Music choices

For our final trailer we had to change music because of copyright issues on our previous choices. We decided to choose two songs from artists we had discovered were unsigned. We chose to crop these songs and then merge them into one for our trailer separated by a sound effect.
Our first song was stigma-

Our second song was... -

The songs we had previously chosen but were unable to use because of copyright issues were
Chase and Status- Fire in your eyes backing track - from 10 seconds in.

Pendulum- The tempest instrumental- from 1.53 seconds in.

We merged these songs together to give the audience a change in music because we felt this would keep their attention better.

Poster - Completed

We then added text to our poster and came up with a completed design:

We went for the image with the lips and eyes pixelated as we felt it was more striking and creepier than just his eyes being pixelated. We had the title at the top, and then just the portrait shot of the protagonist on a black background. We felt this was the most effective and simple way to attract our target audience. This also makes the text stand out, due to the luminous green colour. We chose this colour as it features heavily in some games, such as Call of Duty, so serves as an intertextual reference. We then included our slogan or tagline, "Some live to play. Others play to live" along with the date of our release. We then had the text at the bottom in a smaller size, with the credits about producers and directors etc. This was because it is a code and convention of film posters, so we needed it on ours.

Choosing an Actor!

Our teaser trailer is based on a teenage boy's obsession with video games. We knew that choosing a teenage boy under the age of 16 was going to be a challenge due to parental permission, and the type of things they would be exposed to (in terms of violence), was limiting. Our only option was therefore to choose an boy older then 16 so there would be no constraints to the times we needed them to film and the type of things they would be doing.

The first actor we considered was James Eustace:













18 years old
6ft
Blonde
Thin

The second actor we considered is Miles Watson:













Miles is:

18 years old
5ft 7 inches
Dark haired
Muscular

Our third option was Marc Lequime:

18 years old
6ft 3 inches
Dark haired
muscular

After consideration we felt Miles was our best option for "Gameboy" as we felt the other two males were too tall to play a boy in his middle teens. In addition, with his muscular stature we felt the violent scenes would look more convincing.

Poster pictures - Further development

Following discussion on our poster image, we decided to keep it simple. We decided to pixelate the actor's features such as his eyes and his lips.

We at first just pixelated his eyes:

We felt this was really effective as it was simple and slightly creepy at the same time.

We then pixelated both his eyes and lips:

We felt this was also effective and more striking than the first image so we've chosen this to be our final poster image.

Poster Images - Pixelated

We decided to then pixelate his face on it's own to see if it was good enough to be our poster image on it's own. These show the different levels of pixelation that we experimented with. We then unanimously decided that it wasn't good enough and it wasn't clear that it was connected to our film. 

Initial Poster Image

This was our first idea for our poster. It was influenced by the Gamer poster, with the face of the actor, and the face of the game avatar being transposed so that you could only see the actor's key features. This was acheived with a square type brush, so that it gave the impression of being pixelated.

Opinion was initially divided over this image, but all felt that it needed to be much clearer that it was a game avatar, to ensure that our intended audience was attracted to the film.  

Website Design

This is a screenshot of our final website design for the homepage. 

The page features a large photo of our main actor, which has his eyes pixelated. This was also our poster image. We felt it stood out on the page and instantly made it clear that he was the protagonist of our film. We included key features like the actor's name, the date and rating on the page. 

We also included an option to "share" the page through popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

We also included a rating from a relevant media. We went with the gaming magazine, 360-Gamer which we felt had the same target audience as our film and that our film would appeal to their readers.