Ancillary Task | Short Film Poster

After working for nearly 3 months on my short film poster, I am now satisfied with the finished outcome of this ancillary task. Looking back at my previous post about my short film poster, I stated that I really liked how the two characters have the gun drawn in the middle of their faces to create the "paradox" effect. This effect which I intended to use was also a real positive noted by the audience as the expressions on the actors faces are really strong and well defined.

Receiving my feedback on my poster, the main points which were made where to consider where the text was going to go. Eventually, I came up with the idea of increasing the size of the photograph taken but also only include Morgan's face in the poster with his face being cropped to the side. This allowed more room for me to place the text in whilst keeping the minimalistic poster style in tact. Using Morgan's face in the poster was a decision I made purely on the basis that his photograph was a lot easier to edit and to add more contrast in then Luke's photograph, but also since Morgan is the main protagonist for this short film.

When I took a 2nd look at the film posters I had initially researched, I noticed how they included the film credits and reviews for this short film in too. Whilst adding the extra details in, I also played around with adding release dates for this production as well as the distribution company and links to websites. I chose to use the "Bebas" font for my text since this font fitted best with the genre of our short film.  Overall I am very pleased with the final outcome of my short film poster and I truly believe that this poster is as good as it could possibly get.

Below is a speedart video of the poster being made right the way through to the very end. 

House Style

A key part of my research when creating my ancillary tasks was to research the format of "house style". This is a style guide that sets standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication. The style guide provides consistency in style and formatting of a document. Many publications use style guides to demonstrate the preferred layout and formatting of a published page. They often are extremely detailed in specifying, for example, which fonts and colours to use. Such guides allow a large design team to produce visually consistent work for the organisation.


I intend on following the house style format for my media magazine as this will allow my audience to read through the magazine as they have been brought up to read a magazine and signs due to their social upbringing in the 21st century.

Smoke Effect

One of the key aspects that make up the character of "Crimson" in our short film is his ability to use unsupported flight to travel between different locations without being detected to easily by the everyday person. His fantastical abilities were inspirations we drew from after looking at the way the "Death Eaters" in the Harry Potter series fly through unsupported flight as smoke particles through the air. For our antagonist villain helper, Alex and I wanted to replicate this effect as much as we could to the method used by the Death Eaters. In order to make this effect, I had to use modelling and animating software packages such as Autodesk Maya to create the smoke itself before importing it all into Sony Vegas.

Whilst I have some experience using Autodesk Maya with similar projects in the past, it was an incredible challenge to even be able to create this effect from scratch. The results of this effect so far look great and will hopefully work well when imported into the footage for our short film.

The video clip below shows an exemplar render I made in Maya based on the screenshots in the slideshow.

Short Film | Draft 3 & Feedback

Short Film | Day 5

Short Film | Day 5 by bearjohnstone

Preparation For Film Day 5

Alex and I have been thoroughly organising our filming equipment and gear ready for the final scenes of this short film, the car escape. The footage for our short film so far looks fantastic and is really beginning to look like a genuine film for the big screen according to the audience feedback we have received. We are really excited to show the final cut of our short film to our audiences at our School Oscars Ceremony, however we firstly need to make sure we film the car escape scene before we have finished the completion of our film.

As the stunt driver for our car escape scene, Alex and I have been in contact with a friend of Alex called Oliver who as far we know is a very good driver and is comfortable of driving his vehicle up to high speeds. For the car escape, we expect him to arrive at the location at around 12:00 to give me and Alex plenty of time to film the last bits of footage of Luke running after Morgan before the car escape scene begins. We plan to use a variety of close up shots, GoPro shots and even Drone shots of the car escaping from the interrogation into the distance. As the filming for this scene is relatively quick, we will not require the actors to put in as much effort as previous film dates where we were up in East Hill for around 3-4 hours. I am planning to bring tomorrow the DSLR camera, the GoPro and the sound equipment, but leave behind the tripod as we will not be shooting any still shots for the car escape.

Poster Draft Feedback

Having made a rough draft of my short film poster, Alex and I had the opportunity to display our initial designs for our posters to our secondary audience in order to gain additional feedback to help improve the pieces. Prior to showing my draft to my secondary audience, I knew that there were plenty of improvements required before I presented my final display of my short film poster. For example, I needed to add the film titles and text credits into the poster which deliver the key information to the audience about the details of the film. In addition, the photograph of Luke and Morgan is currently very flat and I therefore wish to increase the contrast of these photos to make the poster more aesthetically pleasing and rememberable.

The fact is, I am having a lot of trouble organising where to position the text since the photograph is taking up a large proportion of the poster layout, so I will therefore have to adjust these around later once I have received the feedback from my secondary audience.

Whilst showing our short film poster to the rest of the secondary audience members, I also took a look around the display areas for the other previous examples of successful film posters from previous years as well as the current poster ideas other students have currently designed.

As we went around the room, we wrote on a piece of paper underneath each film poster the pros and cons which would hopefully motivate the creators to improve on these posters whenever they get the opportunity to.

After several minutes of assessing other people's work, I eventually received some helpful feedback from the other audience members. The screenshot below shows the information sheet that displayed the pros and cons of my current film poster. The feedback in general showed that the audience liked the idea of the characters holding the gun to their faces to show the "paradox" between the two characters. They were also very critical about the colouring of the photo since the saturation levels on the print were very high although this problem was mostly an issue coming from the printer and the printing quality of the poster.

In addition, I thought that it would be useful to record some feedback from an audience member about my current poster design to upload onto my blog to prove how excited they were to see the final outcome of the piece.

Based on the feedback received by my secondary audience, I now have to continue working on the suggested improvements made for my film poster and eventually upload to my blog the final version of my film poster alongside continuing to work through finishing the rest of the short film too.