mikehopkinsa2mediastudies

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Return to the Railroad - Double Page Spread Second Edition

With the revised second edition of the DPS, I set out to create a more professional product that is worthy of being the representative for the film and my work. 

First, I actually created the background of the DPS in photoshop instead of natively in InDesign. Because of my skills and more experience in photoshop, I feel as though I was able to create a better result and more professional image than I could with InDesign. I changed the title text, changed the size and location of the demon slightly, & changed the picture of me on set filming to match the theme a bit better. I switched from one column of text to two, as I was able to fit much more information on these two columns. I also believe spreading the text out onto two columns made the DPS look sharper and more professional. I also changed the text from a solid white to a grayish colour, so it doesn’t pop out too much but is still easy to read, as I believe this sticks to my creepy/eerie theme. 

I believe this revised edition of the DPS looks much more professional and is a good representation of my work and work on the project as a whole.

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Return to the Railroad - Double Page Spread Second Edition

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Return to the Railroad Double Page Spread - First Edition

My first attempt at the DPS was like my first attempt at the poster; amateurish. Once feedback about my product was received, I opted to change a number of things to make it look more professional, and these changes will be seen in the second edition.

I wanted the DPS to look similar to the poster, so that the branding and advertising matched, which created an easily identifiable template for the marketing for the film, so if you’ve seen one piece of print media you’ll recognize the other easier.  I liked having the demon as the centerpiece again, as it created both fear and mystery, which is what the film is based on. The text has been placed to the side, in an attempt to keep the DPS organized and keep all attention on either the text or the demon, as I believe if it’s cluttered the viewer will be less interested. The actual text is just placeholder text, as I am yet to create the actual text to go with the article, as I’m just in the designing stages.

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Return to the Railroad Double Page Spread - First Edition

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Evaluation - Return to the Railway

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Return to the Railway - Final Edit

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Poster - Second Edition 

This is my revised version of my film poster. I believe it’s a huge improvement over my first poster, but it still keeps with the theme I set. 

I got rid of the idea of having all characters on the right side of the demon, as it ended up looking cluttered and amateurish. Instead, I opted for two characters instead, and these two in particular as I had some nice high-resolution stills of them, which made the poster look good. I set the size of the poster to be an international standard A3 size, as I feel this size is the right size for a poster to be. 

I also changed the title text, as I feel it could have been more impactful. By increasing it’s size and placement, it makes the title stand out more, with the intention of being more eye-catching. This is to draw in more people to look at the poster and think about viewing the film. To keep with the eye-catching theme, I added some effects to the text too to help it stand out. These effects are outer glow and shadow. Outer glow is used to create a border around the text, which again helps make it pop from the image. The shadow effect was used on the “Railroad” text as I believe it added some detail to the text, which made it seem a bit more spooky and stand out. 

I added some movie-poster style text to the bottom of the poster too, as you see this a lot with professional movie posters. This text usually contains important information, like about who made the film, who stars in it, the copyright information, & so on. I believe my addition of this adds a feel of professionalism to the work. 

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Poster - First Edition

While waiting for feedback from the first copy of the film, I created my first version of the poster. I created this using Adobe Photoshop, which I had previous skills with thanks to the use of it in the first year of A-Level Media Studies. 

I used the brilliant layers feature in Photoshop to make my poster. As shown in the second image, you can see what I put in each layer and my theme for naming them, so I could keep track of what was in what. 

The third image is a screenshot of the font I used for the Return to the Railroad title text.  I received feedback from a few people on this poster, and the feedback that I received can be summed up in one word; Amateur. This isn’t my best photoshop work, but I liked what I had made but I can also see and agree where third parties are coming from when they say that. Lucky with the amount of time we have to create, I’m able to start to get to work on the second edition of the poster quickly. 

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Return To The Railroad - First Edit

The first edit of the film is a very rough and very thrown together piece of media. All it consists of is the video and the video synced up and placed into an order. This was just so we had some sort of idea what the film looked like in sequence, and so we can get audience feedback. While filming, we did a few things differently compared to how we did them in planning or in the script, but we made these changes for the better and to adapt to how the filming situation was. 

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Return To The Railroad - First Rough Edit

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Railway Hotel - Scout 2

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Railway Hotel - Map Location

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Location - Railway Hotel

The Railway Hotel is where we’ve decided we want to film our short film. It’s located not even 5 minutes walk away from the college, and the owners are incredibly friendly. The actual building is old and creepy looking, which is aided by the fact it is dimly lit and surrounded by old brown wood. 

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Clip 1 from Railway Hotel Scout Out

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This clip is when we rented out the equipment for a bit, to learn how to use it.