Costume Research

This Nike bomber jacket is mostly worn by youth with street affiliation. With what I have seen myself  in reality and in social realism movies this jacket is commonly worn by them, mainly because of the puffiness of the jacket and the secret pockets embedded in the coat which maybe used for storage for illegal items. The hood is very big as well which enable the users to pull over their face to not reveal their identity while committing crime.

                                                                                     

In this mood board I picked out a range of pictures from different social realism films to help understand my costume arrangement for my characters in the trailer. 

From my mood board  I Inferred that hooded clothing  are stereotypically worn by mainly the Afro-Caribbean ethnic  group. Hoodies are seen to be quite intimidating . The media has left a negative stamp on the young generation by labelling hoodie-wearing teenagers as suspicious and sign of intent to commit a crime

When adults see a young person wearing a hoodie they automatically stereotype the teen as “thug” or a “trouble maker” the media has exaggerated the stereotype of hoodies  so much that it created a moral panic in some societies.

People forget the real reason for the wearing of hoodies for example to  feel comfortable and warm during cold weathers.

social realism films 99% of the time if not all the time conform to the negative stereotypes of hoodies, for example the protagonist characters that are seen wearing hoodies are normally up to no good. If you go  back to my mood board you will see a picture taken from the movie “shank” on the bottom left, which shows a group of teens hooded up armed with harmful weapons and obviously the body gestures of the group suggest to the viewers that they have a negative motive.

Evidence

    Also the protagonist characters are generally from a  lower social class,  which is shown by their costumes and  mise-en-scene of the area. In the social realism pictures I have shown the female actresses  conform to the stereotype of an average female from a materially  deprived family which are conveyed to be quite trashy and ‘ratchet’.  ‘Ratchet’  is an urban term used to describe ‘A diva, mostly from urban cities and ghettos, that has reason to believe she is every mans eye candy. Unfortunately, she's wrong’ (www.urbandictionary.com) 

Challenging the stereotypes

In my trailer my male protagonist characters are going to conform to the stereotype in the way they are dressed. The reason I am conforming is because  the way social realist films dress up their male characters is the same way some dress in today's modern society, especially in the area my trailer is located the dress sense is very common. For example a hooded jumper,  tracksuit bottoms and casual trainers

I am going to challenge the way females are portrayed in social realist films. In most social realist films females are dressed up in ‘trashy’ clothing for example wearing tracksuits and hats like as you see in the image below

normally the females that are dressed up in that kind of way it influences their lifestyle and  results in  having no ambition and conform to the stereotype of women dependency on men. But  in my trailer I am to challenge that  stereotype  by dressing up my female character in decent clothing as females are starting to become more independent than in the past and also having ambitions and wanting to play a part in the bread winning role which known to be played by men alone.

Colour Scheme

Here is a selection of pictures of colour schemes the group is considering to pick.

Magic of DAfont

Here I used the fonts from DAfont so i can apply them in the group's trailer. I done by downloading the fonts from DAfont then installing them on computer system which enabled me to apply them in trailer as they were in the list of fonts available on Adobe After Effects CS4.

Poster Sketch

The main character is in the foreground to convey his importance and centrally framed to add emphasis on the male, the dominant role. The knife in the characters hand is there to symbolise his wayward lifestyle and the microphone is in binary opposition to that by conveying his dreams, faith and hope to escape his from his lifestyle that may lead him near death on in prison. As you can see I placed his girlfriend on the right where his microphone is showing her support of him to abandon his negative lifestyle and focus on his talent he posses which is rap and follow his dreams, and his friends that influence him negatively are deliberately positioned on the left side where the knife is to show how they support his bad lifestyle and want him to carry on going down the road his going and not in support of his dreams.

Created by Sean Okpa

This is my sketch of a possible design that we could use when creating our poster. I envisioned splitting the poster into two; the city of London which I represented by using images of the Shard and Gherkin and the city of London where our protagonist lives. I also wanted to illustrate the hypothetical 'split path' that our protagonist could take in a literal way. I did this by drawing a path with split roads leading to his friends or his pregnant girlfriend. I aimed to implement the purpose of are trailer which is dreams and escapism through every aspect of our poster, including the title. I focused on having 'Dream' in a dreamy or bubbly font which would connotate the happiness of a dream whereas the 'Z' was written in the same italic handwriting as 'the hood' which would add edge to the title which I believe our film represents.


Comparing my sketch to an existing Social Realism poster, I've reevaluated what I expect to be on our poster. The Shifty Poster doesn't detract from the main characters as it is on a very plain background whereas on the poster I had designed there was a lot to focus on from the buildings to the main character to his friends and girlfriend. On my poster design, I focused too much on the actual images and including a title, rather than including the other necessary conventions of a film poster such as the film ratings and sell lines.

Created by Abena Amoako

Dreamz in the Hood Poster: Draft 1

Using the hue and saturation panel process, I managed to use the colours from https://kuler.adobe.com/explore/ to get the background above using Photoshop CS4. This is
just a draft of how the group would like our potential poster to look like.

Created by Solomon Ssenyonga

The general idea behind this draft is simplicity. We wanted the poster to reflect the "hood" in which the protagonist dreams of escaping from, however we wanted the audience to be attracted to the protagonist despite him facing the city. We therefore used a soft focus on the city so the main focus would be the protagonist.
This was essentially just a draft to give us an idea of what we intended to created and provide us with a foundation to build on from here which may explain as to why some necessary conventions such as ratings and tag lines have not been included.

Created by Abena Amoako