Production and Post Production

2) Variety of high quality photographs for film poster



















All of these photos were taken in the Rotherfield woods at The Henley College for our film poster. We only wanted Sophia on the poster as she is the main character in the trailer, and we wanted the photo to be taken in the woods, as that is where our trailer is set too. She put fake blood on her head and drew on bruising around her head to make the strong image more effective. We took the photos in colour, however changed to final image to black and white.

3) Variety of high quality photographs for magazine front cover

4) Continued audience feedback ; rough cuts and drafts

From our audience feedback we recieved both positive and negative feedback allowing us to edit and make our magazine front cover better. From our audience feedback, our magazine cover was adpaeted edited from this to our final film magazine. Changing the colour of the masthead and changing the font around as the red was hard to see. We also made it more simple and realistic.

From our audience feedback we changed our poster image to what the audience said, meeting more of the audience's tastes. We changed the credits at the bottom as our audience feedback told us it was hard to read, and then we also made the blood on the head slightly more vibrant as our audience feedback said it was good, eyecatching and bold.

5) Discussion of media theories applicable to openeing sequence

Vladimir Propp’s character types

1. The villain (struggles against the hero)
2. The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)
3. The (magical) helper (helps the hero in the quest)
4. The princess (person the hero marries, often sought for during the narrative)
5. Her father
6. The dispatcher (character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)
7. The hero or victim/seeker hero, reacts to the donor, weds the princess

Roland Barthes codes

The Hermeneutic Code (HER)

The Hermeneutic Code refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader.

The full truth is often avoided, for example in:

• Snares: deliberately avoiding the truth.
• Equivocations: partial or incomplete answers.
• Jamming: openly acknowledge that there is no answer to a problem.

The purpose of the author in this is typically to keep the audience guessing, arresting the enigma, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off and closure is achieved.

The Proairetic Code (ACT)

The Proairetic Code also builds tension, referring to any other action or event that indicates something else is going to happen, and which hence gets the reader guessing as to what will happen next.

The Hermeneutic and Proairetic Codes work as a pair to develop the story's tensions and keep the reader interested. Barthes described them as:

"...dependent on ... two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence."

The Semantic Code (SEM)

This code refers to connotation within the story that gives additional meaning over the basic denotative meaning of the word.

It is by the use of extended meaning that can be applied to words that authors can paint rich pictures with relatively limited text and the way they do this is a common indication of their writing skills.

The Symbolic Code (SYM)

This is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning.

This is typically done in the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing and conflict ideas.

The Cultural Code (REF)

This code refers to anything that is founded on some kind of canonical works that cannot be challenged and is assumed to be a foundation for truth.

Typically this involves either science or religion, although other canons such as magical truths may be used in fantasy stories. The Gnomic Code is a cultural code that particularly refers to sayings, proverbs, clichés and other common meaning-giving word sets.

What codes we are including in our trailer

In our trailer we are including the codes The Hermeneutic Code (HER) and The Proairetic Code (ACT) because in our trailer, we are not showing you how, or what till the very end is making people disappear, so the story’s not fully explained, and even at the end it is still not fully explained so it keeps the audience guessing. And The Proairetic Code (ACT) builds tension, and in our trailer we are going to build tension that will indicate something else will happen.


6) Still photos of the editing process with written support

Changed volume of sophia talking cos it was too loud for the first thing to be said in the trailer

putting the zoom on to the universal logo like in the other trailers

editing the text in the trailer

Changed white to red editing and comparing which looked better etc

7) Final teaser trailer


8) Final film poster

9) Final film magazine review

This is our final film magazine cover. We edited the contrast and colour of the image on Photo Shop to make the face in the image a little brighter in order for it to stand out more as it is in the centre of the page. We chose this image for the cover as Sophia Wenzler is our main character in the trailer and the character that features on the film magazine, therefore we wanted to keep this consistent and make the audience recognise her. She is wearing casual clothes, as this is what she is wearing in the film trailer and we wanted to link the image to the theme of the trailer and keep her in the same kind of clothes. She also has fake blood running down from the side of her head, on her neck and a bruise on her head. This is to give some of the danger of the story line of the trailer away to the audience and show the type of character she plays in the trailer. We kept the image in the background, and put all of the text on the page over the top of the image. We did this to show the importance of the text, and also because we didn't need to place the image over the top as the main part of the image (her face) would have been shown in the centre of the page with no text covering it anyway. As the image for the film poster is also in the woods, we wanted to change this slightly for the magazine, however still locate the image in an area that conveys horror. We took this photo in front of an old knocked down wall, which I think is appropriate for an image trying to convey horror. This is because some horror films are set in old run down locations, which is how this could be perceived.

We used other magazine covers to help with the basic layout of our magazine and to see what we should and should not include. We included typical things that would be found on a magazine cover such as a bar code, price, date and website to make our magazine look more realistic and professional. We also looked at other film magazines and saw that many of them included a block colour circle, usually a different colour to the rest of the magazine, with text in it promoting an offer, or something important inside the magazine. We used this feature in our magazine, also to make it look more realistic.
We kept the colour scheme for our magazine as basic as we could, without making it look dull or boring. We did this to stop the cover looking too busy or messy, and also because we saw that this is what other magazines looked like. We used basic block colours of black, white and red, which are also colours that could convey a horror theme.