What kind of mockumentary do we want?

After watching an episode of the show Catfish that is a documentary about the meeting of lovers that met online, an absolutely terrible show (an example of part below).

 It is shot using one expensive professional camera and one small more affordable one that one of the presenters film with. This gives the show a very low budget feel to it yet still enjoyable to watch. I think this low budget feel and look but yet still enjoyable to watch. I also think that this would work well as in reality the chances of a company getting a large amount of funding to create a documentary about a delusional man who chases a sock monster is low so this will make the whole thing more realistic.

Our Film in 113 words

Paul smith is a young Schizophrenic who has suffered from delusions ands hallucinations about the "Sockmonster" ever since his father told him the scarce fable to cover up the truth over his mothers death. As the documentary crew follow Paul, it is explained that he has an obsession with re-pairing lonesome socks stolen by the "Sockmonster" and with finding this thief once and for all. Paul's dad is keen to tell his side of the story. From his interview  we discover that the "Sockmonster" was a one off story to stop Paul form taking the blame for his mothers death, as it was him who left the sock on which she slipped and died.

HM

I think that this synopsis makes our film seem abstract enough to be interesting yet not too abstract to limit our audience heavily so I think we will keep to this roughly when shooting our film.

Update to our film planning

The following video is a short video about updates on our film that we have decided



Do bad magazine reviews ruin a films chances?

In my opinion, it would. The majority of people are influence on reviews, whether written or heard through word of mouth.
A trailer of film is there to attract a target audience. If one was to be intruiged by the trailer and later hears that the film is underwhelming from more than one source, then they are likely to not go to watch the film. This is because we are influenced by other poeples opinions.

If one reviewer badly rates a film and a collection of others highly rate it then the audience are likely to take the majorities opinion. It works vice versa.

However, a review also requires an unbiased opinion. If the reviewer was to review a film by a director they have a negative opinion about then this would represent a bias opinion. It is the fault of the audience to research thoroughly into a specific film's reviews to make sure they recieve a full evaluation.

An example of a recent film with a bad review is Grunge Match by Nick de Semlyen from Empire Magazine. They gave the film 2 out of 5 stars (poor under their ratings).
Plot: Two old boxing pros (De Niro and Stallone), long-time rivals now in the autumn of their careers, are lured back into the ring for one final glory bout.
Review: Sylvester Stallone is the old paunchy, grumpy one and Robert De Niro is the other old, paunchy, grumpy one in this big-screen adaptation of the classic Balboa-versus-LaMotta pub debate. As a couple of washed-up stumblebums training for a rematch, they gamely send up the movies Grudge Match is inspired by (Rocky via a meat-punching joke; Raging Bull via a puppet show in a dive bar), but unfortunately, despite the dream-team pairing, this is a dreary, spark-free affair that seems to take forever to get into the ring. Alan Arkin’s dick jokes are as good as it gets.

H.M.

Audience Research

This is a video on audience research we did to gain a better understanding of how many people watch mocumentaries and what they think their conventions to be.

Conventions of a poster

After looking at a range of posters I decided that despite them all being different they all had a set list of convention's they followed that ours needed to have to be good. Below are what I think they are and how I am planning on incorporating them into our poster.

 

• Name of film-plain font, yellow text
• Cast-yellow or grey test in thin font
• Mans legs with socks-take photo and then edit in Photoshop
• Film company-in yellow or grey with a thin font
• Social media network reference-include #lostsock somewhere
• Positive quotes about the film-in yellow at the top or bottom

 

I think these are the main points that I should follow when making the poster.

Posters that inspired me

Below are the posters for Jurassic park and Kickass. I liked the black backgrounds on both of these posters and wanted to use that for ours. I also liked the simplicity of the Jurassic Park poster and the grey on black text for the cast etc. I planned to use these things in my poster. I loved the plain yellow writing and font in the Kickass poster so planned to use that in my poster as well but I didn't want to have either the characters in it or a drawing of something in the film like these 2 do. Instead I think a mans legs with socks on would be better suited but still very simple which is what I wanted

 

Posters that inspired me

Below are a number of examples of films posters. They all vary a huge amount but also have similar things on them. Such as cast, name of film in big, directors, company name and usually just one image of the main character or something related to the film. Despite all of this none of them give too much away without being completely unrelated to the film. This made me think that our poster needs to be related to our film for it to be a good poster. I liked these posters but found them relatively uninspiring for our poster.
 

 

 

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What is the point in a poster?

I did some research into posters and why they have what they have. They are basically a way to make people want to go and see the film. I then broke down the different techniques used to sell the film and the following is what I found and what it made me think I could use on my poster.

A poster is designed to attract a certain target audience to the film. For example a film about a princess aimed at a young girl the poster would typically have a princess and lots of pink on the poster. As our film has no particular target audience this has given us almost free roam when creating the poster, but we do want it to be similar and have clear relation to our film.

They often have the main actor/actors on the front as people will want to go see a film based on the cast or director. As our actors are going to be unknown and Synergy is an unknown film company we can't use our cast or anything similar so have to look for another way. I think that the name itself will be enough so we should have this in bold and large text which contrasts the colour of our background.

Some films have a picture of something important in the film, for example a film about the white house will probably have the white house on the poster. I think this approach is better for us and we can use socks or something similar as the main image in our film.

The font used is extremely dependant of the type of film but personally I think that plain, easy to read fonts are what would work well in our poster.

So to sum up I want our poster to have text that contrasts the background. A picture that isn't dependant upon the cast like socks or something. Plain bold text that is easy to read.

How to make a magazine review

We are going to use Adobe InDesgin for the layout as this was designed for this purpose and I have good knowledge of the software. We could use other software but I don't think they are as powerful and would be able to give us a proffesional finish that InDesign can give us.