For our 'Music From The Movies' project, I chose to do finance and merchandise along with general fundraising for the project with everyone else. My specific role for merchandise was designing the programmes and sending them off for printing, while with finance I have to track all expenses/income and make proposals for anything we could need for the show. For programmes, I used one from a previous college production - Grease - as a reference when sorting out the page order (1) and to help decide between A4 and A5 (I ended up choosing A5 so it would be easier for people to carry).

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When designing the programmes, I had to take several things into account - I mainly needed to research the movies and their posters to create designs based on them. This is harder for some movies when compared to others because if the designs are more detailed, any information put over the top will be hard to read since it'll clash with the background. The first movie I looked into designs for was Suicide Squad - this movie was easy to find designs for because the movie was based on the popular 1980s comic created by John Ostrander (2) and has had multiple series throughout the years; a lot of designs were already available, especially with the promotional posters released in the run up to the release. Due to this, I chose the green design (3) from a promotional poster and a pink/purple design also released to promote the movie (4). Guardians of the Galaxy is in the same vein as Suicide Squad with it being based on a comic from Marvel, first appearing in 2008 and wrote by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (5) so there were many design concepts to choose from. I decided on a black and orange design (6) inspired by the movie posters. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World was similar to this with comic-based design so I used a comic-style drawing of the main character, Scott (7). I also considered a design with all of the main characters (8) but I thought this wouldn't work well with text over the top of it. Twilight and Shrek had similar issues for designing the pages - with Shrek, most of the designs were based on Shrek's swamp so it was difficult to find a colour for the text that would be visible with all of the colours used in the background. Twilight had the same problem with most of its famous scenes, such as the baseball scene (9) or the final battle (10), being set in rural landscapes like forests which means that most of the designs available were set around forests. To sort this, I decided to make a design based on the name of one of the films (Breaking Dawn) and used a picture of the sunrise (11) for a basic yet effective background for the page. For Dirty Dancing and James Bond, I felt that black and white would go best with silhouette outline designs for both - Dirty Dancing features the pose from the final dance (12) on the movie poster so I used this for the silhouette. I didn't use the movie poster because that would be blatant copyright; in 2015, 5 Seconds of Summer were accused of ripping off Green Day in the designs for their trilogy album covers by using very similar colour schemes (13). Due to this, they faced some controversy in the media over their album covers; we need to avoid any situations like this and make sure it's fair use. I used a design based on the gun-barrel sequences (14) for the James Bond design - all of the posters for A Star Is Born, however, were centred around the two main characters; to get around this problem, I used the background from one of the posters with palm trees in black and white (15) for that page. With The Greatest Showman, the movie "brings the menagerie of P.T. Barnum's travelling three-ring circus to life" (Paulina Cachero, 2017) through the character portrayals, music and plot - because of this, my inspiration drew from designs of vintage circus posters (17) with the use of stripes in block colours alternating between two shades of the same colour. I also found a sticker of one of the main characters from the movie (18) which worked really when paired with a shadow to give a 3D effect on the page.

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The only research I needed for finance was how to input sums to give percentages, totals and clearly layout information. To do this, I looked for a list of the functions on excel (19) and used this for the project spreadsheet - for example, when I did sums to give a total for income and expenditure, I used the SUM function so I could add up values in a certain range of cells. This automatically calculated the total when numbers were typed in to one of those cells and it also re-calculated the total if the number in one of the cells was changed. Percentages had two different functions - the first one uses a calculation to give the percentage as a whole number (so 25% would be written as 25) by dividing the number needed as a percentage (the numerator) by the overall number (the denominator) and then multiplying it by 100. However, the second function - the one I used in my spreadsheet - involved the same first two steps as the other function, but instead of multiplying it by 100, I clicked the 'Percent Style' button under the number group option in the home tab to display the resulting decimal fractions as percentages (20). I had 3 sheets in my spreadsheet for the general income/expenditure from the project, one for the busking so I knew exactly how much each person earned (this was to make sure the total was correct) and another for the questionnaire report - using different sheets made all of the information much easier to navigate, especially as it wasn't all squashed together on one page.