Our Film Poster CCTV



This poster has a very simple colour scheme of black & white and green & white. I decided to use this because the running time on the CCTV shots in the film are in green and a black & white picture helped to make the text stand out. I hazed out the edges of the picture so that the picture is more focused on the camera and so that the text on the edges were more effective. Having text on the edges makes them bold because they are on a black background and they are out of the way which emphasises the larger text "CCTV".

Film Poster Research


When planning to make a poster for CCTV, I decided that a CCTV camera would be the focus of the poster because our film wanted to show how CCTV has been a huge part of most people lives whether they know it or not. I wanted the majority of the poster to be in black and white because it would make the rest of the writing stand out.
By looking at what films are similar, I decided that the film "Eagle Eye" was the most relevant to what our film wanted to show and what our target audience is. By looking at the "Eagle Eye" poster I noticed that the poster also had a black and white theme that made the colour text stand out more. From research of other film posters I found that the majority have a section of text that is dedicated to saying what actors are in the film,who wrote the screen play and who directed it.

A2 Media Pitch

For My A2 coursework I will be working with Harry Aquilina in creating a short 5 minute film!

Our film will look surviellance and modern society.

The main representations we will be exploring is peoples privacy and in this I mean how people are always being watched in what they do, whether it be going to the shops or at work there is always somebody or something monitoring what you do.
Another representation will be about modern society, with this we will look at why people are always being monitored.

In the film we combine different shots to give the impression to the audience that everyone is suspious and everbody is wary of everbody. We will hopefully use CCTV footage to show more reality in what we mean on how people are being watched.

We hope to start the film with archive footage which will set the scene and give the audience a suggestion to what the film is goin to be about and what to expect. Showing this will hopefully make the audience want to carry on watching the film as it gives a meaning to what we are trying to represent.
In order for a film to be complete it must have an equilibrium, start-middle-end. However it doesnt been necessarily have to be in that order. In our case we will start the film off after the archive footage with scenes from the end of the film, then flash back to the build up to what you see. Then it will lead up to what you saw and then an ending will be in place.

So after the archive footage it will cut to a shot of a normal everyday street, we will focus on a police car on 'blues and twos' driving past. We decided on having this as police links to CCTV and being watched etc. This will be right at the front of the shot and then once its gone past we will focus on a street corner in which a normal looking male walks out of and down the street. As he walks down the street we will film different shots of him and the sound to this will be music coming from his headphones. Specifially we hope the audience will pick up that he has a laptop in his hands.
From here we see a woman walking up to her curtains in her house and then we switch to her POV of her opening them and see this man walking past and in the background you see a mystery white van following close behind. Then we cut to a medium close up of the male and then we cross focus to the van behind and then we show two guys look at a picture of the male on a piece of paper and then see them drive slowly up the male. Then we have an established shot of the male bundled into the van and then it fades to white. From here we then go through the moments leading up to him getting taken away and we portray it so we keep the audience guessing. Once we get to the first scene again we start to unfold why it happened.

Our target audience would be of the age between 18-30 who are from a working class who have an interest in society, crime and technology. They will be familar with security features and technology and have a feeling towards modern day society and what happens withour people knowing.

Our film has similar aspects to shows like spooks, 24, shows that deal with smart crime. Also films which feature similar shots that we like include eagle eye and enemy of the state.
This could mean that instition wise we could look towards BBC as they have aired spooks but in terms of film insition Dreamworks were associated with Eagle eye and Touchstone pictures were the instition with Enemy of the state.

Representation- Our film will include a main character who has similar aspects of a Uni student who has an interest in Technology. Therefore we will be representing people of a social class of middle class as they will be able to afford new technology but also this class as they would of just left univeristy. We will represent how technology can change people.

Institution- From research i have seen 2 similar shows that show certain aspects of what our film has. These are 24 and spooks. These are similar to our idea as they both are to do with crime but also represent change in technology. I feel spooks has a realism to it and this is what we want to accomplish with our film therefore BBC could be seen as an ideal institution. However in terms of 'Films' I have seen Eagle Eye which includes a young working male similar to ours who is familair with technology and the film has similar shots to what we want so i feel this is a good film to look at in terms of similar films. Eagle eye is associated with Dreamworks.

Values - Values we are trying to show are that how people have limited privacy in modern day society and how society acts in peoples lives. We will show limted privacy through different shots in the film such as CCTV shots.

Audience - Our audience will be Young middle/working class males who have an interest in Security and technology and how people are always being monitored. Also they will be able to relate to the main character in our film who fits our target audeince. Prefferably they will have a good experience with modern technology.

Language - In the film the music and setting of the scene will help explain to the audience what else is happening in the scene. Certain music will help build tension or help show what is going to happen. Also we will think carefully on where to film as this will help aid the realsim of the film.

Ideology - The film will deal with privacy in modern day society and how people can't escape certain aspects of life such as being watched closely by anyone around them. In the film we want to show how everybody is watching everybody and give that sense of mystery to the audience.

Narrative - See above. Film is briefly explained.

Genre - I feel that through the conventions that our film is showing, I would put our film as a crime drama, as it represents society and problems in society but also as it deal with security of ourselves i feel it has elements of crime introduced into the equation.

Evaluation of Newspaper

We first started off by doing some research into newspapers, we looked at a variety of different newspapers most of which were free and local. Because these newspapers were free and local they had more advertisements on the front. Once we had a brief over view of what we would need to have on the front. We then decided to go out and take pictures of stories that we wanted to portray.  
These picture had to be our own, therefore we had to go out and take the photographs. We decided to have a UFO sighting as out main story. To do this we needed a picture of a sky. Other pictures we took were of a movie star, who was part of 'The Package', and the student that had spotted the UFO. To make it easier to pick pictures we took 87 photos. By having so many photos it made it easier to get the story we were trying to get across, each photo gave a different style to the story (e.g. smiles means a happy story). After we had taken all of the necessary images we uploaded them to the iMac. Once we had done this we then needed to change them in specific ways to portray to the audience what the story was about. For example we had a photograph of the sky in which we edited to show a UFO to go along with our story.  
To create the UFO I (Harry) used Adobe Photoshop, by using this program and its detailed tools I managed to create a similar looking object to a UFO in the sky. The image was then dragged to indesign and we made it look smaller so that it would look more realistic. 
Indesign was the software we used to complete the task of creating a local front cover with the story of our choice. Indesign allows you to create different boxes and guidelines so that you can comply a page that has the same style of a newspaper. Using this software was a learning experience for the both of us as this was the first time we had used it. Overall we thought that this software was pretty easy to use as it was similar to other programs such as Microsoft Publisher which we were more common to. However Indesign was more complex and this was an advantage in completing the task  as it had more tools and options to allow us to have our page looking the way we wanted to.
All together we manage to complete the task and get the result we wanted. We got the paper to look the the way we wanted by using a variety of programs and techniques that helped us to develop our skills for the part of the course next year.

Film and Evaluation

Comment on the best bits: Some very clean shots and very good hand held work. The camera positions are excellent. An excellent edit. Good use of sound. Nice use of light in the establishing shot, and down the passageway.


Things you can improve: Hand held work has to be better still: that's a challenge rather than a criticism


Marks are out of 3 for this:
0 means you haven't done it.
1 is lowest - it means that there is a lot that needs to be done, but that you have the material to sort it out and make it work.
2 means that you've done the job competently and it is OK.
3 means that you've done some parts of it really very well, and should work to exploit this.

CAMERA
Medium Shot MS 3
Long Shot LS 3
Close Up CU 3
XLS - extreme long shot 2
XCU - extreme close up 2
Pan 3
Tilt 3
Zoom 3
Cross focus 1
Deep focus 2
Tracking shot (dolly, hand held, shoulder shot) 3
Point of View - POV 2
Use of tripod 2

EDIT
Shot - reverse shot 2
Establishing shot 3
Cut 2
Dissolve 2

Total out of 55 = 41 = 76% = B

Evaluation is very good, so 9/10, = A

The Package Evaluation

We first started off with a list of camera shots that we had to include in the film titled 'The Package'. With all of them in mind we sat down together to discuss and draw up our ideas, and finally put them together so that we could film our ideas. 
After this we chose who our actors were. We need to select people who fitted the character's attributes. Our actors were David Finch (Suspicious guy) and Tom Hayward (Mystery man) and Stuart Sharples who was a random character. 
We now had to find a location to shoot our first scene. We chose a quiet class room which was adjacent to a long corridor. This was helpful as our second scene was to be in a corridor.
We made several changes to our script whilst filming but none were major. 
All of our clips we over ran so that we had sufficient film footage to edit later on.
Now the filming was complete we now had to extract the footage onto the computers and edit it via Final Cut Express, which is a software which allows you to use several tools and techniques to put together your film.
We found the software easy to learn as Harry was already equipped to the software due to previous experience's therefore Harry was able to show me how to use Final Cut Express. The tools available such as adding transitions and cuts made it easy to merge together the clips we had and make changing scenes more attractive on the viewers eye.
It  took us long period of time to find specific music that would fit our film and one that we liked as well.We both looked through Harry's Ipod which had a variety of music that we liked but ended choosing Linkin Park - In the end. We thought of merging this song with another half way through the film but instead chose to fade the music into the background by making the music quieter and then pick up its sound again and finish at the same level it started off at.
One problem we had with editing was that it was hard to get the right heart beat and make it sound real because one bar was only 2 heartbeats and we wanted more so we had to join them to make it sound real. Another problem was that it was frustrating to film as we had to film during school time we had a lot of noise in the background and interruptions from people passing by interested in what we were doing.
All together we both found this task interesting to do and enjoyable to put together and we learned a lot to do with editing and how to use a camera to show different representations and how to capture the same thing but from a different position.

The Package

By Stuart Sharples and Harry Aquilina

That's better

Thanks Stuart. Evaluation now.
HM