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Film Review

FILM REVIEW EVALUATION

(due to the size of the film review, it is displayed below the evaluation)

This film review was written for a magazine that I invented called "Viral Magazine". The magazine is all about technology, media and everything around that. I chose to write my review for this magazine because it relates to my target audience who's lives revolve a lot around the media and technology. This review would also fit in Empire Magazine because it follows a similar layout and colour scheme. This film review follows a similar layout to other film reviews that really do exist in the world. After doing a lot of research on film reviews a few things became clear, film reviews found in magazines always have the same features: photo(s) from the film, the film title, quotations from famous people within the media or film industry, there is a rating on the film and the review itself talks about the best and worst parts of a film. These features can also be found in my film review, the main photo (the biggest one) is a key moment in the film and is interesting. The film title is in the biggest font and the colour scheme for the whole film review is a dark red. The review itself talks about the directors (myself and Megan), the actors, the editing, the camerawork and the film of the plot. The quotations from famous people are from Rian Johnson who directed the neo noir we studied earlier, Brick. He is also currently directing the new Star Wars film which shows that he's relevant in the film industry and knows what he's talking about. I have a screenshot of Kanye West's twitter account showing that he used the social media platform Twitter to talk about Chantage. This is relevant because not only is he a huge public figure in the media but it's also Twitter which is commonly used by my target audience. The final quotation is from Leonardo Dicaprio who is another influential man in the film industry who is also admired by my target audience. The actual film, Chantage didn't turn out as great as we hoped so writing about it positively was hard, however I did pick out good points on actors who played especially well and specific scenes in the film that worked exceptionally well.

Chantage Film Poster

In order to create this final film poster I had to take a series of photographs using vivid lighting, reflectors and flash guns in order to create the shadows and brightness of the photo. I took separate images of Holly's hand holding the revolver and another of Holly's hand holding the lipstick. In Photoshop I combined the two best images in order to show the gun pointing at the lipstick. I also had to create separate layers of the nails and lipstick in order to keep them in colour whilst the rest of the image was in a high contrasted black and white filter. Although Photoshop didn't have the same font as Final Cut Pro (American Typewriter) I was able to find a similar font that had a similar typewriter effect that worked perfectly. My poster is a teaser poster so it doesn't have as much information as a regular film poster might contain, this kept the poster simple and easy to read which really helped when choosing the location of my film poster. The information that is found on the poster is the title (Chantage, the release date, starring characters, directors names, writers names, the film tag line and the production company. The poster doesn't really give much away about the film however you can tell that this poster is linked to the film as not only is the font the same, but the gun was the gun used in the film and the red lipstick and nail vanish link clearly to the film.

FILM POSTER LOCATION

The location and format that I have chosen to display and advertise my film are on billboards that are located in popular cities such as New York City, London and others. This way thousands of people will see the poster because they're in highly populated areas and the billboards are huge so therefore are visible from very far distances. Due to the location of billboards I made sure that the poster was simple and easy to read because when driving past a billboard unless in heavy traffic it's hard to take in high amounts of information within seconds. To the right are two examples of the billboards I might advertise on, the first is located in New York City, just outside of main city centre. The one below is in another city (most likely located in America) that is next to a busy road. The film poster is also majority in black and white which symbolises the genre of film noir. The gun shows that there is action/murder in the film and the lipstick along with the tagline shows that the murderer is probably female. The fact that a feminine hand with red nails is also making it very obvious that the villain is a woman. The film poster also highlights the importance of red which again links to the film noir conventions of having a femme fatale involved.

Film Review Research

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Chantage (BTS)

This is a short video showing the best behind the scenes moments of our film noir: Chantage

Chantage - The Final Film

Chantage is finally here! After long hours of planning, filming and editing, we can finally say that Chantage is D-O-N-E! We actually produced a coloured version as well as the black and white version in order to find out which one was best. After conducting some more audience research based on the two finished films, coming to the conclusion to release the black and white Chantage..

Here it is:

Evaluation of Chantage

The final film has it's good sides and it's bad ones. The actual film itself comes across as very confusing and unless you've read the premise or the rest of this blog it may not make any sense at all. It wasn't until we began filming when I began to realise how hard it is to make a film in five minutes, it's very hard to make a story that makes sense and lasts only five minutes. However, we worked with what we had and it didn't turn out too bad. What's confusing is the characters and their relationships with each other. What many people didn't realise is that Roy and Vivian are brother and sister, Roy has killed both of their parents and Vivian is mad so threatens to kill him if he doesn't give her the entirety of their inheritance. Ernest is Vivian's ex-boyfriend and also Roy Peterson's solicitor. This fact isn't as clear in the film as one of our actors had trouble keeping a straight face for more than five seconds, it took about half an hour to get the final cut when they're in the office as Vivian threatens him (0:26). Unfortunately by the time he managed to get through all his lines, he slightly mispronounced the word "solicitor" so it actually sounds as though he's saying "I'll call my sisters". At that point we had, had enough of trying to get him to be serious so we went with what we had. This did cause some confusion though when asking people their thoughts on Chantage. 

The cinematography side of Chantage went extremely well, we were able to produce some really artistic shots. For example, after Ernest has shot Roy, he is panicked and doesn't know what to do with himself (3:06). We used the camera to really highlight this, instead of using a tripod we had a handheld camera that tracked Ernest's movements. This helped to build the tense mood and helped to represent Ernest's emotions and how distraught he was. Another example of a great shot was at 0:35 where there is a cut from the title sequence straight to a close up of Ernest's phone displaying pictures of Vivian. The cut goes from a huge black screen to a magnified object which helped to reinforce the importance of the phone and what was being displayed on it as it was key to the storyline. 

The sound was one of Chantage's weakest factors, unfortunately the boom mic that we borrowed from school was faulty which lead to a tonne of unusable footage as it had no sound to accompany it. After adjusting the boom mic we were able to get it to work, however what we didn't realise at the time was that when inside the microphone made a horrible buzzing noise that was permanently layered onto more of our inside footage. We tried to reduce the buzzing noise using the sound adjustment settings in final cut pro, however it didn't work and the buzzing was still a disruption which then lead to us having to re-film for the third time. However, because of this we were able to film in a different location that looked much more like a professional office and also enabled us to re-evaluate the script and make some adjustments to make it even more powerful and effective. So, in this case having a faulty boom mic actually led to a better scripted and better located scene.

Chantage is very busy, it's one of those films that you have to pay attention to at all times in the film otherwise you'll miss something that was really important and without it the film wouldn't make any sense whatsoever. This is because of the 5 minute time limit that we had been set. If I was to re-do this project I would definitely write the story in order to fit into the 5 minutes perfectly, allowing a smooth flow of scenes and a story that was much less confusing and hard to understand. 

Editing Chantage

Post Production is a very important part in the creating of a film,

without it a film would lack continuity, emotion and detail. For our film, Chantage we used Final Cut Pro X. This software enabled us to do some basic and technical editing. By using Final Cut Pro we were able to add in titles, subtitles, filters, transitions and sound. Each of these individual additions to our film helped us to follow the conventions of film noir. For example, after doing audience research and overall research on film noir we came to the conclusion to put a black and white filter over all of our clips. The top left shows a screen shot of the different styles of filter you can paste on top of any clip. We chose the black and white pre-set which we then modified slightly using the colour enhancement settings.

We increased the contrast of the video which created a chiaroscuro look which is very common in many film noirs. Final Cut Pro is fairly straight forward and so it was very easy to use. The screen shot to the left shows the layout of final cut with the film in the centre, video clips on the left and the timeline at the bottom. This layout was very beneficial when choosing where to cut certain clips as it was exact to the frame. When putting certain clips together to create one scene, we used different types of transitions in order to create a certain mood depending on the scene. For example, in the fourth scene (sweet talk) we wanted it to be emotional as Vivian tricks Ernest into thinking she's hurt and her brother is responsible. This is a very tense and emotional moment because Ernest really believes Vivian because he still has feelings for her and we wanted the audience to feel that. To create an emotional atmosphere we used longer transitions like fade to black and cross dissolve which made the clips blend together in a much sadder, slower pace rather than using quick cuts that might create a quick, action filled mood instead.  In the murder scene we used quick cuts in order to intensify the action and really create a fast paced, rushed and panicked mood which worked perfectly.

The majority of Chantage's transitions were fade to blacks and regular cuts. We didn't want to draw too much attention to the editing in our film so remained with cuts except for at the end of a scene as fading to black really helped to express that the scene was over and a new one was starting. It also represented an end to something, for example the end of Roy's life or the end of the short film. Sound was a big issue when filming, the boom mic we borrowed from school had been abused by some other students who had used it before us and so it didn't work as well as it could have. There was clearly a fault within the microphone that couldn't be fixed without extensive soldering or replacing of parts which we didn't have time for after we realised that it wasn't working properly. When we watched our footage back on the camera just to check that everything was going okay, we figured out that it actually wasn't going okay... The microphone had created this horrible buzzing noise that made it impossible to hear any of the actual audio that we had meant to originally record. Luckily we checked it before we called it a wrap and were able to re-film some of the scenes that had been ruined by the microphone. Some of the audio wasn't entirely ruined though, instead we were able to fix the audio through final cut. Seen to the right you can see how we adjusted the volume, the background noise and the hum in order to revive some of the audio we had recorded previously. This helped reduce some if not all of the buzzing created by the faulty boom mic and also helped to reduce some of the background noise that the boom mic had picked up. 

Another feature we used from final cut was the range selection tool, this enabled us to choose specific sections of the audio and adjust that section's volume. This really helped we having non diegetic music playing while our actors were talking. This meant that we could have the music at a reasonably loud volume when it was silent and we could then lower the volume when our actors spoke so that they could be heard over the music. As soon as the actors had finished speaking, the music would return to it's original volume and carried on until we changed it again. This was a perfect technique for sound effects as well and really came in handy when setting the mood.

Overall the editing process took around five hours, if not more. However, it's one of the most important parts of making a film which is why it's so important to spend so long editing. The editing helped to bring Chantage together and fit the parts together to create one whole story. The editing also helped to create certain moods. The transitions would create tense moods or calm/sorrowful moods. The editing took a long time but helped to make Chantage what it is.