Final Magazine Front Cover & Poster Media Products

For our compulsory task, we were asked to make 3 forms of media, a poster, magazine front cover and a teaser trailer for a horror film of our choice. After long hard weeks of working, we finally have our official products below:

Film Poster

Film Poster (Japanese Version)


Magazine Front Cover

Progress Report #8

Progress Update 8

This week we have explored as much tutorials as needed to complete the furnished edit. I have successfully edited the video and applied the appropriate effects needed visually, with advise and guidance from the team. And we are all now happy with the edit we have. Next week we will be in the studio recording sound fx and i will also be composing to apply to our edit.

Benjamin Acolatse

Progress Report #7

Progress Update 7

During this week the group have been researching tutorials on the net; teaching us how to use the Apple Final Cut Pro program effects appropriately and efficiently. And passed the most useful ones onto me. While i explore these effects and put them into action. This also involves drafting, which i have been doing. There is not yet a final copy of the video edit with the effects used, however i will continue to perfect the mistakes made this week while editing to improve the edit next week.


Next progress report: 29th January 2011

Benjamin Acolatse

Magazine Front Cover Draft - Lucy Luu

Before creating the front cover for a horror magazine, I had a look on the internet to find inspiration on designing my own as well as keeping the regulations of a magazine.

For the magazine front cover we wanted to keep it looking simple as well as making the face of the main character from 'Lullaby' on the front cover being all you see. The reason we decided to use an extreme close up of the girl's face was because during the teaser trailer you don't get to see much (or any) of the girl's face so therefore we wanted to tempt the audience a little by showing a sneak peak of what just half her face looks like. Whilst drawing her face i started to see a similarity with the characters from Japanese horror movies such as 'The Ring' and 'The Grudge' with the long black hair covering half or the entire face. 'Lullaby Premier' is put in front of the hair in a white scratchy font (same as the font used in the film poster) as it will stand out in front of the long black hair and so people will know what the movie is called. On the left hand side we have small photographs of Lullaby snapshots to let the audience know what Lullaby looks like and for them to develop interested in the movie.

'The Big Screen' was simply a name for the magazine that came to mind whilst thinking for a name but in fact i think the name suits the magazine very well, this is because the magazine is about movies therefore while watching movies you're usually watching it in the cinema or on a big screen for the best impact. All magazines include captions of what other pages in the magazine contain to create an interest within the audience, the captions i decided to use on the front of our magazine front cover include 'Top 10 movies ever' - this makes the audience wonder what the top 10 movies ever are and therefore they may buy the magazine to read this further. Other captions include 'Shia LaBeouf on filming Transformers 3' - I thought this was a good caption to include as Shia LaBeouf is a popular actor so if he is included within the magazine, the audience may be interested. The last caption i used was 'Massive Preview Special', i thought this caption would catch eyes of the audience as people would want to know previews of the upcoming movies which is why i included big favourites such as 'Harry Potter' and 'Toy Story 3' on the list. Above the header i added a rhetorical question as a slogan to let the audience know this is magazine is featured on horror movies.

Overall i think the outcome of our magazine cover came out better than i imagined, this was because before i started i didn't have an initial idea of what i wanted it to look like but after looking at examples i knew what wanted to be included on the magazine and i included all that was needed.

Lullaby Film Poster Drafts - Fenetta/Lucy

We've tried to keep our film trailer as simple as possible. Not because it would be hard work to try and develop this poster, because we did our research on movie poster and realised that the scariest and most effective ones have all been very simple with a single imagine. We followed the traditional conventions of a horror movie poster by using an odd number of images; one. We placed the subject in the corner of the poster. I felt that this made the poster feel more uncomfortable to look at, as when you look at the poster, you don't directly look at the main girl. The space around the main character makes you feel as if the character is alone, and people tend to feel more uncomfortable when they're alone.

Another thing about this poster that I feel makes it effective, is the use of a child. In the past, children have been the main characters in a lot of the most popular and major horror movies, for example, 'The Omen' and 'Poltergeist'.

The connotations of children are usually innocent and harmless, so the use of a child provides a more phycological feeling to the poster. The title 'Lullaby', is written in a child-like font because lullabies are usually sung to put little children to sleep. I think this title is a good title because no matter where you live or how you live, everybody knows a lullaby. Whether it is 'Rockaby baby' or 'Hush Little Baby', lullabies are known globally and are sung by millions so I feel that this film title will be effective in it's role in attracting a global audience.
This is our second attempt at designing a film poster, the reason why we felt the need to design another film poster was because we wanted to see what it would look like if we changed a little of the detail: the teddy. Teddy bears are usually found in the hand of children and that is what keeps them looking innocent, from the first moment you look at the film poster you just notice there being a child in the corner until you look down to her hand you'd notice the child's hand dripping with blood and a bundle of flowers drenched in blood which portrays a more sinister and evil young child.

Behind-the-scene's photographs


These are some of the Raw photograhps taken by Lauren Lawlor before the stages of photoshop and editing.



This photograph was taken on the first day of shooting, showing where Lucy was sitting in the closet, where most the trailer was to be filmed. This photograph was taken just before the shot of her rocking was filmed. This shot was used in the final product as the first shot used in the sequence.


This shot was taken on the first day of filming, for firstly the continuity of the make up and hair, in other words, we looked back at this image on the second day of shooting to make sure there was a continuos flow of how Lucy looked through out the whole trailer. This image was uploaded to facebook on the first day of shooting, it created a buzz about the whole project and people added input into the look of the character which was the first point of audience feedback the project had. Some of the comments were "she looks scary, the costume is good" Thomas Collins, "Her makeup creates a mood its scary" Matthew Mcsweeny. "She looks like the Actor from the grudge, the costumes cool, she looks innocent and cute" Lauren McCloskey.


This image shows the camera and the lights recording the clips, this was just before the second shot of the sequence when lucy lifts her head up and then it goes in and out of focus, which is one of the most interesting shots of the whole teaser trailer.


This images was taken on the first day of filming, as you can see the areas very dark and the outcome of most the filming is that is was underexposed and we wasn't able to use the shots taken.


This is a shot of the set, showing the lights, camera, closet and the tripods. This set was quite small and cramped, however the team worked well together and we kept it in control.


This image was taken before the hand blood shot was taken, which was added into the main teaser, This image shows the application of blood onto lucy's hands, it also shows the set including lights, camera and closet. (also shown is the wires tucked away safely and the storyboard on the floor next to the camera, which I used to give me an outline for the order of shots.)

an image to show Lucy in the closet, showing her getting ready for the next shot.

Lucy moving to stand up, this was one of the shots on the main storyboard. This shot did not work because it was to simplistic and made no sense to the final product.


This image shows the team work, looking at shots to see if the lighting was good and if the shot idea worked, as the group experimented with different shots

This was a shot the group decided to do off the storyboard because it is a chance to experiment with the filming, and also to produce differnt types of shots and differnt angles.

This is a behind the scenes image of me checking the photograph I had just taken, this show Lucy wait for me to tell her how to pose for the next photograph.
This shows the making of the image on the poster, this image shows the teamwork produced when taking this photograph, showing the reflector to make the lighting satisfactory and how I want the image to look in the end product.


This is a photograph of me (Lauren Lawlor) taking an image on the blue screen, to produce images for the magazine front cover and the poster. I used manual settings, a lightbox and lots of fake blood.


This shows the brightness of the lightbox, also Lucy posing for an photograph on the blue screen.


Getting taught by sir how to use the light box to the best of my ability helped me out, being able to produce brilliant images, All the image were taken in front of onlookers and they were walking around the college, looking around. They all added there own feedback also, saying "The images were good, and the actor looked very scary" some small children looking round the college were scared to enter the room, this meant our group had reached the factor of having a scary factor, even though its a bad feeling scaring a child, the group use this as feedback and understood that we had reached a good enough scare factor.


This image shows the light box, main character and me taking the images for the poster image, showing lucy in fully costume, with her hands tied and lots of blood over her hands.


This image shows me taking the image in different angles, using the manual zoom.


This image is also showing me in a different angle. showing some people looking around the college, adding audience feedback to our project and how everything looked.


This image shows lucy walking, This image is framed very weirdly showing her in the first 3rd of the image, This image is out of focus and very dark. This group doesn't look that good because of the dark lighting and the framing.

This image is framed interestingly, however it shows a cute view on Lucy's face, in other words, its not scary enough, once this image was taken i decided to use the light box to my advantage in the next image I took because this image shows a more brighter view on Lucy, which could connote a nice personality, which is not what I wanted to put across, I wanted the image to look like she had evil from within her.

This photograph is interesting showing a freaky type of stature, however it is very bright and you can't make out alot from this image becuase it is over exposed and doesn't conote a horror feeling. Eg: Dark, scary...


This image shows the application of blood onto lucy's face.


using the light box to the best of my ability, I made half lucy's face look dark and the other look light, this meant that the image could connote that she has the darkness within her dark personality.
Post by Lauren Lawlor

How effective is blood and SFX make-up?


We asked how well they thought special effects meshed with horro movies and 6 people thought that it meshed very well with it, so we decided to try and encorporate that with our trailer.

Progress Report #6

Progress Update 6

This week we successfully Drafted our final decided video edit, the arrangement of shots was decided as a group. I was prominently involved in the timing and grove of the shots, ensuring that the audience would feel the suspense from which we wanted to convey. All the group are happy with the final draft and next week i will pursue to add the professional effects within the Apple Final Cut Pro program, which is required to give our video the final visual horror teaser trailer feel.


Next progress report: 22th January 2011

Benjamin Acolatse

Additional research and feedback.

After Lauren had taken the pictures that we decided we were going to use, we made a tally and asked 40 people which photo they think is the most effective for the poster and magazine front cover. We chose 2 pictures and made them pick which one should be for the magazine front cover and which should be for the poster.

Giving them a choice of these two photos:


11 people said that picture number one should be for the poster and 29 said for the magazine.

7 people said that picture number 2 should be for the magazine and the rest said it should be for the poster.
We then continued to ask why they thought it should go in that order and we got some quotations from some people.

"I think picture number 2 should be for the poster because in the magazine, it should give the audience some information on what the film will be about and using a picture of her back wouldn't be that effective for the magazine in that way" - Olympia

"I think that picture number 1 should be for the magazine front cover because it reveals the msyterious identity of the girl that no body knows of and makes us aware of who she is; finally" - Kineka

"The use of the blood on her eye, that you can hardly see, but you know is there is spine chilling so I think it should be for the poster, not the magazine" - Chelsea

"If you give away too much on the poster, the film become predictable, so I don't think the poster should have her face on it because it adds suspense"


Progress Report #5

Progress Update 5


During the course of this week me and the team have been working vigorously Drafting, and going through our Video Edit Drafts which we currently have 7 of, and have chosen the best one to improve on. This decision was important to us as we had to find the most appropriate draft which would suit our targeted audience, and we didn't want our viewers to think our video looks effortlessly edited or doesn't make any sense. This also made us feel as if it has been an unproductive week, however this week has been on of the most important weeks yet.

Next progress report: 15th January 2011

Benjamin Acolste