The Outtakes

Here's a peek into the process of the filming!

Official Poster

Audience Feedback

Recently, we completed drafts of our texts and we decided to e-mail these to some audiences as a way of identifying how effective the texts are, whether they have the desired effect on our audiences and where we need to improve.

Judging from the responses that we got, it seems that on the whole, the audiences were impressed with the results. One of the most common positives was that they felt that the trailer did a good job of not giving too much of the plot away and the enigma generated curiosity and intrigue. They also liked the layout, colours and fonts included in the magazine front cover and the poster as they thought that these clearly indicated the genre of the texts.

However, one of the negatives that they found was that the music was not as conventionally Western as they would have expected from a Western trailer and that it did not quite match the feel of the trailer. They also identified that they would like more information on the movie and the actors included in the trailer as we had only included information about the release date and the past works of the directors with just the one line - 'Who do you trust?' - in relation to the content of the movie in order to keep the trailer as enigmatic as possible.

So, we have responded to the constructive criticism of our audiences by including more text in the trailer with information on the cast and the directors as the audiences wanted and we are currently working on creating a new soundtrack! :)

Poster: Final Images

Here are our selection of the final images to be included in the poster:

'EAGLE'

'LORETTA'

'SHERIFF'

First of all, we decided on this image for 'Eagle' as we wanted an image that slightly concealed his face with shadows. We wanted this as, usually, across all texts - not just Western films - the hero is often shown in brighter light than the villain as light is often associated with good and the dark with bad/evil but we wanted to challenge this. We wanted to portray to the audiences the fact that he is an unconventional hero as within the storyline of the film, he is an outsider, yet, he manages to 'save the day' - conventionally, in Western movies, the 'outsider' is often the 'bad guy'.

Likewise, you can see in the 'Sheriff''s image that we have used a lot brighter lighting as he is the 'Sheriff' - a job that supposedly means that he is of good character and is capable of protecting the settlement. However, we have also created a dark shadow behind him in order to depict that he has a part of him that is hidden and dark. Also, in the image you can see that the sheriff has his hand on his gun - a show of power - and has an arrogant expression on his face as he is looking down his nose at the audience. These all hint to the audience that the Sheriff could be taking advantage of his power. Therefore, we chose this image of the Sheriff to go onto the poster.

Going back to the chosen image for 'Eagle', we have chosen to make use of an extremely low angle in order to show that he may be an unconventional hero - achieved by the use of lighting techniques - he is a hero, nonetheless. Low angles often force the audience to treat the subject with higher regard and respect. Also, we chose to have 'Eagle's arms crossed with a serious expression and against a simple background in order to portray his personality to the audience - closed off, serious and mysterious.

In 'Loretta's case, we chose to have her in the bar as her job as a bar maid predominantly the reason why she ends up in danger in the film (she overhears the Sheriff's less-than-respectable plans and the Sheriff threatens her to keep her mouth shut), so, the bar is a very important location for her. Also, she is looking into the camera with a soft gaze - letting the audience know that this character is the 'damsel' that is so often present in Western films and also in most other texts, according to Propp's theory. We also chose to have her in natural lighting as we felt that this depicted her ...

We had previously decided from our poster analysis that a lot of posters for Western films seems to have illustrated or painted effects ... So, now that we have chosen the images to be used in the poster, it's time to experiment around on Adobe Photoshop to see how we, too, can achieve the illustrated effect that was evident in so many Western posters.

Here are some of my experimentations:

 The 'Film Grain' effect ...

The 'Palette Knife' effect ...

The 'Paint Daubs' effects ...

 However, in the end the effect that I felt best achieved what we wanted was 'Poster Edges' ... So, here are the final images that will be used in the poster:

Bye Bye Georgie ...

Unfortunately, one of our group members, Georgie, has decided that this isn't the path for her and has decided to leave ... So, we just want to say 'Thank You!' for all your contribution, Georgie, you will be missed and good luck! :)

19/12/11: Filming Report

Today, after months of planning, location hunting, casting and negotiating filming times with our actors, our group members and our actors finally met up for the filming of our trailer! We scheduled to meet up at 10:00 at Folkestone Bus Station, then head to Dymchurch where we could use Megan's house as a base for getting our actors dressed and made-up and then set out to the vast and deserted fields as the location for our filming. However, one of our actors (who was meant to be acting as the antagonist - 'Bully Edwards') made a last-minute decision to drop out due as he was not feeling well. This meant that we had to make quick changes to some aspects of the trailer by cutting out our comedic character, 'Grave Digger', and reassign roles with the actors that we had remaining. It was decided that our actor who was orginally casted for 'Grave Digger' would play our bad boy of the movie, 'Sheriff Bully Edwards'. Although, we were slightly behind on our schedule, we managed to get all our actors dressed up and to our filming location.

For the first filming site, we chose a deserted field near Megan's house as it thought it would be the best representative of the vast, dry lands of the Souther parts of USA that Western movies are set in. In this site, we were to film the ending scenes of the trailer - the 'shoot-out' scene.

Here, we had a few problems in terms of trying to find the perfect camera angle in which modern developments and technology would not be seen. Although, the location was rather deserted, there were several interuptions such as buildings in the distance, telephone and electricity lines and so on. However, after a bit of moving around and with Megan's excellent camera skills we managed to find angles in which none of them were present!

We then managed to get all the necessary shots that we needed from the location so we decided to move on. We would've liked to re-do some of the scenes in order to get even better shots, however, although we had checked the weather forecast beforehand, the weather was not on our side with sudden showers of rain so we were unable to spend much longer in that location. After that, we managed to get a few establishing shots (such as of train tracks and so on). Then, we headed over to Sophie's (our actress) house, which with its all wood and rustic charm was the perfect filming location for our indoor scenes.

We used Sophie's kitchen area, in which we had to create our 'bar' set. The covering up of modern appliances and products turned out to be much harder task than expected ... But after a lot of moving things around and a lot of covering things with towels, we finally managed to turn Sophie's kitchen into a convincing Western bar! We also adjected the lighting to make it dimmer, in order to recreate a more older and natural feel. Also, we felt that the shadows would aid in conveying a mysterious vibe to the audience.

So, after a long while of shooting inside Sophie's house (the actors found it very hard to keep a straight face ... haha), we finally managed to finished the filming! We then moved on to do the photoshoot for the magazine cover and the posters, for which we had to use several other light sources such as extra lamps and torches from several different angles in order to create light and shadows exactly where we wanted it. And that concluded our long day of filming! Despite having to cope with last minute changes, time constraints and after giving much direction to our actors and with Megan diligently working behind the camera, we managed to get some good material for the trailer.

And now the long process of editing begins ...

Trailer Storyboard