This is the finished poster. The things I could improve upon is the colour scheme. I would have liked to implement the colour wheel to create a more eye-catching colour scheme and design. I would also think about the font and do market research to see what other posters and other designs that toy companies/designers have done for their products. It also took me a while to get the hang of Adobe Illustrator. I would also make the How It Works information more clear because at the moment without the writing explanation it wouldn't be clear what the product does.
I like the picture below as seen on the Pinterest moodboard because it symbolises the superheroes with an arty personality. Each picture does not tell you which character it is, but it's obvious to the viewer if you know superheroes - I really like that aspect of the picture.
I researched what else was similar to my idea on the market and the closest I could find was a simple circuit board which when you connected the wires a light comes on and another product was the Raspberry Pi. I gained inspiration from the circuit board to make my motherboard react to when the cables are correctly connected. I gathered other elements from the Raspberry Pi to have a simple coding operating system. My idea is a combination of both of these.
The Royal Crescent would have been a very suitable place to film but bystanders and cars were a big problem.
This street would have been a great place to shoot but there were no scenes in the film that would have suited the location.
This phone box ticks all the boxes, the only thing that isn't suitable is the phone itself because it's technically not a 1930's phone, but this cannot be avoided. I would also have to film at specific camera angles to avoid cars - this is not as difficult as other areas because of the way the phone box is positioned.
This phone box would have been good but it doesn't have a phone, it's locked, and it would be very difficult to shoot because of cars/tourists
This location was not suitable because of the cars in the backgrounds and the pedestrians, it would be very difficult to film without breaking the mythos of the film.
I think this area is perfect for the film. The only downside would be how shaded it is by the benches, but I think this will have to do, I'll just have to try and film during brighter periods if this can fit with the scheduling.
The brief was called Unknown Caller: "You’re walking down a street a phone rings you pick it up, after a short pause a voice tells you that you have two minutes to get to a destination (of your choice) and hand over the envelope hidden nearby."
The finished full movie below
I decided to do a silent movie spy drama because I felt the brief fits into the spy category and the silent movie was my own idea and how I imagined the brief would be. I did research into the 1930's silent movies such as Metropolis to see how and when Title Cards were used. The idea came from a Trigger Happy TV sketch(the clip starts at 0:19) which I tweaked to fit the silent genre.
(I can't find the link for the second image but I found it on Google images)
I decided to do scribbled out faces over the characters similar to the artwork above because it would give it a more atmospheric feel and tension for the viewer, not knowing who's behind the blackout. The canonical reason for the scribbled out faces was for a classified document effect. It was very time consuming and difficult to produce this because I had to export the video into photoshop and insert a timeline which enabled me to move the video forward frame by frame. I then used the brush tool to frame by frame draw on each scene.
I had attempts of different techniques: I tried to use face motion capture in After Effects but the face-tracking didn't work when the character's face was slightly off-screen and it wasn't a scribbled out effect, just a static black dot. I also tried to do it on Adobe Premier Pro but it didn't have the capabilities within it's program to do that.
Filming was difficult to get right because with the time period I selected, getting historically accurate items proved to be difficult. The most difficult aspect was the cars going by during the phone box scene. I had to frame the phone box to the right side of the scene to avoid cars and pedestrians.
This didn't affect the sound because it's a silent movie and I added 1930's esq music during the editing process. I was originally going to compose my own music on Garageband but I decided to not do so because of a lack of ability to create music that would have been good enough and which also would have set up he atmosphere of the movie. I got the music from youtube which was in the "creative commons", the link is here. The music I have used is non-diegetic.
I had to reshoot the park scene because the first take was overexposed and there were not enough interesting shot types. I reshot it and I am a lot more pleased with the reshoot than I was with the original, but there are several improvements I would make if I was going to shoot it again such as:
The coat that one of the agents is wearing is slightly too small.
I would have more actors to help distinguish the agent in the phone box and the man on the bench.
I would also compose my own music - I did try this but it wasn't fitting for the genre, atmosphere, and the time period I was going for.
The original storyboards have some similarities to the finished product but are different in their ways. They are different within the shot types and the story is similar, for example, in the storyboard, the order which each scene happens are in a different order. I changed the order which the scenes happen because I thought it flowed better on screen and the story made more sense.
I decided to use standard shot-types such as mid-shots and long-shots because I looked into films of the time period that I set out to do, such as Metropolis and a more recent silent film called The Artist - in order to see how a silent movie would be made in present day that had throwbacks to the 1930's. In the 1930's they were limited by technology and the 1930's was very early on in cinematic history, so they were still developing skills/techniques.
I changed the beginning because it explained and set up the scenario more clearly. It's in colour because it shows the jump in time period without telling you outright. The newspaper is also a clue to the time period as modern newspapers are very different. I decided to keep the noisy background in this shot because it symbolises that it's in a busy office environment and when it transitions from colour to black and white the viewer notices the jump back in time. The music/sound is another clue to this I'm pleased with this scene because it does what I wanted the scene to set up the film.
