Evaluation

In our trailer we wanted to make sure that we not only met the typical conventions of a horror trailer, but also challenged them so that our film was set apart from all the other horror films out there. For our film we wanted to put in some different camera shots to make it look more interesting, so we decided that our first shot of the main character would be a point of view shot. We did this so that it instantly gives an impression that there is someone watching her and the story is introduced. We wanted there to still be some mystery in the story making people want to see more. We wanted her to look like a normal girl leaving her family home so her clothes are quite plain, suggesting her normality. The story is about how she must escape from the horror of her stalker. Although there are many horror films about women being stalked but we wanted to put our own spin on the story so that it isn’t like all the others.

 

This second shot is from a little later in the trailer, when the villain of the film tries to distract our heroine. We shot this from the back of the car because we wanted to show the brake lights coming on suddenly showing that she is stopping. The red stands out emphasising this strange event.

 

This third grab is when our main character is discovering that the villain has been watching her for a long time. I feel that this meets the typical aspects of a horror movie because usually the victim is captured and unable to escape until the end. We wanted to use a dark red room for this shot to give the feel of death and terror, as red can be seen as associated with these feelings. We wanted to use a high angle shot for this because then we could get the best effect of her reaction and also it makes her look smaller and more vulnerable. This shot is when the music is at its highest level to make sure that these are the most obviously dramatic parts of the film.

 

This shot is from the montage of parts from the film, this is when our character has escaped from the villain and is trying to find help. We wanted to have a montage in our trailer to set aside our trailer from the rest. These shots of the film switch from our female character running to other parts of the film. We thought this was quite effective because it makes the pace faster and the tension heighten, which was our initial intention.

 

This next shot is not only the last shot in our film but this is the shot that inspired our poster as we thought that we needed a shot to show the horror that our main character was feeling. I like this end shot because the villain looks very creepy and the audience know that something bad is going to come from it and as it is the last shot it makes the audience want to know what will happen after this last shot.

 

We wanted to have these in our film so that it was the best that it could be and as professional as possible. We also created a logo for our Production Company like many of the other companies such as ‘Universal’ or ‘Warner Bros’.

 

 

As well as these, we wanted to make sure that our tag line was included in the trailer to give the audience an idea of what the storyline might include.

 




I think that together our trailer and poster and magazine cover work well because of the way that we have presented them. We wanted them to connect to our trailer as much as possible. We filmed our trailer in the dark, so we definitely wanted our magazine cover and poster to be dark and mysterious, like the atmosphere in our trailer.

We looked into many different film posters from the horror genre to get particular ideas of what we might want ours to look like. After researching posters such as 'The Skeleton Key' and 'Scream' we decided that we wanted to use a picture similar to one in our trailer. This photo is a close up of our main character with her had covering her mouth as if she were trying not to scream, this is very similar to the 'Scream' poster which we thought was very well made. As the picture takes up most of the space of the poster, there are not any particular colours that dominate the poster. However, we have used black and red in it to make it seem more dark and dangerous. We have put our tag line 'when it comes to living there are no short cuts' in red to foreshadow the horror and even death in the trailer.

We also used red and black for the main colours in our magazine cover. Again, we wanted these colours to foreshadow what might happen in the film. For this, we used screen grabs from our actual trailer to make sure the photos connected to our film. We used two separate pictures from the film, one of our main characters in red to keep to the red and black theme. We used a picture of our second main character in the background to give the illusion that he might be watching her giving a hint of what the film is about. The font that we used in our film is cracked to give the feel that there will be destruction within the film.

The music we originally used was from the song ‘Russian Roulette’ by Rihanna but unfortunately we were unable to use this as it was copyright so we created our own music, we wanted it to be eerie and strange to make sure that the atmosphere was right for the genre of the film.

When asking what people thought of our film we wanted to get as much information as possible from a range of people to make sure that our trailer looked as professional as possible. We asked our classmates and parents and siblings to watch our film, we also asked our subject teacher to watch it to get the full amount of feedback that we could. The feedback that we got from people was mostly positive, the general answers were that people were interested in the storyline of the trailer and felt that they would be encouraged to see the whole film if it were really being made. Our subject teacher said that filming it at night was a good idea and that it made the ambience of the film darker.

One of the negative points that we were told about was the music that we had to change because of the copyright. Also, the camera we used was not up to the standards of more modern cameras so unfortunately the film looked a little grainy, however when watching it we thought that it would be better if we added an effect to the film, this made it look less amateur.

Throughout our project we have used many different technologies to make our trailer and music and all the important parts of the project. Firstly we have used ‘Blogger’ to put all of our work and research together in one place and also to show our trailer, poster and magazine cover together. This was really useful because it helped us show all our information in a professional way.

When had made our film we used ‘i-movie’ to upload it and to edit our film to make it look frightening and to put all our clips together to make an effective trailer. We added a dark effect so that it looked scarier for the audience.

We also used ‘Garageband’ to create our music for the trailer so that the atmosphere is emphasised at the right moments.

When researching our genre and other films that inspired our story we used ‘Google’ to get the most information about the genre and films. We also looked on the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines/15 website and looked at the certificates and looked at the requirements of what should be in a film to see what certificate our film should be. As well as this when looking at horror trailers we used ‘Youtube’ to find out what sort of film we wanted to make and to look at the interesting shots that we could use.

http://www.youtube.com/

If I were to do this project again I think that I would have chosen a different genre to make as I think it would have set us apart from all the other groups and it might have been a little easier to make and relate to. However, if I were to change something about this project I think we could have been a little more creative with our storyline and also we could have made our film seem a little more professional. But overall, I am very happy with our finished trailer and all that we have done in the project. 

Our Final Trailer

This is our final trailer. We have changed the music after getting the feedback from some of our audience members. We are very pleased with the way this turned out and hope that it looks as good and professional as we wanted it to. 

Trailer Feedback

We created two questionnaires that we asked people to fill out, one for before they watched the trailer and one for after. We wanted to make sure that we asked a range of people of different ages to make sure that we get a lot of information to help us. 
From the information we received from the questionnaire people filled out before the trailer, we found that most people thoughts were that a good horror trailer should have a believable and interesting story. People also said that the camera work was quite important as camera shots make the film seem more real. 


As well as this feedback, we gained feedback from the same people but this time it was after they had watched our trailer. We were given some very positive feedback. People said that the storyline was intriguing and made them want to go and watch the rest of the film. As well as this, they thought that the dark and mysterious atmosphere of the forest was very effective for the film. 
One of the most important feedback points that we were given was the issue of the music. In our draft of our trailer we used parts of the song 'Russian Roulette' by Rihanna. We discovered that we weren't able to use this music as it was not available for us. So our main factor of change is the music for our final trailer to be as good as it can be. 

Trailer

This is a draft of our trailer. We were very happy with how it turned out, however our next step is to get feedback of the trailer to find out if there is anything drastic that we need to change. We will ask a range of people to watch the trailer and fill out the questionnaires that we have made to give us the best idea of the alterations that we might need. Once we have the feedback, we will make the changes and the final touch ups and post the final trailer on to our blogs, we will then evaluate the whole of the project and how we thought this went overall.

Our Poster

This is the final draft of our poster. We were very pleased with this poster as we think that it looked very professional compared to all of the other film posters we have researched. 
We took some inspiration from different posters by having just one of the main characters, but we think that this was effective as it doesn't give much away about the film, but it leaves you wondering why she is like this and what her is expression is. We decided to put a tag line into the film as well because we thought that this would give the audience something to think about when saw it. 
Like in our magazine cover, we used the colour black as we thought this best represented the mood of the film and also it gives the audience some idea of what genre the film is. We also used red, the denotation of this colour is that it is an effective colour against the black, but the connotation could be that it represents the death and blood that might be to come in the film. 
We have also added the main features of a film poster to make sure it lives up to professional posters standards, such as release date, website for the film and names and production details. 

Our Magazine Cover

After doing lots of research on other film magazine covers, we wanted to create one that lived up to the same sort of standard as the ones in the shops. We wanted to make sure that our photo contained at least one, if not both, of the main characters and that it linked well with the genre and type of trailer that we have created. We took the photo from parts of our trailer to create our magazine as we wanted to make the magazine look as professional as possible and we felt that collating these photos really worked for the mood of the trailer. As the colour of the photo is predominantly black, we wanted to keep the rest of the cover black so that the photo did not look out of place. 
The only thing that I would liked to have changed would be the colours, I would have preferred to have the colours match the type of season that it is. We have made sure that it has all the typical features of a magazine cover, such as the price, date and issue number, a bar code and obviously the name of the magazine. 
To make the magazine look as good as possible, we added some information about up and coming films this year and also interviews that might go ahead about the films being released.

Representation

Within our trailer, there are quite a few events that we needed to portray in a way that our target audience would understand. The genre of our film is horror and we wanted to use interesting camera shots, music, mise en scene etc. to portray this in the best way possible.

When thinking about the characters' costumes, we wanted to make our main female character, Helena, seem like she is a normal, older, teenage girl. We decided that she would be dressed in a plain dress and white coat. The denotation of her clothing is that she is simple; however, the connotations of this might be that a white coat indicates she has a lot of money. This is a part of a theory that came from Roland Barthes. He said that ‘denotation’ was the literal or obvious meaning of an image, where as a ‘connotation’ are the ways that we interpret a film or text. Our interpretations also depend on our lifestyles, for example, age, gender, ethnicity, class etc. Continuing to think about this theory, we thought about how the audience would respond to our male character, Eddie. Although the audience does not see a lot of him in the trailer, we made sure he was wearing dark clothes and had his hood up most of the time, so not to see much of his face. The denotation of this could be that he just likes dark clothing and having his hood up, however, the connotation would be that he is a thug and very mysterious.

When we thought about the setting of our trailer we wanted somewhere that would create tension and atmosphere for our film. We chose to film on a road near the forest, giving us the trees to make the mood dark and eerie. To the audience it looks just like a normal road, however, the connotations of this road could be that it is dangerous for a girl to driving down at night, and that this is the place where our story is at its highest peak of tension.

Within our film, we tried to use a variation of camera shots to create suspense. When in the forest, we used a long shot of the car to show the sudden impact of brake lights. This was to give the audience that initial feeling that something is going to happen to the car/girl.

We also wanted to use a montage within our trailer to show the events within the film. This contains two shots of Helena running to show the terror she is experiencing. We also used a close up shot of Helena in a red room, the semiotic of this is that she is in danger and it is connected with the thought of blood and threat.

Genre

Before deciding what our genre was going to be, we wanted to do some research on what genre actually is and how other people view it.
Genre comes from a french word that means 'type' or 'kind'. It demonstrates a way of putting different media texts into categories that share of the same qualities. There are many different types of Genre's for example:

• Romcom
• Science Fiction
• Musicals
• Western
• Thriller
• Horror
• Comedy
• Animation
• Action
• Mystery

Whilst researching the meaning of genre, we also looked at what other people thought about what a genre is and why it is so important. I found that Andrew Tudor, a professor in New York, believes that genre is 'what we collectively believe it to be' and 'a genre defines a moral and social world.' However Linda Williams, a film scholar, argues that 'horror, melodrama and pornography all fall into the category of "body genres", since they are each designed to elicit spine-chilling, white-knuckled, eye-bulging terror; melodramas are designed to make the viewers cry after seeing the misfortunes of the onscreen characters; and pornography is designed to elicit sexual arousal. And finally, Janet Staiger,  historian of American film and television, feels that 'Hollywood films are not pure genres, because most Hollywood movies blend the love-oriented plot of the romance genre with other genres. I think these are all relevant to the way we want to make our film. We want to make sure that we keep some of the typical conventions of horror films, but we didn't want our film to fall into any other categories taking away the emphasis on the horror.

Genre is very important to the audience, as it helps them to determine what type of film it is and whether they will be interested in seeing it or not. They can also be sure of what they will see in this particular genre, for example a person is less likely to see a graphic horro scene in a romance film. Not only is genre important to the audience but it is very important for the producers because they can determine how big their target audience is going to be by seeing how popular the genre already is. The more typical the genre is, the more people are likely to want to see their film.


We found it quite easy to decide what our genre would be because of the surrounding area of where we live we thought that it would be suitable for a horror film. Within a horror, there are many typical aspects that the audience expect to see and we wanted to make sure that we not only met a few of them, but challenged them as well to make sure that it is not like every other horror film ever released. For example, there are always the contrasting characters, or in other words the hero and the villain. We wanted to keep this convention in our film as there wouldn't be an effective or interesting storyline without a villain and hero to draw us in. 
We also decided that the setting of our trailer would be in the forest. Although this is quite a typical setting for horror films we wanted to do it because we live in the countryside and had easy access to lots of fields and forests to make the trailer look as effective as possible. 

Animatic

This is the video of our animatic that we created to give an idea to our audience of what our final trailer will look. As this was made a while ago, we have made a few changes to our trailer, to make it look better and flow more evenly. Not only was this useful for the audience to see, but it was also really useful for us to really get a good picture of how our trailer would turn out.

   

Since making our animatic, we have made some changes to our film plan to make it better. When thinking about how to improve it, we thought that the atmosphere of the film would be better in the dark, so we decided that we would film it in the dark. We also used a secluded, forestry area to make the main character seem more alone and make it feel more frightening for the audience. We also wanted to change the characters, as this is just a prototype I will not actually be the main actress. 

Narrative Structure

Within our trailer we found that we have used a lot of narrative structure elements when planning. We wanted our trailer to be as interesting as possible; this meant that we needed to give our film the best narrative structure.

We started our trailer with a shot of our main character at house. This shows the exposition in our trailer. We showed her at her house to introduce the part of the setting but also to show that she is a normal teenage girl living at home in a quiet place. We wanted to start our trailer with a positive atmosphere maybe giving a hint the something bad might be going to happen later on.

Most of the development in our trailer is seen in our planning. We meet our second character and see him in his normal day life and see why he is trying to hurt the female character. However, within our filming we see the male character develop a little when we see him in his house searching for his victim.

The complication is quite a big part within our trailer as it shows how the main character ends up in the bad situation shown within the trailer. Whilst driving to a friend’s house our main character is stopped at the sight of something being thrown in front of her car. Whilst investigating what this object is and who could have thrown it, our villain gets into the car. We shot this from in front of the car, having the car lights shining into the camera so that we can only see the female character, but can still hear the slam of the car door, causing panic in our character and hopefully the audience.

For our climax we wanted to show something quite creative to show the rising tension between the characters. We decided to do a montage between the characters and different scenes from within our film. The first shot of our montage is of the female character running through the forest, away from the villain, this is repeated once more but closer in to repeat the suspense. The other two shots placed between eh shots of running are of both our characters. The first of our female character in a red room, this creates suspense because it makes you as where she is and the red makes us think that this might be very dangerous. The second shot is of the male character kicking open a door, this cause more tension because we ask the questions, where is he and what is he doing?

Our resolution is not so happy in the trailer because our final shot is of our main character close-up hidden. We wanted to have our trailer end on a cliff-hanger and so we left it with a slightly negative tone to keep the audience wanting more.

Throughout our trailer, we have used quite a dark lighting to make the film denser, keeping the atmosphere negative and frightening.

Our trailer connects slightly to Vladimir Propp’s theory of characters. Although we only have two characters the fit into these stereotypes that he gives. Our main female character is the hero/victim as she is the one being chased through the fields and trapped in the red rooms. Our second character sit eh obvious villain in our trailer, as he is stalking and capturing our hero. Our trailer is not a stereotypical horror according to this theory as don’t have as many characters; however I feel that we don’t need many more characters to make it because we mainly wanted it to seem scary.

Audience Research

When it comes to our audience, we thought a lot about how the narrative would be interpreted to all different people and we wanted to make sure that everyone would understand the message within our trailer. We also thought about who our target audience would be and what the rating would be for our trailer. When researching trailers, we found that some horror trailers are rated lower to make sure the widest range of people see it, however whilst in the cinema they become higher because of the more violent and frightening scenes that might not be suitable for younger audience members. These are the scenes that are not shown in the trailer, to draw attention to the rest of the film.

We created this questionnaire for our audience to fill in before seeing our trailer to see how they feel about horror films and what they might expect to see depending on their gender, age and occupation etc.

This is the questionnaire that we have created to find out what people think about the trailer and whether they thought it was scary and if they would be interested in seeing the rest of the film. We are hoping to get some other feed back on what they think could be improved. 
The feedback for both of these questionnaires will be coming soon. 

Magazine Cover Research

This is the research that I have done on Magazine covers and how they are put together. I found that most of the time, the photo is the main focus, containing writing around the sides. A lot of the magazines contain articles of the main feature film and also have interesting articles that draw the fans into the magazine. 

These are the two covers that I studied. 

This magazine is from http://www.empireonline.com/

This magazine analysis from http://www.totalfilm.com/magazine

After looking at these two magazine covers and studying them, I thought about what we want our magazine to look like. We decided that it would be best to have the main character in the middle, to make sure that they are the main focus. We also wanted our photo and the background to be related to our films storyline. Our colours are going to be connected to the month and season that we are in and we want to make sure that we incorporate interesting articles about up and coming films, using colourful fonts to draw the audience in.