Equipment and Production Lists

Research of Alfred Hitchcock was part of our research where we found him to be one of the most succesful producers of the horror genre, from this we furthered our research by looking further into his induvidual films and being inspired by them.

This was a section of our original target audience research, where we questioned our target audience, to find out what they wanted to see in a horror film, and therefore what we should use in our trailer. For example one of the questions was:

which of these types of horror do you find the scariest? with the most popular options being:

Zombie, Beast, Realistic Supernatural.

Here we textually analysed the film poster of the film 'The Strangers' From this specific poster, the key points that we picked out were how the element of fear is a surprise as the lady looks as if she is in a comfortable homely environment and that you have to look closely to see the element of fear appearing in the background in the form of a masked person. We also picked up on the font of the writing and how it is glowing, and that all the posters that we have looked at have similar elements in terms of a large title, smaller tagline that leaves you thinking and smaller credits with stand out actors/actresses in a slightly bigger font than the rest.

We also used the film poster for the film 'Vacancy', showing us what we needed to include on our own film poster. From this we specifically picked up the use of light and dark and the messages portrayed by the main focus. In this case both of the characters are inside, from this we see that they could potentially trapped and all around them is darkness.

In the planning stage of this project, we researched trailers of films to help form common conventions that we could use for our film. For example here we looked at the trailer for the film 'Vacancy'

This is a recording of our 3 original story ideas, from which we decided on the storyline for our final production.

Recce Shots of our first location (Wrington). These along with other shots when edited on the computer, eg changing the light levels, helped us choose the locations to film.

This was a recording of the reports of our auditions to find main charactors to play the couple in our film.

Editing

To edit our movie trailer, we chose to user Adobe Premier 4.0 . Although initially struggling to upload and succesfully edit parts of our film, after a while we fixed the problem and were able to remove parts that were un-needed, as we had too much footage and it was not all of good quality so it was quite easy for us to agree which bits to take out. At this stage we also researched the types of music or sound effects that were used in popular horror trailers. Using the software and uncopywrited (freeplaymusic.com) music found we were able to place the music and sound effects over the top of our film and choose where to place it in order to gain maximum effect whilst continuing the story. The first scene that we edited on this software was the opening scene in the woodlands where we reduced the lentgh of some of the shots as to fit with the conventions of a traditional trailer, with many short snappy shots, although had to leave enough within the film as to set the scene and set up the story. Taking this into consideration, I again used the technology to speed up the shots of the 'creepy house' so that more shots could fit in a smaller amount of time

Filming and Camera Shots

We chose to film our trailer at a number of different locations and at different times of the day, as to give the impression of the whole film being spread over a number of days. Our first location was in the village of wrinton where mos of our shots were taken in the woodland area and around the grand house with large gates ( the location of the couples weekend away). Here we chose to use a handheld camera, giving the audience a sense of normality and suggesting that this is the calm before the storm and where everything appears normal. Our next location is inside the grand house, (although we actually used the inside of a different house, the illusion is created that they are the same). Here the camera is on a tripod and a close up is used originally as the couple enter the house. Later in the scene we see variations of long shots as the couple sleep on the sofa, low shots as one of the charactors suggests heading for a bath and use of the 180 degree rule as the charactor panics around the house. The use of lighting is key here with the camera work suggesting when the charactors are fealing fear or nerves as the dark acts as the unknown, creating tension.

Planning and Introduction

As a group (Seb Winter, Liam Barnett and myself) we chose from the specification to produce; a trailer for a horror film, a magazine front cover and movie poster. After deciding this and clarifying the genre of our project, as part of our research we researched the common forms and conventions of a professional horror trailer, poster and magazine front cover. From this we found that there are certain elements in the trailer that immediately show the audience that it is off this genre. This was similar for the movie poster and magazine front cover. An example of this is the colour scheme that we have used as a constant throughout our project and the font used in the writing of our titles. We also planned our ideal locations for the filming of the trailer and set about finding suitible actors to play the main roles, along with planning our time management, negotiating when we could have what equipment and the availibilty of actors and producers.

Movie Poster Still

This shot was taken within the filming stage of our project. We have used technologies such as adobe photoshop in developing this picture into our final movie poster. As a group we choose to use this picture as I enabled us to portray the feeling of the main charactor and clearly shows the genre of the trailer and film, with the eiry dark charactor in the background. It was also chosen as it allowed us a suitible amount of room around the edge of the picture, so that in the development stage we could add the film title, and entice people to watch it by stating the actors and actresses and reviews.