Elysian Productions - Eoin

Above is the poster for Rain Man, a poster that heavily inspired us for the River poster. This poster is really simplistic in design; it's not packed to the brim with quotes from the film or from reviews. It simply has the two main characters walking down the street, with their names and the title of the film.  It makes use of the Z rule. You can see the actors names along the top, the title and the two characters in the middle and the award that it won in 1988 for Best Picture. The two characters are the focus of the poster, however. You can see them walking side by side down a road towards the camera. This obviously sets these two characters as the focus of the film. The main theme of the film is companionship and I think that this poster reflects that well. The two characters are walking beside each other, indicating that they're getting closer to each other, however Tom Cruise's character walks with his right and in his pocket; perhaps indicating a slight reluctance...

The music creation process was one that, again, I thoroughly enjoyed. Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and being able to impart that into our project was a joy.  For the main theme, I made a simple recording of my bass guitar, which was plugged directly into Audacity with no effects or filters, apart from a noise reduction filter applied after recording. This was based of the Dies Irae chant, except changed into a major key to make it a less sombre and menacing. This was relatively quick to record and was done within a few minutes. What wasn't done in a few minutes was the cover that I performed of Helplessly Hoping by Crosby, Stills and Nash. I first discovered this song while watching Annihilation, and when thinking of music for the Amy's House scene, this popped into my head and I immediately consulted our group and asked their opinion on it. They all agreed that it was a good idea, so I went ahead and recorded it. For recording, I used a...

Overall, I had a great time filming. During last year's project, I was in front of the camera as well as behind, and as well as this I had to do the editing. This meant that I didn't get the time to put a lot of thought into the camerawork. This year, my focus was entirely on the cinematography and the music. In this regard, it meant that I had more time to spend thinking about how I was going to do a shot and what would make it best. It also meant that I could take time and research certain cinematography styles, like Edgar Wright's and Hideo Kojima's.  I enjoyed having the creative liberty to consult with the director and decide how a shot should be played out, as well as taking it upon myself to film things the way that I think would look best. It was also great to get the feedback from everyone after a shot was taken and people could suggest ways to do a shot better. We were fairly efficient with our filming, despite the fact that it took a fair few days to get ...

This process was a little more complicated than the poster was. It applied the same gradient and brightness filters, however on the title text and the border I was asked to invert the colours. To achieve this, I created a clipping mask of both the border and the title text, then overlaid the same background image, but without the gradient and brightness filters and with the colours inverted. This then achieved the desired effect, with the colours changing but the actual image itself is not interrupted. I then had to make it look like an actual magazine review, so I decided to use Empire as the magazine it was going into, then added in the review text. I also added in a large quote above the title text and a brief verdict and star rating at the end of the review, as is the style of Empire reviews. I added the page numbers and issue date to the bottom left and right hand corners of the page and considered it done.