By George Rose

I used a lot of research websites to look up post apocalypse dystopian films like Wikipedia, YouTube, IMDB. While researching what makes a good film I found a good post. One by Dr Eric Dodson, that discussed the genre in detail and the other being an interview with Shane Acker and his 9 rules to creating a Post-Apocalyptic film. This helped my group and I plan out our trailer and the story of what it needed to include. Shane Acker Article: post+apocalyptic-movieshttp://io9.com/ /shane-ackers-9-rules-for-creating-great- post+apocalyptic-movies Dr Eric Dodson Article:

From the information I have gathered and learnt this image on the left is a screen shot from Photoshop. This is how you change the layers from all the imaged you want to be included in the poster we were making. If gives you the option to choose what image you want to edit and labels them under layers This is how you edit your many different images that you have collected. Once you have selected the layer that you wish to edit you then have the option to change how it looks, add an adjustment and change the colour of the image to make it suit what you want. Photoshop

Film websites helped me with my research as well because it showed information about the film. It helped me as well to think about other media advertisement ways like the poster and magazine covers. I used Google images to look at magazine designs from little white lies and also for posters.

I looked at the trailers on YouTube of other films that were similar to ours to get an idea how they used the camera shots for effect, how they were put together, the music they used to give it the dystopian feel to the film, any titles they added to give the audience a slight clue like in 28 days later they explain the infection. Lastly, what they showed in the movie to see how much they gave away.

To help us with our research and planning we chose 3 films that would help influence us: 28 days later was a big influence on us as it had the same disaster as our movie where people had become infected and were trying to hunt down survivors. it helped up with the trailer idea as well about how it showed what happened. This gave us ideas for our film which helped us with more of idea. Another film that influenced us with our film was ‘The Road’ this road is about a farther and son travelling along the road to head south to head to the sea. On their journey they encounter cannibals that want to kill them. In this you never know what happened to the world and how it got to the way it is. We got our influence from this as the character I play is always on the move. Trying to survive and do it being unnoticed from the threats around. One of our influences was the film I am legend. This film is about a man that is the last man in Manhattan after an infection hits. He is forced to live in Manhattan to find a cure. His aim to live and survive throughout the days until he finds a cure. This links into our film because our film is based on an infection that hits the world that leaves few humans left on this planet. Fighting every day to survive. This is one of the films that gave us a lot of influence on our film.

The blogs are a good way for us to help share out information that we find. The blogs are helpful because you can access them anywhere you are which gives me the opportunity to do work anywhere. It helped me see the work I did in the first year to see how I can improve and see the conventions and for me to refresh my memory if I had forgotten anything. Our group exchanged phone numbers as well in case we needed something and to plan out our trailer locations and organise times and dates to meet and film. It was also a good way to share images, our final trailer, poster, magazine cover and more.

I did most of my presentations on PowerPoint as I don’t fully understand how to use Prezzi and I am most confident on PowerPoint as I can still use video links, pictures and it can be filled with information. I used this to do my initial research on the post-apocalyptic and the social realism genre, my initial film idea and all of my evaluation questions. I would also create a new blog entry to add information if I felt that it didn’t need to presented on PowerPoint as there wasn’t enough information or it would look better just on the blog

On the blog I uploaded files/image/videos and then imported them into my blog. I used them in my blog posts by clicking either the ‘video’/ ‘image’ tool and linking the files. I linked words so that it would link to my work or other relevant web pages as seen in the examples above. I did this by highlighting a word, clicking the ‘link’ tool and then pasting a URL or an uploaded file.

For my magazine research I looked at little white lies webpage, good images on how the covers are designed. This gave me and my group how we wanted it to be designed and how the lay out would look.

For the filming of our trailer we had a number of equipment that we used while filming. The DSLR 550D camera with a 35mm lense is what we used to film all of our different shots. This was different from the camera that we used in the first year of filming when I did media AS. The image is a lot clearer and it’s a lot easier to use with the settings. For example how to white balance the screen, focus and enhancing the image. We used a recoding device to record the voice over that would be added to our trailer. We would then have to get the voice recording of me and put it as a voice over when we were constructing our trailer A2 camera AS camera

Once we had complete all of our shots we went into the editing suit to put together our piece. We used Adobe Premiere to edit our trailer. This is the same software that we used last year to edit our trailer. As I did media 2 years ago I got the teacher to help me remember how to use abode premier as I had forgotten all of the key concepts that I would have needed to use. I was not the person who constructed our film trailer however I did learn the basic of editing and found the music by going on incomputech to find the right sound for the trailer.

James bodkin did all of the editing on this poster. He used Photoshop to add both of the images and put them together. He did this but layering them over each other. He then highlighted and cut the image so that he could use the ripped effect. He then added in the titles by adding in more layers and changed the colour and the font so that it matched the film. We then did the fine print which included all our names in the piece. We had to add each name in but editing an original copy from another film and change their names to ours. James then changed the colour of the image to give it a more grainy, dark image to suit the genre.