Production Concept: Merchandise

A lot of Syfy's shows are also represented through merchandise which is sold on the website. On Syfy's official store fans can buy T-shirts, Dvds, mugs, phone cases and much more. Here I plan on again photoshopping these images to promote the Cthulhu film and also relate to how Syfy sell their shows. Here are some images I will be photoshopping:

  

Production Concept: How Cthulhu is represented online

Looking at most Syfy Original films they are not represented online with an actual website like typical movies. They are represented through Syfy's actual website under the original movies page. each movie has a distinct page with it's own captions, what the movie is about, where to watch the trailer for it, what else is on on the Syfy channel and what other movies the person might like if they enjoyed this one. Again I plan to photoshop some images on the Syfy website which will then be able to to give Cthulhu an online presence. Here are some of the photos I plan to edit.

Production Concept: Where would Cthulhu be promoted, how and why?

Researching into where certain films are promoted I noticed that SyFy original films are not greatly represented through billboards, bus stations etc. like most hollywood films. However there is a place where smaller films do get promoted where their target audience is all around them and that place is comic con. Comic con has become extremely popular over the years and is held in many different countries and states. When films get promoted at these places they usually give away free items like stress balls or links to where people can see trailers for the movie,  leaflets are also given out which tell people about the movie and where they can see it. Certain films even have 1 hour long Q&A sessions with some of the main actors who stared in the movie and maybe the director. I believe that Cthulhu could be perfectly and easily be promoted at comic cons and all of it's primary demographics would be situated in one place.

As mentioned before there isn't just one comic con, there are hundreds all around the globe so Cthulhu could appear at any of these regardless of it's airing just in the US. Examples of this is that Cthulhu could be promoted with leaflets at UK comic cons and people can be given links to where they can watch the film on he internet.

Tonight I plan to photoshop some promotions for Cthulhu onto the comic con website for mock ups of the promotion process. I also plan to have a Q&A session with main actors from the film such as Grant Bowler and Edward James Olmos who are widely known and acknowledged actors in the "geeky" sci-fi world.

Here are some of the pictures I will be photoshopping for the comic con promotions

 

Production Concept: Scripting and Professor William Webb

In the past few days Me and Sam have been scripting the next few scenes for Cthulhu and so far we are up to where the two detectives meet professor William Webb an anthropologist who tells them that the recent disappearances of missing persons in New York are linked to the resurrection of the mysterious dark lord Cthulhu. Legrasse and Fiber obviously don't believe this at first until the professor explains more into this. In the script we have made sure that Webb has a lot of quirks and to relate his character profile which we've created for him, his actions need to match that of which we have created for him and his look is also quite important. We have made sure that he comes across as a bit of a quack, so Legrasse and Fiber's impressions of him are not great. So far we are up to page 35 of the script and hope to have another 40 pages done by the end of the week.

Production Concept: Scripting Prologue

The other day me and Sam started the writing process for Cthulhu by writing the prologue and a part of the first scene. In this scene we see some marine biologists researching an up coming earthquake on a boat which they have rented out from a surly captain. A sudden storm hits and many fisher men on the ship are swept off. Two of the marine biologists take a submersible to investigate what is going on below in the ocean. When they contact the ship to see what's going on, on the surface, they hear that this storm has cleared up with no wind or any reports of bad weather. The biologists investigate further and find an ancient city where they find a gigantic beast which is cthulhu, the title sequence will roll from then.

This is just the summary of the prologue, we have scripted all the dialogue for many characters and descriptions for the scenes.

Production Concept: Maneater series and Posters

I've been looking more into the Maneater series which is broadcast on the Syfy Network. We feel that Cthulhu seems to fit perfectly into this series so I had a look into some of the trailers and scenes from the films shown within it and a few of the posters. Here are a few examples:

Behemoth Trailer:

Behemoth Poster:

Wyvern movie clips: 

Wyvern Poster:

Production Concept: Promotion and merchandising

I have been looking into how certain Syfy movies have been marketed and promoted on the internet. I decided to use Sharknado as an example as it seems to have the most popularity out of all the Syfy original movies. For promotion I looked into what merchandise they sold and how they advertised in social media. Below is some of the merchandise Sharknado sold as well as some promotional material.

As you can see there are a lot of novelty items being sold as well as t-shirts with one of the main character's name on it. I feel that I can easy do something on the same level as this as a lot of merchandising seems to act as good promotion so I shall look more into how I can make some unique merchandise with Cthulhu.

Looking more into promotion of Sharknado I found that a lot of it was done through social media sites like Twitter etc. here is an article about some of the promotion Sharknado had http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/11/22/twitter-and-the-sharknado/ I feel that not all of my promotion can be done through social media however so I need to see how I can advertise Cthulhu properly.

Production Concept: Skype Call with Dom

A couple of days ago we had a skype call with Dom one of our collaborators from the cg arts and animation course at UCA. Dom will be doing the design and some 3D models of our monster Cthulhu and some of the Shogoths. In this call Dom showed us some of his ideas of what Cthulhu could look like and we expressed what we definitely wanted from the monster. Both us and Dom were certain that we wanted Cthulhu to look unique and not too similar to some of the illustrations already done. We did share some indifferences however, there were some elements Dom wanted that we thought were a bit impractical for the movie. So what I suggested was that Dom draws two different Cthulhus, one with twists that he thought would look cool and another one with some of the elements and parts which we suggested in the call. In our next call we will then be able to compare illustrations and say what parts of the two Cthulhus we like and don't like, and take all the good points from each drawing and put them into one last one which should be what our final monster should look like!

Below are some of Dom's drawings that he did before and during our skype call.