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.