Ancillary Task

Ancillary Task

For any Movie, Short Film or even book, there will always be some from of advertisement for it to make the public aware of their products. These advertisements can come in different forms such as Trailers or TV adverts. However for a Short Film with no budget the most obvious way to advertise your Short Film is by creating an in detail poster and a Radio Advert. Michelle and Myself focused on doing research and planning and the creating of the poster, and Yazid  focused on the research and planning as well as the creating of the radio show. 

Creating The Short-Film Poster

This poster gives the feeling that the Short-Film is going to be very serious. The colours used and the editing is very good and it gives a very big and clear clue about what the Short-Film is going to be about. This helped us make decision for our Poster because there is a lot of blurring and hiding in this Short-Film poster because they want to give us the clue that there is something to hide but will be revealed once you watch it. Which is what our short film is about, and this is why we felt it would be best if we used a similar idea for our poster. This poster is very specific to what the short film is going to be about. By seeing the poster you can tell that it is to do with something landing from the sky and it is being discovered by a little boy. This is what we were trying to do with our poster, we were trying to give a bit of the Short-Film away but not a lot because we wanted to surprise our audience.

Main Features of a Short-Film Poster:

Colour: The colour in a short Film poster is very important, because it has the power to create a strong feeling and message from when you just look at the poster. This poster has more of a green colour to it but they have decided to keep it natural, with the sky and the view. This Poster helped us with our Short-Film poster because we felt that sticking to two colours which are black and white would make the poster stand out.

Slogans: This poster does not have any slogans but this is a code and convention of posters, and as you can see the poster above doesn't have a slogan so we decided that we would not use one as we felt our editing was strong enough to get our point of the short film across to our audience.

Arrangement: Arrangement is very important in any poster, not just for Short-Films because if the Title on the poster is placed in an unprofessional place, it will make it seem as if the poster and short-film is messy and no one would want to consider watching it whereas if the positioning was placed well then people would pay more attention to it.



For the making of the poster we decided that we wanted something that would give an idea of what our Short Film is going to be about. The first idea was to take a picture of the two main characters staring each other in the eye and keeping a straight face. Below is the first picture we decided we wanted to use for our poster. It was a good picture to have as a poster but we thought it was too simple and wouldn't interest the audience to watch our Short-Film.

Shortly after we decided that we wanted to get the extra characters involved. We decided that this would make the poster more interesting as it gave us more do to with editing and a wider variety of choices of things to do, to make it as eye catching as possible. The following is a picture of the characters that we are going to use for our poster. These are the unedited images of which we were deciding to use for our poster. 

After taking this picture we had a group meeting about what we should do with the image and we decided that we would edit the front two characters so that they stand out and then blur the background characters so that it concentrates on our two main characters. We decided to do this because it reflects what our short film is trying to achieve. By blurring out the background characters and concentrating on the front two it shows that they do not care about their friends and are just concentrating on themselves, we felt this would be the best option for the poster because it is very similar to what our short film is like. The first Edit for the poster is shown below: 

The Editing on the Full poster is shown below, using Photoshop. We felt Photoshop would be the best for the editing of our poster because we tried to keep it very simple but very powerful and the tools on photo shop allowed us to do this very well. For the font of our heading, we had to use an online website called "1001 fonts" which had a selection of different fonts, also shown below. we picked a font that reflects what the short film is going to be about as well as blending in with the poster to make it look better. 

This edit shows the black and white tool. This is what we used to get the background colour.

This is after the effects of the black and white tool. We then used a scissor tool to cut out the front to characters and a blur tool blur out the characters behind them.

This is the font website and we used the last font and edited on photoshop to get this finished version:

This is the finished Poster for our Short-Film.

Creating the Radio Advert

Research into existing Radio Adverts: 

Me and my group have done some research into existing radio adverts for short films and these are the ones we have found. We decided to pick these because they sound serious and have a catching tone to it which makes you want to stop and listen. This is what we were trying to achieve with our Radio advert.

Codes and Conventions of Radio Adverts: 

Timing: Timing is one of the biggest codes and conventions of a radio advert for a short film, they shouldn't be longer than one minute and usually most of them last to up to 40 seconds. we are trying to keep ours at 39 seconds because if we exceed to 40 seconds then usually there is an extra charge, as Radio companies charge in 5 second slots. So timing has to be very precise.

Music: Almost every short film radio advert I have listened to has contained some form of music, this makes the advert more interesting as listeners can obviously only listen to the Advert but not see it. so if there is no music and just talking viewers may get bored and make an assumption that the short film is going to be as boring as the radio advert.

Quotes From Short-Film: Using quotes from the short film is another code and convention which most radio adverts have used, this is a good technique depending on the line from the short film used because it can give the listeners an insight of what the Film is going to be about.

Our Short-Film Radio Advert: 

This is our groups radio advert which we are going to use for our Short-Film, and we decided that we wanted to create some tension at the beginning and near the end because that is usually what the audience want to hear and that is also usually what makes them listen. From listening to the radio advert you know that it is going to be about lying. The voice we chose to use was serious because thats the point we were trying to get across with our short-film.

Feedback:


We received a lot of criticism for our Radio show as the vox pop above shows. So we decided that we were going to change the middle part of our Radio advert which involved taking out the tension music and replacing it with a quote from the Short-film.



 As a group we felt that this was the better decision because we wanted to listen to our audience and to give them what they wanted in order for them to watch the short-film.

This is our final Short-Film Radio Advert, this was made after taking all the Audience Feedback into consideration.

Here is a screenshot of the editing of the radio show. As the screenshot shows, some of the recordings were too high and in order to bring them down to sound better we had to use the amplifying tool which is circled. The amplify tool allows us to make recordings sound higher and lower, and in this case we wanted to bring ours down because it was tool loud and sound off when it came to putting the whole radio show together.