Report

The task that I had been set with was to ensure I had made a DVD cover, script and one film poster for a thriller film. As for the creation of these production artifacts, I had to firstly research various posters and DVD covers pertaining to the thriller genre whilst also engaging in research of thriller genre codes and conventions. Before the production process began, I had researched various film posters and DVD covers since they included different layouts and various aspects of design that I wanted to include into my own design.  For this I had created a blog post on blogger which from there I had added various film posters and DVD covers where I had analyzed them in an attempt to understand what kind of techniques I can use in the creation of my own media texts.

For the pre-production part of my coursework I had taken a huge amount of influences from film director John Woo’s Face Off film, in which the film poster had incorporated mysterious conventions surrounding the two figures, just as on my poster and DVD cover, such as the use of smoke on my poster compared to the mist effect that had been used on Face Off. This film was the most significant film poster I had researched.  I had taken the elements used here and simply manipulated them to suit the theme, genre and narrative of my poster and DVD cover’s film.  From seeing how the poster of Face Off utilizes the use of black and white colour codes that pertains to mystery, death and suspense, this influenced my decision to use them as my main colours for the design process of the poster and DVD cover. As I had looked at most of the film posters I researched which were Face/Off, Eagle Eye, The Roommate and The Woman In Black, all these media texts utilized both the colours white and black as their primary colours. Since white and black offer symbolization of mystery, darkness and suspense, I knew that these colours were the primary colours that I was going to use for my film.

There were some anomalies that I had to work around, which in particular was to do with the lighting on the protagonist and antagonist’s faces for the front cover of the DVD cover and film poster. I had the aim of them both appearing to be sinister with dark lighting on half of their face to shroud mystery and dark intentions shared between the two, however as I did not have the correct technical lighting equipment to create this effect, I effectively used the tools on Photoshop to try and replicate this effect, which I had done successfully.

As part of the production process, I adapted these conventions and tried to keep my poster and DVD cover with a simplistic design, as having two faces glaring at the consumer, these production pieces inhabit a direct mode of address which makes the audience feel like the consumer cannot take their eyes off them if they went on display, as this is from the eye contact made from both the protagonist and antagonist which is there to create a relationship with the potential consumer in order to draw them in and persuade them to go and watch the film.  On the back page of the DVD cover, I added two images of a scene in the film where the protagonist proceeds to engage with the antagonist, as both images of them are displayed. The contrast between the placements of these images suggests that these two are against each other and underlines the conflict between the two, such as is the same with the image on the front of the DVD cover and poster. The facial expression between both the antagonist and protagonists displays the anguish that they feel between each other, which

When deciding what style of font to use for the both of my media text artefacts, I wanted to decide on a font that would have a sinister effect to it, but also leave a mysterious effect. Hence why I used the white colour codes for the font to add to the conventions of the thriller genre so the audience understands what genre this film belongs to from an initial glance at the poster and DVD cover. However on the contrary, initially I wanted most of the colour of the film title font to be red, though when I had edited the font to be of a red colour, the DVD cover and poster appeared to belong to a horror genre since the heavy use of the red colour codes resembled blood and gore while also symbolizing danger, violence and disembodiment; which my film tended to not utilize those conventions. As for the font on the poster, as the main focus when it came to the design process, simplicity was a key factor. I decided to place font which says “He’s closer than you think” down through the middle. I enlarged the word “closer” to generate an effect that the audience is involved and from this phrase alone the audience is questioned as to who is “closer” to each other (the antagonist or the protagonist).

On all of the DVD covers and film posters that I did research, all those media texts included star power on them in order to attract the audience.

The process of the script creation was to outline the genre of the film through the creation of the narrative. I had researched the script of the film Pulp Fiction which was written by Quentin Tarantino. From my research of this script, this gave me the guidance on how to professionally write a script including the correct layout and the right inputs that account for example, actions or dialogue within a script. Since I also had previous experience using the script writing program, ‘celtx’, I knew how to input these selections to write the script. However since I had to keep the script to a minimum at least eight pages, it was particularly difficult to structure out the chronological order of the linear narrative to the film when writing the script, so deciding when to end the script, even along with the synopsis of the film’s narrative at hand, was difficult in doing so. 

In summary, I have used most of the key conventions of a thriller to produce a poster and DVD cover at a professional standard. One weakness that I believe I could have improved on was using a different image for my DVD cover as it’s the same image used on the film poster, however I think the way I manipulated them to appear in a different way was a good option. Overall I am pleased with the outcome of my project.