Digital Graphics Review

In Adobe Photoshop I have created a poster, a DVD sleeve, and a DVD disk cover for the film Anaesthetic.

 For the film poster I created a template with a width of 40 inches and a height of 30 inches. Making the resolution 300 pixels per inch as to ensure the quality of the final product.

 

We took the pictures of our two characters seperately and then used a technique of changing the characters contrast to the background in order to easily cut them out and removing their original backgrounds..

 

 

They were then placed onto the background picture we had taken on set for the poster

 

 

I also changed the hue and saturation to create a more satisfactory dark tone for my poster, as well as adding my title text and block credits text underneath.

 

 

For my DVD sleeve I used very similar techniques, but this time adding in screen caps of the film anaesthetic and also inserting a logo, BBFC rating and a DVD logo.

The DVD disk cover was kept ver minimal, I simply used the photograph of our character Tobias and the backround that I had previously edited from my poster.

Raster VS Vector

Raster images
Also referred to as a bitmap graphic, a raster graphic is the most common kind of image found on computers. Raster images are made up of a grid of pixels, each pixel is assigned a colour value, and with enough pixels a computer can create the illusion of a crisp image. If you were to enlarge one of these images, you would lose the sharpness and quality of the image as the pixels became more clear. Depending on the height of the resolution of a raster file a picture can look incredibly crisp. An extreme example of this would be this 320 Gigapixel panorma photograph of London. Which allows you to see extreme details from huge distances. The problem with this is that the pixels in raster images require a large amount of disk space, so creating pictures like this is not easy.
Raster files come in formats such as .BMO, .TIF, .GIF or .JPG. Raster images are often created and edited in software such as microsoft paint, or adobe photoshop.

Vector images
Unlike raster graphics a vector graphic is not made up of a grid of pixels. A vector image is very good for media printing because it's size can be increased hugely without any loss of image quality, this is because vector graphics use geometrical formulas to represent an image. Instead of being made up of a grid of pixels, they are made of shapes called "objects". You can edit each objects shape, size, position and colour Common files formats for raster are .CGM .SVG .ODG .EPS .XML. Vector files require very little memory to store them Vector graphics are often edited in software such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Freehand, Pro/DESKTOP.
Before vector graphics can be translated into the physical world from a computer through a raster based output device such as a laser printer or dot-matrix printer, the vector image must be translated to a bitmap to create. A limitation of vector graphics is that they cannot handle phtographic images as well as a raster format can. Because of this, the best time to use vector images is when creating large scale illustrations and logos.

Raster Or Vector?
There is no better graphics format. Both raster ad vector graphics can produce brilliant results simply by understanding the strangths and weaknesses of both of them. Where one fails the other one will likely compensate in that area.

The Thriller Genre

Thrillers

 

Thrillers are a very wide genre of film that can include sub genres such as gangster movies, spy films, sci fi, detective films, crime and more. I love thrillers because they're movies designed to keep you interested, if they don't keep you on the edge of your seat throughout then they're not doing their job right. This makes the thriller genre one that leaves very little room for error. The entire genre is built on suspense, which must be delivered else the entire movie falls apart. Thrillers, often being very cynical tend to portray society or the world as dark and unforgiving. A thriller that is a large Hollywood blockbuster usually do this too, but they often swap out the dark endings for a more upbeat optimistic conclusion to the film. Often in thrillers you'll find that important information is withheld from the audience in the movie, until near the conclusion of the film, the audience sometimes knows this, sometimes we're just given hints that something happening in the story is not quite right, which excites us more to find out what the twist is.

Fantastic examples of thrillers using this technique of long drawn out suspense would be movies like Fight Club, Oldboy or The Usual Suspects.

 

  

The preferred reading for an audience of a thriller is in the name. We want the audience to be thrilled, to feel tense, excited or anticipant. A thriller must succeed in this or it will fall short of its potential. This brings me to my next point, the fact that a good thriller creates suspense and mystery for the audience, it demands your attention throughout, it requires active spectatorship from the audience, which is one of the reasons I love this genre, because they force the watcher to think about what they are watching. Because of this thrillers are not often easy, laid back watches for the passive spectator.
For example in Oldboy and Fight Club we are thrown into the minds of the main characters, we learn things as they do, anything that they don't know, we won't know either, information is withheld until the character learns it.

 

The idea of active spectatorship means that each viewer is different and that each person will react to the material they are watching differently than the next. Audiences do not simple absorb what they watch without thinking about it.

Passive spectatorship is something that was suggested by the Hypodermic Needle theory. The idea that the audience simply sits back and accepts the media that is delivered to them without thought.

 

Some film makers attempt to turn the audience into passive spectators while watching their movies, for example a movie like Transformers, an action movie directed by Michael Bay. Transformers does not demand much thought from the audience. There are clear protagonists (the autobots) and antagonists (the decepticons). The film never stops to ask why the bad guys are doing what they're doing, they just want to destroy all humans, that's all you need to know.

If a spectator is truly passive then it is much easier for them to go away from your movie with the creators preferred reading. That being, that the movie was good and enjoyable to watch.

 

Others encourage make the audience actively spectate, make them pay attention and think about what they are viewing. Thrillers do this. For example in the movie Fight Club we are not shown a clear antagonist and protagonist. The bad guy can be a good guy and the good guy can be the bad guy. The ideologies of anarchy are presented to us very convincingly by Tyler Durden, but then the counter argument is presented to us by the Narrator. We understand what Tyler Durden believes, we see the sense in it, but the Narrator allows us to also see the madness. It presents two points of view and lets the viewer make their own decision, this is active spectatorship.

 

 



 

Wes Anderson and Auteur theory

 

Auteur Theory and Wes Anderson

 

 

Auteur Theory is the idea that arose in France in the late 1940s that I director of a film can have a major effect on the creative style and vision of the movies that he/she produces, in effect making the director more the author than the person that actually wrote the material.

"A true film auteur is someone who can bring something genuinely person to his subject instead of producing a tasteful: accurate but lifeless rendering of the original material." Francis Trauffat, 1950.

 

Wes Anderson is widely thought of as director that would qualify to be an Auteur. This is because he brings a very unique style to all of his movies that is easily recognisable to almost anyone who has seen his films before. For example he often includes very similar themes within all of his films. For example the stories tend to revolve around middle to upper class families that are more than a little dysfunctional as well as precocious and pretencions characters.

Also Wes Anderson has a very notably quirky style of cinematography that appears in the majority of his movies. For example a he often makes shots completely symmetrical. He also likes to use tracking shots that last a relatively long time and require a large amount of choreography in order to shoot. The is also a slow motion shot in every one of his films not including Fantastic Mr. Fox.



 

Wes Anderson also has a habit of using high angled shots in his films, here is some examples.

The mes en scene that Wes Anderson creates is always very vintage, with a very 60's era style to it. He uses costume that would be out of place in today's world, and props that should be long outdated.



He also often uses a very similar colour palette throughout each of his films that includes shades of yellow, red, blue and orange.

Wes Anderson titles are also a notable signature of his, in a bold yellow font that fits his colour palette.

Not only do his characters and cinematography have very distinct styles. But also his choice of actors. Wes Anderson's movies has repeatedly collaborated with multiple actors in his films, such as Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Jason Schrwatzman. When Wes Anderson Directs a new movie it is expected for at least one of these actors to be in the film.

 

 

In my personal opinion, because of all of these unique and quirky things that Wes Anderson brings to his movies, that make his work instantly recognisable as a film made by him, he fits the definition of an Auteur. He is someone that makes a movie his own. Bringing something different to its delivery that only Wes Anderson could do, because that is his style of film making