Magazine Cover- 1st draft

This is our first magazine front cover draft, we decided to use an image of our main female character as the feature within the magazine is going to be an interview with her discussing the film. However we are not going to use this particular image as after we got feedback from our peers they felt that the image was too posed and would work better if the girl was in character for the picture. Another suggestion that came from peer feedback was the idea of having an actual background rather than just a plain white background as this is typical of many film magazines.

After researching film magazines we noticed that there was a range of fonts used so we decided to mirror this in our own magazine cover. Although we felt with this particular layout we couldn't get enough cover lines on our magazine and felt it looked empty so decided we would change it to the typical "U" shape layout seen on many magazines with the image placed more in a more central position.

We originally decided on red as a colour scheme so it corresponded with the colour of the masthead, this is something we wish to change as this colour doesn't suggest the ROM-COM genre of our film, thus we changed our colour scheme to pink and white. With this change came the decision to use our own magazine name (Film Today) rather than "Total Film" which already exists.

We have decided to keep the "PLUS" circle as it is commonly seen on film magazines and breaks up the constant text from cover lines. Also, we have decided to keep the "free Harry Potter film posters inside" as this a device conventionally used to catch the target audience's attention. The reason we chose "Harry Potter" film posters is because it is a film that is popular with our target audience.

We are now in the process of making these changes to our magazine front cover to get it to a higher standard and make it look as if it could be an actual film magazine.

Storyboard Animatics

-Our finished storyboard is what we want our teaser trailer to end up as. Our first scene is of the institution that is producing and distributing our film as we found that it is a common theme within teaser trailers. We then have quick cut scenes of a number of imperfect guys with a voice over saying "when you can't find Mr Perfect, you have to settle for less". Here, as well as the voice over we are going to have music on low in the background. Then there is a close up of our female character who looks straight down the camera and says "NO". We then see a short clip of our female character talking to her best friend on the phone explaining what she wants in a boyfriend. It then cuts to a range of shots accompanied by music to insinuate to the audience that our female character falls in love with an unconventional Mr Perfect. On our penultimate shot is of the film name with the tag line "love makes the imperfect, perfect" and our last shot states that the film is coming soon with the films website on for the target audience's future reference.

-When we filmed our storyboard we had to ensure that we were in a quiet room as we didn't want any noise in the background. Also a steady camera helps to make our storyboard look effective.

-The location we have chosen to film our teaser trailer in is at school this is suitable for our target audience as we plan to aim it at a young audience who are still in education. Although we may film the shots of the guys outside of school so we have a variety of locations and shots.

1st poster

We are currently creating our film poster on Microsoft Publisher, we chose Microsoft Publisher as we felt that it would be the program best suited for this purpose. After researching a variety of Rom-com film posters we found that they generally use bright colours to suggest the genre and attract their target audience. From this we decided to use orange and pink as our colour scheme to have the same effect. One problem we faced was that our stars names didn't fit very well with the format of our poster so we decided to change them to give the poster a better look. Although this was a lengthy process it was worth it as our poster is now more effective and appealing to our target audience. Another convention commonly used in film posters that we decided to keep is the enlarging of the stars last names to make them stand out. We chose to stick with this convention as often, people recognise the last names of stars so by making them larger than the rest of the writing it will make them eye catching and attract our audience. An aspect of our poster that is not always featured on mainstream film posters is the use of a tag line. Our films tag line is "love makes the imperfect, perfect". We decided to put this towards the bottom of the poster so it doesn't distract the audience from the stars names or film name. Another common feature of film posters is a billing block. To see what information is generally on a billing block we zoomed into a billing block before making our own. We wanted to name an established ROM-com director in our billing block and found that Nancy Meyers had directed a range of ROM-com films and decided to use her. At present we are debating the font for the billing block as we understand that a billing block is usually unreadable and are finding it difficult to find a font that is appropriate for this. Instead of naming an actual date for release we just chose to put the season Summer as this is when ROM-Com's are generally released. Underneath the date we have put the film website so that people who are interested in the film are able to find out more about it. We are planning to have a picture of the main couple sitting on a bench and try to make the title look like it's sitting on the bench with them.

Magazine front cover draft

After researching the front covers of film magazines such as Total Film and Empire we decided to draft our own. We decided that we would use Total Film as our magazine that we were designing for. On our front cover we are going to use a photo of our main female character as the narrative of the film revolves around her. From our research we found that Total Film often have a personal story about film stars inside and this draws the audience in so it is featured as a main story on the front cover. Other features we included are:the bar code, price, other cover lines to attract our target audience and the month of release.

Draft film poster

Before designing our film poster we researched a range of film posters. From these film posters we were able to see the typical conventions. We then designed what we initially wanted our film poster to look like:

Our first thoughts were that the image we would use would be of our main male and female characters on a bench. This is a situation is a typical image related to romantic comedies. We also decided that we would stick with the conventions of a rom-com poster by putting the billing block and release date at the bottom. Originally we couldn't decide where we wanted the name of the film to go so put it on the bench next to our main characters and underneath the bench to see which we thought looked better.Another convention we stuck with was putting the stars names at the top of the poster. As a group we decided we would have a tag line for our film which is "love makes the imperfect perfect" and we chose to have this at the top of the poster to attract our target audience and give them a clue as to what the film is going to be about.

This is a later version of our film poster. Here you can see that we have kept the release date, billing block and stars names in the original place we put them. We have also kept the original image of our main male and female characters on the bench.However we have moved the film's tag line to underneath the image.

Audience research

We felt the best way to find our target audience was to construct a questionnaire as we did at A.S. This is because it is a quick and accessible way to find out relevant information and then this information can be easily summarised for us to find out the results. These results from 15 people will then help us to create our teaser trailer, magazine front cover and film poster.

 Age was an important question for us to ask as we wanted to know the age range we should be targeting with romantic comedies and if romantic comedies were more appealing to a particular age range or across the board. As you can see the majority of the people we asked were aged between 16 and 24.

Finding out how often people went to the cinema was also another important question as we want to find out the possibility of our film/teaser trailer being seen at the cinema. Also we wanted to find out what these regular cinema goers watch at the cinema and what they expect from posters, trailers and film magazines.

The social network question was important for us to ask as it allowed us to find out the best place to advertise our film. From this we found Facebook and YouTube were the most popular of these sites so if we were to advertise to the target audience of 16-24 these would be the best places to do so.

Very often there is a link between the film genre's people prefer to watch and their favourite music genre. We found that pop was the most popular music genre amongst our sample and pop is most commonly linked with romantic-comedies or comedies in general.

From this question we found that people tend to look for the image when initially looking at film posters. This means it is important that we take this into account and make our image stand out to entice our audience.

Finding out if people see films they wish to see is useful to us as if they tend to see a certain genre over another it could not be their personal choice but someone else's. From these results it is obvious that the people questioned do see films they want to therefore we can take these results as quite reliable.

We asked this question to see if there was a trend in the age range we picked. We found that friend and partner were the most popular choices. This does typically reflect the age range we were hoping to target.

In this question we asked the participants to rank their favourite film genres from 1 to 5. Rom-com come out as number one which means that this is a popular choice for this age range and a good genre to make our film.

As we were undecided as to whether or not to put actors or actresses names in our work we found out whether this would appeal to our audience. As it does we have decided to do so.

Although we have to produce all 3 of these advertising formats we thought it would be useful to see which is most regarding by our target audience to ensure we get the genre of our film across completely in this format.

After looking at our results we are able to gain some ideas as to what to include in our products to make them accessible and appealing to our target audience. However as we handed them out to the majority of the age range we wished to be our target audience these results could be a little bit biased but they have helped us to get specific information that needs to be included in our products.

Initial Narrative

After researching and discussing various ideas we have finally decided to do production based on a romantic comedy. So far we have decided on the title; Imperfect Mr Perfect. To begin with we struggled on ideas for the teaser trailer but after getting the basic story line and watching a range of teaser trailers that fit our film genre we have been able to come up with rough ideas of what we want to produce.

Our story is about a girl named Maria, she is a single girl looking for her perfect guy. As an independent girl she understands she doesn't have to settle for anything less than perfect. After seeing her parents inspiring relationship, their never ending love, she is desperate to get a taste of a happy ending. She’s searched in all the wrong places and starts to wonder if there is such thing as Mr perfect. Her encouraging friends manage to persuade to go on one final date. It goes unbelievably wrong and it doesn't stop there. Her car breaks down on her way home and she is forced to take a bus. On the way to the bus stop, whilst on the phone to her friend a reckless bike rider ignores the road and focuses all his attention on Maria and unsurprisingly falls over. Shockingly, completely out of character, Maria is impressed by this maniac and gives him a hand up. We could say love is blind! The chemistry is instant and their love is apparent. She shocks her friends including her parents with her new found love. Their bizarre relationship is annoyingly romantic and Maria starts to pick up his crazy hobbies. Love might be blind but Maria has found her Imperfect Mr Perfect!