Cumha - Production Blog

Our movie: Our poster: Our review: My evaluations: 02 by grace magee

02 by grace magee

In preparation for writing the review of Cumha , I read movie reviews, primarily from Empire Magazine. Movie reviews seem to exist in their own genre; they're borderline informal but still incredibly factual and precise, so reading as many as I could was a good idea, as it helped me gauge the tone for the Cumha review better. For the actual layout of the review, we used Adobe InDesign, as it gave us more options for the layout than Photoshop would have.  InDesign allowed us to create a double-page spread, and also gave us a selection of fonts to choose from, to really enhance the professional appearance. It was tricky to get the hang of at first, so I googled plenty of tutorials to help me, and eventually, it became fairly similar to creating the poster.  We did a photoshoot with R í bh for the double page spread, and our decision to use our leading lady instead of Michael came from the desire to keep the plot of Cumha as ambiguous as possible. ...

During the post-production stage of Cumha , we realised that the movie was only coming to about two and a half minutes, which wasn't long enough. We decided to add more establishing shots during the Dream sequence in Scene 2, the shortest scene, which includes more closeups of foliage. As we approach better weather, more plants are blooming, which gives us a much greater choice of things to include.  These extra shots helped creates a calm, tranquil atmosphere, so that the ending is very blunt. Jane also took extra shots for the opening shot, of a light going on in attic room. It was suggested that we have shots of The Boy walking to the train station after Scene Two, where he sees other couples, and thinks about The Girl. I, personally, didn't like this idea.  The scenes are so neatly divided, and the shots are characteristically sharp, that I thought adding shots of The Boy walking and thinking outside the three set locations ...

This is our final poster, we used examples of real posters to decide where to put the actors' names and the review. The slogan comes from an Irish saying ' Níl cara ag cumha  act cuimhne' which ties nicely back into the story's origins in an Irish short story. I really enjoyed making the poster, as graphic design and illustration is a personal interest of mine, and that helped the progress along.  Cliona also had experience with the editing software we used, so we worked together well. Overall, I've enjoyed this stage of the process the most.  The film board we chose to associate ourselves with is the Irish Film Board, to pay homage to the Irish in the title, and the short story that initially influenced the plot. We chose the studio name 'Blacksheep' because we felt it reflected the uneasy tone of the movie, and played on the seemingly outsider 'stalker' status of the main character. The decision to include a studio name instead of ...

We initially had three ideas for our poster: a smashed clock, that is seen in the opening shot of Cumha , a screenshot from the movie of the girl's face smiling over the flowers, and a picture of The Girl with a dart through it, all of which are pictured below. We first ruled out using a screenshot from the movie, as this isn't a very professional approach, and then decided not to go along the lines of using the dart as a) the dart board never appears in movie and b) it implies that the movie would be a slasher or horror, which it is not.  Here are the photos we took after we smashed the clock, a symbol of The Boy's hopes and fantasies, as a hint to people looking at the poster of what is to happen.  At first, we couldn't decide between the third or fourth photo, so I decided to do some trials with the third photo, as it's my favourite photo, but it wasn't portrait, as most posters ar...