Empire magazine analysis- The Dark Knight Rises- Batman vs Bane

These two magazines have been used to promote the film The dark Knight rises. It is a very clever idea as it is realising two different front covers fort he same magazine. This means that they will be able to sell more copies as big fans of 'Batman' will highly likely want both copies as they are collectors of the merchandise.

On each front cover Batman and Bane are the centre of attention. They have been placed in front of the Empire magazine title which is very unusual and gives the characters a 3D effect which makes it look like they are coming out of the picture. This layout suggests that they feel they are going to sell more copies by drawing readers in by the batman feature than recognising the make of the magazine.

Each picture looks like it could be from certain action shots from the film as the characters seem alive and in motion. The picture of Bane has very good lighting which could be as they want the viewer to buy the magazine as they are interested to see what the character looks like in the film.

The writing of the film is written very big at the bottom left hand side of the cover. The background is very dark and busy which means that the title of the film still stands out against the dark writing. The other writing around the image is written in blue and white writing which does not take such as prominent feature on the front cover. On the left hand side of the cover in a yellow box, which almost looks like a warning sign, shows that there is another magazine which features the other character in the film this will make it obvious to the reader that there is another Batman feature that they may have missed and make them want to buy it. The big header at the top of the page, 'The ultimate exclusive', suggests that it is an opportunity not to be missed and is a one off exclusive. This will again draw big batman fans into the magazine and make them want to read it as they don't want to think they are missing out.

Mask choice

From watching our trailer, it is clear to see that we had two masks, one painted and one not. Both masks were identical, but instead of keeping them the same, we painted one to make it creepier. When choosing our mask, we had many masks to choose from, that had facial expressions and were a greeny colour. (go down to 'masks' post) We chose the white masks on purpose as they are expressionless, which destroys any connection you could have to our villains. Our idea behind the white mask was that fear and emotions, are based on facial expressions that you are able to see. By making our villains wear masks that are emotionless, everything about them is cold and full of hate, which in the long run makes them a lot more frightening and scary.

GREEN MASK WITH EMOTIONS -

WHITE MASK WITH NO EMOTIONS -

As you can see, the white mask is generally just a lot scarier than the green one, even though in these images we are wearing them. Generally woman/girls are not as frightening as men in horrors, but just by wearing the white mask, Beth looks a lot scarier; which is why we chose plain, expressionless masks. Also the white mask looks slightly funny, so we did not want people to laugh at the face on the mask as it may detract from the fright we want to create.

The Unwelcome teaser trailer

 This is our final teaser trailer 'The Unwelcome' for our A2 trailer.

Practice titles

We have now decided on a name for our film so will start researching font types and backgrounds for our main title and the release date for our film. We have also decided where we want this information in the trailer so will be able to put the titles straight in when we have decided on the design and the effects that we will use.

 

 

 

We looked at this title and thought that it was a clever idea having something in the background. We this this is effective as it makes the picture more interesting and gives the audience a visual image to think about. We also really like the child like writing in the centre of the ring as we felt that this would be very effective in our trailer as it would relate the the child like aspects that feature in our film.

 

 

We thought this title style would not suit our film as it is not very interesting and we also felt that it wasn't very powerful. When creating our title we want to use an interesting background which has a link to our story line. We also think that our titles would be more effective if we used child like handwriting to relate to the nursery rhyme playing over the top of our trailer.

 

 

 

 

We have created this title using Adobe Premiere Elements. We feel that it creates a scary atmosphere as the blue smoke on the black background engulfs the title of our film. This could symbolise that the evil villain in our film captures all his victims and the gold writing could show the innocence of his victims. The gold writing shows up against the black background and the lower case letters make the title look simple and childish. 

 

This title could also be effective for our film as it clearly shows the scary storyline and gives the audience an image of the mask in their head at the end. The white mask shows up well on the black background and enhances the black lines around the mask like the mask from our film trailer. The writing is white with a shadow in the background this makes the title seem ghost like and misty. Here again we have chosen lower case letters to give the suggestion of childish writing.

 

This title is also very effective as it gives the audience the feeling of the unknown and something hidden in the darkness. We chose this mask for this title as it looks faint and almost ghostly. This may give the audience the idea that they don't know where it is. This masks also fits well with the writing. We tried to make the writing look like it was written by a child as we want to give the impression of contrasting ideas and make the audience feel uncomfortable as children are being related to these scary events.

 

We have chosen to use the 3rd title which is shown above as we think it fits best with the story line of our film and also we think that it is best suited to our target audience.

The music debate

We are not sure whether we want the childs voice singing the nursery rhyme over the top of our music so we have created a table to show our thoughts and feeling to whether it would be a good idea:

Advantages	Disadvantages
Adds more depth to our trailer music	It may not sound childish enough
Sound eerie	It may not fit in with the music properly
We’ve created it ourselves	The audience may not understand why a child’s voice is heard
it may fits well with the background music	It may detract from our music
A nursery rhyme is a novel idea
The nursery rhyme contrasts well with the horror genre

From this table you can see that there are more advantages to disadvantages having

the childs voice in the background of our film. Therefore we have decided to continue with the nursery rhyme idea and are developing our own music to fit with the voice of the child.

Animatic

We have produced this animatic to show the format and ideas for our trailer before we produced it. We have used screen shots from our trailer to show clearly our thoughts and opinions. This animatic shows the shots that we will include and the music or instruments that we plan to play over our trailer. It also shows the scenes and each individual shots in conjuction with each other which gives us an idea of what the audience will see. Another advantage of an animatic is you can decided on the length of the shots, this will save us time and we will find the trailer easier to edit.

Storyboard

These pictures are of our storyboard that we created before making our film. We have added screen shots on the left hand side after we created the film as we thought it would display each event more clearly. We will later turn these screen grabs into an animatic to show each individual shot in detail and talk about the titles and certain shots that we plan to use. These images are shown in the sequence that they will be displayed in the trailer so that it can be ‘pre-visualized’. We can also see how the scenes run together and make sure that the events that happen are in the right order throughout the trailer and have the right angles of shot and special effects to them. A story board is also a good way of planning music to fit for each shot and decide how it will progress to create tension and suspense. We may move shots around to display it differently and change the angle. This will make the audience feel more scared and will depend on the way that the actors portray the characters.

• Originally we had drawn out all of the shots and written a lot about them, but unfortunately our storyboard got lost. Therefore to save time and to give a different look we screen grabbed images from our trailer.