Another project I worked on while away from my blog was the Film Distribution Project!
Here my partners, Sofia, Maria, and I received a prompt for a story from another student and were tasked with creating a trailer, teaser, and distribution plan for the film.
Our assigned film was an action film about a vigilante, Raith, who returned to being a vigilante after an old friend and villain, Crimson, reemerged into the public eye for ~nefarious deeds~ like poisoning the city's water supply.
Though the writer originally titled the film "Sinner's Past," we really liked the idea of poisining the water supply, so we changed the name to "Crimson Wave."
We were super stoked to work on this, and immediatley began planning.
We first decided to have Maria play Crimson and me play Raith, that way we could have more control over the characters without worrying about planning around someone outside of our groups schedule. This decision did ultimatley change how we could distrubute and market our film, since an action film with two female leads would not target the typical action fan.
Also, we were provided some ideas about scenes from the film and were provided this: "Crimson's past crimes will be shown and discussed by police officers looking for him while Raith listens." We really enjoyed the idea of having a police officer to drive some of the plot along, so Maria recruited her boyfriend and brother to help us out.
We then began shooting our teaser. Though Maria had a neat idea involving shooting by a water pipe, the sound of a gun cocking and a cut to black, and blood flowing though water, we found that with our locations and time constraints, we wouldn't be able to achieve this goal. So, we altered our idea to show a police guard stumbling across evidince of Crimsons evil actions and Crimson coming up behind him and killing him. We wanted to keep the idea of introducing Crimson as a major threat, not afraid to kill without mercy. Then, we storyboarded what it would look like, and after a night of filming, we had ourselves a teaser!
Around the same time, Maria and I took pictures of us in our vigilantie/villain outfits and power poses to use for our films key art!
Then came the task of the trailer. We knew we wanted it to be fast paced, use of guns, and a lot of close ups. There was also a scene in the trailer of the new movie, The 355, where one of the characters breaks into anothers house abd both pull guns out on each other and rapidly count down while at gunpoint (for a visual, click here). This scene really stuck out to me because it managed to create tension and high stakes without any fight sequences, like action trailers normally have. For our trailer, we also wanted to include a scene like this.
Another scene we planned to add was one where Raith looks up Crimson to confirm whether or not she actually came back. In her dark room, Raith would be illuminated by just her computer light, and it would switch to red when she saw Crimson really had returned. Our group took a variety of this shot because we didnt know which version we liked the best, and though I don't have the clip we used in the final trailer, I do have this outtake where Sofia's phone started to ring. Still gives a good idea of what one of the shots looked like! Sorry, just thought it was too funny not to include. Warning for cursing btw, you can watch it here.
Anyways, we continued filming, and once we felt conficent in the number and variety of shots/scenes we had gathered, we could begin editing the trailer. Though it was tough to get it up to the 2 minute mark due to bad video quality or shots that didn't flow, Sofi, our editor, managed to pull through. With that, take a look at our trailer here!
There are some things that I would change with our final project. For example, filming individual moments/lines rather than entire scenes pulled right from the film, making the trailer more focused on Raith, faster action in our shots, and different organization of the credits. However, I definetley am walking away from this project having learned something new, mainly that trailers are incredibly challenging, but also that you have to find ways to work around peoples different creative processes in order to ensure good communication and a quality product.
All this being said, its time to move on to my next big project! I have a lot of ideas floating around, I cant wait to blog about them and decide which idea to pursue.
Thats enough typing for tonight, see you soon blog!
Song for 2/7
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