arran) and 2 for the review (me and Adam).
REVIEW:

• For the image I chose a screen grab that would be instantly eye-catching and make a reader choose to look at the review rather than just flicking past it. This image is quite humerous (due to the couple's juxtaposing expressions) and targets our 16-24 audience effectively with a quite blatant reference to sex. This is also fitting with the conventions of social realism as it doesn't shy away from showing more shocking images. Were the review designed to feature in a different magazine, it may have been too risqué, but as 'Little White Lies' prides itself on being independent (see its website here) I thought it would fit well and be better to capture interest.

• The lay out is taken directly from 'Little White Lies' magazine, which we used as a template because of its clean, simple design and diverse range of reviewed films across all different genres. Each issue of the magazine is themed to a current blockbuster (see the 'Where The Wild Things Are' issue to the right), and as a quick task to help design the reciew I created what could be the front cover for the issue in which our review appeared, themed on Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland':On the actual review template we then put in references to the film (a Tweedle Dum poking out from behind the 'directed by' box and a Queen and King of hearts card fanning out at the far right of the page). I used the bright orange and green colours from the front cover image for the text boxes and the fanned out cards. I think this makes the page more interesting to look at and is more realistic to how the real review would look.
• Before writing the review, I read alot of the real reviews in 'Little White Lies' to try to get a feel for the style as we wanted it to sound authentic. The copy is aimed at both the film's audience and 'Little White Lies' readers, and when writing it I tried to strike a balance between formal language / terminology (such as 'the female protagonist') and coloquialisms (such as 'living happily ever after in a perfect little cul-de-sac far, far away') so as to engage both. We decided to mention the fact that it was social realism: 'in classic social realism fashion...' and '...and in that way (amongst many others) it is social realism through and through' as we thought it likely that many readers of this magazine would be interested in social realism, given that it's aimed mostly at independent film-watchers. We also made a point of the fact that it isn't a traditional romance story: '...laying bare the characters’ thoughts and emotions and adding an unexpected depth to the story.' as we all agreed that was the important selling point for our film. We also talked alot about the fact that it might 'be frighteningly mirror-like to many members of the audience' which insinuates that we have both directly targetted our teenage audience and stuck to the boundaries of social realism enough to make it believable.
• We tried to keep the Anticipation, Enjoyment and In Retrospect section short and sweet as they often are in the real magazine (sometimes as simple as 'Wow.') as we didn't want to repeat everything we'd just said.

• To match the font of the text boxes to the ones in 'Little White Lies' I used Dafont.com again (-->) to find one that I felt was as close as possible to the real thing. 
• Criticisms I would make of the review are that :

1. 
   
   The text boxes don't have rounded edges as we couldn't find how to create them, a small detail but still different to the real magazine.
2. 
   
   It is not formatted to the same size as 'Little White Lies' and is still A4, as most of it was created on Photoshop which doesn't allow you to change it to the correct format.
3. 
   
   We could have had more references to 'Alice In Wonderland' to make it more obvious; although, perhaps too many would have distracted from the article itself.
4. 
   
   The copy doesn't contain virtually any criticism of the film, which is not realistic to a real review. There are insinuations that at the start you assume it's going to be another generic love story, but this is really the only negativity it contains. Perhaps it would have been better to include some more critical comments in order to make it more authentic.