Media Theories..

The media tend to focus their stories around current world affairs. For example, we see war plays a huge part in the news headlines; this sparks an interest for war films to be created and released, for Pearl Harbour and Dear John. This also links to post modern society which focuses on the must have items and that we want everything as soon as possible. A theory that can be linked to our film is feminism; this is shown through our main female character as she doesn’t want to settle for any man that is less than perfect. This represents every girl in society who dreams of their perfect relationship with a perfect guy, to get married and to raise a family. This theory therefore links our film trailer to our society today. The message we tried to show in our film is that everybody’s idea of perfect is different; this is called the hypodermic syringe theory when messages are passed to the audience through different medias.

Our Promotional Package..

The first thing we thought of for our promotional package was the title ‘Imperfect Mr Perfect’ this allowed us to base our ideas around the thought that not everyone is perfect. We then came up with the tag line ‘love makes the imperfect, perfect’. From these two vital parts, we were able to think of a story line to fit the title. Before, we had tried to think of a story before coming up with a title, we felt that thinking of the title beforehand gave us the first step to thinking of a story, although we have changed our story line at least 3 times. This also led to us choosing certain poses for our pictures on the poster and magazine, also the colour scheme, release date, character clothing, props and fonts for our three promotional items.

We had an image of what we wanted our poster to look like from the start and we have mostly stuck with our original ideas as it fits with the typical romantic comedy theme. We originally wanted to put our film title next to our main characters, so it looked like it was sitting on the bench. Although we decided to put our film title underneath the picture, it worked out to our advantage as it suited the romantic comedy film better and was easier to catch peoples attention. Our magazine designing was interrupted after gaining feedback which suggested our character was too posed to be displayed on the front of a film magazine. We therefore decided to go for something a little more relaxed with a background to suggest the film magazine genre.

Creating our film title and tag line first have also helped us decide on a colour scheme. We researched into other Rom-Com promotion products and noticed the colours used were bright, bold and girly. We therefore decided to use bright pink and orange as our colour scheme, the pink portrays the romance in our film whilst the orange stops it from becoming over powerfully girly and represents the comedy element to our film.

We decided not to use a specific release sate on our products as teasers don’t often display specific dates of release and just show the month or season that it is due. We researched into the release dates of other romantic comedy films and found that most of them are released during spring and summer. We chose to use ‘Summer 2011’ as our release date as the holiday breaks and hotter months seem to peak for romance.

We noticed that on previous film posters and magazines, that the characters display the chosen colour scheme through their clothing. To keep consistency, we chose to dress our main female character in pink and our male character in white for the poster. This represented our colour scheme very well and therefore worked with the writing we placed around the picture on our poster. We didn’t want to over use both colours and so chose just to show the girl in pink while leaving the man in white. On the front of our magazine cover, we chose to keep our female in plain white, this allowed her to stand out from the background and we worked our colour scheme around her with the different story titles featured in the magazine. This stopped our colour scheme from being too over powering, otherwise we would have struggled to find suitable colours to stand out from the image to use on our titles.

The font we decided to use for our teaser trailer and poster defers from that we used on our magazine. We wanted a font that would be bold and easily read, yet also romantic and swirly. We decided to keep our film title in block letter, so it stood out and caught people’s eyes, we chose to display our tag line a italic curvy writing to represent the romantic element in our film. We chose not to show our tag line on the magazine front cover and decided to display the romantic element in the title unlike before.

All of these link together and help us promote our film – 'Imperfect Mr Perfect’ very well. Having a tag line allows the story to be suggested to our audience but does not give to much away. This is will question their views and persuade them to watch the film and buy the magazine feature.

Editing..

We had to upload our footage to Pinnacle in order to edit it into a film trailer, this is where we realised we had filmed some of our footage with a HD setting, where others hadn't, this caused the footage to vary from a big screen to a smaller one. Fortunately we encountered this problem last year in our AS Media Studies, this was therefore a easy problem to resolve but changing the setting of those shots but right clicking and selecting the 'fit to screen' option. This allowed us to keep the consistency throughout our film. As mentioned before, we filmed a scene with the main female character and her friend, we deleted this shot after realising teaser trailers do not often contain dialogue and wanted to keep this convention with our trailer. We also spent a lot of time considering the different colour options for our title scenes, we wanted to the keep them consistent with our other promotional products with the pink and orange but we didn't know whether to use one slide orange, one slide pink or so mix the two colours together. After careful consideration, we chose the film title and release date to be pink, to match our film poster and for the tag line and film website to be orange as this is a less bold colour and the information is less important. After editing most of our film, we noticed the some of the shots at the beginning of the boys were off centre, we chose not to re-film these shots as it would be inconvienent, instead we chose to adjust the shots on Pinnacle by zooming in on specific shots and choosing which parts to be shown during our trailer. For our film magzine we chose to change the image we had used of our main female character as we felt it was too posed to be on the cover of a film magazine and looked part of a teen magazine, regardless of the title of the magazine. We chose a picture of our main character shown in a more relaxed pose, and used the background of the image as well instead of a block white colour. This implied that our character was happy and fun whilst still bringing out her beauty which is typical of a romantic comedy. We also experienced some hiccups on our film poster, after reviewing our final poster, we realised that one side of the image of the bench had been cut off. This was easily fixed by cropping the other side of the bench off, this allowed the image to be more symmetrical. We originally planned to put the film title next to the couple and make it look like it was sitting on the bench with them, after consideration we chose to put it underneith the bench instead, this worked out for the best and filled out the poster more, whereas we would have had big empty spaces.

Filming Evaluation..

We used a lot different people for our film trailer, and this was a major set back for us as they weren't very reliable. The main disadvantage to us was finding a main male lead character, people kept letting us down or weren't available for filming when we could. Firstly we filmed the beginning shot of the different boys, this was the easiest part as we just grabbed boys from around the school and filmed them. We then filmed our main female character's solo scene as she is played by a member of the group. We also filmed scenes between her and a friend to try and explain the narrative a bit better in the trailer but then decided against this idea as dialogue doesn't play a huge part in teaser trailers. Further on in the week our male character was able to film, we chose to constantly film the two characters in case we caught a spontaneous cute moment between the two of them. This worked to our advantage as they forgot that we were filming them and was less uptight about the situation. Considering they aren't romantically involved in real life, they worked professionally together and produced good material for us to use in our trailer. Luckily the actors were wearing several layers of clothing and was able to swap and change between shots to give the effect that the scenes were filmed on different days of their relationship. After  we uploaded all of our footage onto the laptop, we figured that we didn't have enough shots of the boys at the beginning to portray our story and therefore went on the search to film more. We kept to many Rom-Com conventions in our trailer, for example, we decided to keep our main characters young and attractive to attract our target audience. We also decided to keep the conventional deep voice over on the teaser trailer, this explains our story line without giving away too much in the filming. We browsed for days to choose our background music for our trailer, we finally found an un-copyrighted website where we could download songs for free, we chose a song called Hold On, which sits comfortably with the Rom-Com feel as it is soft and gives off a happy vibe.

Font Analysis..

Throughout our three promotional products, we have not used the same font for our film title. Although on our poster and film trailer we have kept the title in block letters, this allowed the audience to be able to glance at the poster and know what it was called without having to stop and stare at it for too long. Also with the film trailer, where the film title is only shown for a matter of seconds, we did not want the audience to not be able to read it, or have to show it for a long period of time for them to have to work it out. We chose to use a different fonts for our magazine cover as this is typically seen on other magazine covers. We chose not to use the block writing for our title as we have done before and decided to use more a more romantic font. This made up for not having our tag line "love makes the imperfect perfect" on our magazine cover, as this is seen in a more romantic font rather than our title on our poster and teaser trailer.

(L-R) Film Poster, Film Trailer, Magazine Cover.

Magazine Cover Drafts..

This is our our magazine cover drafts, we chose to display only our female character on the front as you tend to only see the main character on film magazines. We chose to portray her as a pretty young girl with a plain background to make her stand out. After getting feedback from our peers, we realised that this particular layout is mostly seen on the front of fashion and teen magazines. We therefore decided to take some more photos where we focused on choosing a specific background. Also, the red and black colour scheme doesn't sit comfortably with the consistency of our teaser trailer and poster as we have used pink and orange on them. We have decided to take another picture of our main character in a more relaxed environment and use an real background instead of a block colour to portray a more film magazine feel to the front cover. We will also use more compatible colours on our texts to keep consistency with our other promotion products. After doing some more research on film magazine covers, we noticed that there wasn't always just one font used on the page, so we decided to try out different fonts on our magazine cover, this made it more realistic. We also added more story lines on our front page to add to the real magazine effect.We encountered problems when the image seemed to be stretched, we decided to add a grey advertisement block at the top and bottom of the magazine cover, this improved the quality of the image as we didn' have to stretch it. We included the obvious elements of a magazine like the date, bar code and issue number, this gave it more authenticity.

  

Final Poster..

This is our final romantic comedy poster. Typically we have kept the main characters centre of the poster, as we said, we kept our actress on the left and actor on the right like the Rom-COM posters we researched earlier. We dressed our actors in pink and white to match our colour scheme for the poster to keep our theme consistent. We also kept the names at the top of the poster above the actor's heads, seen on  we made the last names bigger and a different colour to stand out and to balance out the colours used overall. We centred our film title and tag line for maximum effect on the eye grabbing of the audience. We also decided to change the full stop to a heart to make the poster seem more romantic, putting this in a different colour divides up the title's colour so it is less of a block impact on the eye. We chose not to challenge the convention of the billing block and decided to keep it at the bottom of the poster, as it is seen as unimportant and did not want to distract our audience from the main features. We also decided to make the release date unspecific and stuck with the traditional romantic season for advertisement. We noticed that all films create a website to advertise their film, although we did not do this we included a website address on our poster to keep it looking professional.