Finished Trailer

Youtube Link

Evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We screened our trailer to a class of people who were similar to our target audience, which was teenagers, aged roughly 17-19 who attend the cinema 1-3 times a month. Our target audience is this age and gender because after my group and I did some research, we found that the horror genre’s majority of the audience is Males in their teens to mid-twenties. We found that females aren’t as interested in this genre because the gore, violence and action doesn’t appeal to them as much as it does to the males. However, the class we screened this to had females in it as well. However, within the classroom the ratio was roughly 5 males to 1 female. This is representative of the typical audience of the horror genre as they are all young and a majority of them are males.

After screening the trailer to the class we gathered feedback from all of them which allowed us to gain more insight to how a real audience would react to the trailer, however, the screening was close to the deadline and we were unable to make many adjustments to the trailer if we had a lot of negative feedback on one aspect of the trailer as we screened this very close to the deadline. The purpose of this screening was to gather criticism and praise about our trailer. The group viewed the trailer 2 times, the first time was to be able to see the trailer as a whole and mention which part stuck out to them the most. The second time was to find anything small that they thought worked well, or didn’t.

The most common feedback that we received was regarding the statistics we used throughout the trailer. This is because of the ‘shock factor’ that it induced to the audience and made them feel uncomfortable, as statistically at least one person within that room would be stalked at some point in their lives. We included this in our trailer as we felt that a majority of horror films that have been released within the last 5 years have been based around an unrealistic or supernatural plot, as a group we preferred horror films from 1960-1970, as they revolved on how dangerous the typical person can really be. A perfect example would be Psycho, the villain is seemingly kind until the final scene where we see how dangerous he really is. We wanted to bring back the concept of not knowing what a person is truly like.

A few people within the group didn’t understand the empty Snickers wrapper towards the end. After hearing this feedback, we thought that we should add a shot of the final girl eating a snickers bar near the beginning of the trailer. The wrapper was to symbolise that she had disappeared without warning, and that snickers bars were her favourite snack. We used a snickers bar at they are advertised as a ‘man snack’ with the slogan being “get some nuts”, which links back to her being the final girl as she is shown as being quite masculine.

We got mixed feedback on the variety of shots used. Some people said that they liked the dutch angle and variety used, whereas others said that there wasn’t a wide variety. However, a majority of comments about the shots used said that we used a wide variety of angles and shot types, so we have marked the feedback stating that we didn’t use enough shots as an anomaly.

We received a lot of good feedback about the sounds used. The group said that they liked how it built suspense and a lot of people mentioned that they liked how the heartbeat went on for longer than it stereotypically should have, as it made them feel very uneasy and prepared them for the killer shot. Others said that the music was matched well to the shot type at that point in the soundtrack, when the music was suspenseful there was a shot of the killer, and when the music was quieter and calmer there was a shot of his victims. One person, however, said that they didn’t like how long the heartbeat went on for, and that we played on it too much. I agree with this person’s comment, as during the editing process I thought it worked well, but after playing it back without the ability to change it I noticed this flaw also.

The killer shot at the very end was filmed in a hurry, we didn’t have the time to film it as planned. A lot of people picked up on the roughness of this shot by saying that it wasn’t as scary as the build-up led them to believe it would be. I agree, I had planned the killer shot to be within the woods, the camera was to be handheld so as to make it feel like the audience’s point of view, to turn around and see the killer storming towards them with a bloody knife in his hand and a body on the floor. Instead we broke the 4^th wall which I thought worked well, as this is stereotypically frowned upon in media. We broke the 4^th wall to make the audience feel like one of his victims.

Evaluation question 1

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My media product follows most forms and conventions of typical horror movie, but also challenges some of them. My horror trailer is called Obsession, and is about a college student who stalks girls who attend the same college; he confesses his love to these girls who then laugh at him. He takes his revenge by murdering these girls but is defeated by the final girl’s boyfriend.

I have followed some codes and conventions of horror films as the villain is male. The villain is male because my group and I thought that the typical villain is physically stronger and larger than his victims and also uses a phallic weapon (a knife), also, we had one shot where the villain seems very carefree, although he was chasing the final girl down to kill her. We used this shot because mental disorders are more common in males, and we felt that there had to be a reason behind our villain’s crimes. So, we designed him to have a mental disorder rather than just blindly killing people because we wanted to make our trailer as realistic as possible.

Villain's weapon of choice

The three locations used within my trailer were the forest, outside of the college and empty corridors. The forest and empty corridors convey isolation and loneliness because the victims are far away from other people, and ultimately, rescue. These isolated settings along with the darkened lighting work well together to convey tension and suspense within the trailer. The outside of the college shots were only used for establishing shots.

Forest

Establishing shot of the college

In the trailers I analysed, I found that there was a wide variety of camera angles, movement and positioning. My group and I imitated this, as we filmed each shot from a variety of angles and positions, we used the ones we thought worked best with the other clips we had decided to use. Close ups are one of the most effective methods to convey the emotions of the character to initiate a response from the audience. However, we didn’t use low/high angles within our trailer as we felt that the power of the villain and helplessness of his victims was portrayed effectively enough without them. However, low angles are used a lot to make the villain seem more intimidating and high angles are meant to make the victim seem powerless. The victims were always seen either from a distance or from behind when they’re running, which is used to portray the villain’s point of view. Another shot is filmed in the forest with the camera at a Dutch angle, this was used to disorientate the viewer as the obscured shot is different to how the audience is used to viewing things.

Close up of villain

An example of a shot we used filmed at a dutch angle

We used editing to our advantage, as we were unable to film at night because when we filmed the footage was too dark, so instead we used video editing techniques to emphasise the blue lighting and dim the rest, so that the shots looked like they were lit by the moonlight from outside. When the shots start to change at a faster pace, we decided to play a clip twice, one with less opacity, and play it over the top of the original slightly after the clip had started. This created a fantastic disorientating effect and revealed to the audience that the villain may have been using drugs to knock out his victim.

This was filmed on a sunny day, but by using editing we managed to make the audience believe this is at night

Another stereotypical convention of horror films is the ‘final girl’, theorised by Carol J. Clover, the final girl tends to wear boyish clothing and have a unisex name, she either defeats the villain or is saved by a male figure. The final girl also stereotypically has a good education and also tends to be rather conservative (no sex within the film, rarely they have boyfriends but there is no intimate scenes between them, they are shown as more of a team than a couple) My trailer does have a final girl, but we have broken some of the rules of the final girl theory. The final girl’s name is not unisex, and she also has a boyfriend who saves her from the villain. However, although these rules are broken, she does wear boyish clothes and she is a college student, which represents her good education, as any scenes shown with her in are in or near the college itself. 

Final girl (Left) and friend (right) differences in clothing reinforce which character is which

We used teenagers for all of the roles in our trailer, this is typical in horror films as teens are perceived as naïve and stupid. This makes them ideal victims as they will walk straight into a trap. Teenagers are also used most in horror films as the target audience of horror films is mostly teenagers, so the audience can relate to the characters, thus creating more of a ‘shock value’ in the trailer. However, usually, the villain is older than its victims. In our trailer, we broke this convention as we used another teen as the villain. This was to show that teenagers can still be evil and not so idiotic as they are made out to be in other horror films.

Inter-titles are very common in horror trailers, as they set the scene for the audience without giving too much of the plot away. Inter-titles are very useful if you don’t want to use dialogue, as they use declaratives, telling the audience what has happened, what will happen and that they could be the next victim. My group used inter-titles in a different way, we used them to tell the audience facts about stalkers in the UK “1 in 12 women are stalked in their lifetime”, we felt that this would scare the viewer more as this is a true fact, and isn’t a far-fetched supernatural plot.

Most horror trailers are themed with a colour, usually red, as it suggests blood or danger to the viewer. Instead, we used dark colours on the villain, such as grey or navy, so suggest that the villain is a very dark character. We also used dark blue tinting in a lot of the shots to imitate night time, so as to reinforce that they are in the college at night. We tried to use a red filter over some shots in the editing programme, Adobe Final Cut Pro, but we felt that the red filter didn’t match our plot very well, as it made the scenes seem very dangerous, we wanted them to seem more eerie and suspenseful than dangerous and fast-paced.

We also used climatic music, which begins with a crescendo to build suspense. This is very common in horror trailers, as the soundtrack used in the trailer can make or break the feelings conveyed through camera angles and positions. The soundtrack we used in our trailer is called Bent and Broken The song starts with a crescendo and has loud crashes and bumps over the top of the soundtrack. We used these crashes and bumps to our advantage, by mixing these sounds into the trailer where there is an eerie shot or a shot with the villain. For example, when the villain’s feet walk past the camera, we made sure to mix in a loud crash over this shot. This worked very well as it created more suspense and helped to reinforce that the villain is a dangerous character. We also mixed other sounds over the top of this soundtrack, such as creaking doors and a heartbeat sound. We didn’t use any sound that we had captured with the footage tended to have a lot of background noise which we couldn’t remove. The background noise we had was because all of the places we used to film tended to have a lot of people around, or the wind was very strong and distorted the sound we had.

Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In the planning and research stages of this task, I used YouTube, DVDs, Wikipedia and IMDb a lot. I used YouTube to view previous trailers from old students and some official trailers. This was to get a good sense of what I need to include in my trailer and the sorts of camera work that I should use. I used DVDs to view whole movies, to see how suspense is built and what music, if any, is used. I also used this to listen to the dialogue, as I was considering using dialogue within my trailer. However, I found that the moments with the most suspense had no dialogue but used sounds such as panting, footsteps, heartbeats etc. I used IMDb to look into further details of films and also to look at movie posters. IMDb is a great tool used to find out more information about a film because the public can also rate the films, and you have access to a lot of reviews, both professional and user-submitted. IMDb helps you to gain a broad perspective on a film without actually watching it or giving any spoilers about the film away. Wikipedia was used mainly for my History of Horror essay. Wikipedia is very informative and is useful to gather a lot of information about one topic.

When we were creating our product, we used a camera (Canon PowerShot A810) to film the product and gather photographs for the magazine cover and poster that we later needed to design. The camera records video, sound and images. We used this camera as it has high quality recordings and I owned it personally, so we didn’t need to gain permission from the college to rent out a camera and we could film spontaneously at any point if we needed to. Digital cameras such as the canon PowerShot A810 are used frequently because they are easy to carry around and makes transferring data from the camera to the editing software easily.

Post production, we used Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Wikipedia and Blogger. Premiere pro was used, by far, the most. Premiere pro allows the user to manipulate video and sound to create a media product. This includes tools such as transitions, filters, colour correctors and more. This was used only to create the trailer aspect of this assignment; I found this program easy to use. I mainly used the ‘dissolve to black’ transition, as most of the clips were darkened to follow the typical conventions of horror trailers. The program also allows its users to manipulate audio. We used this feature to delete any sound that had been recorded with the PowerShot A810, and used a royalty free soundtrack from A site called Incompetech, a site that allows its users to download royalty free music tracks and sounds with no fee for personal or commercial use. We also used this site to download a creaking sound for a certain shot and a heartbeat which we used to create more suspense toward the end of the trailer. I used Wikipedia to gather statistics and facts about stalkers, such as the definition of stalkers and how many people are stalked at some point in their lifetimes. I also used Blogger to post and share my coursework. Blogger is a website owned by Google and allows users to create a blog for free, on which they are able to post text, video, images and links and share them with as many people as they wish. The website is easy to use.

Audio editor featured in Premiere Pro

Three-colour corrector used in Premiere Pro

Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In my opinion, the combination of my trailer, magazine cover and poster is an effective way to promote my horror film. The first thing that was produced was the trailer itself so that we could make sure that all materials used in the ancillary texts were relatable to the film, as we changed some aspects of our trailer regularly.

Film production companies always try to create a lot of hype around their films as early as a year before its release. This is achieved by releasing teaser trailers very early on to thrill the potential audience and make them anticipate the release date of the film it is advertising. Another way to create a buzz around a new film is to get their film on the front cover of a big magazine, such as Total Film or Empire, this is usually a few months before the release of the film. By achieving this, it gives the production company a totally new platform on which to advertise their newest release. It is very hard to get a film onto the front cover of a magazine, but the coverage and feedback it receives afterwards is well worth the time and money invested into doing so.

Distribution companies have three areas of their marketing plan, this is to make sure that it is a success among the target audience. The marketing plan consists of advertising, publicity and promotion. Some methods of promoting their media product are television adverts, billboards, posters, magazine articles/covers/adverts, websites, cinema adverts and many more. In order to learn more about their target audience, distribution companies carry out an audience profiling. The audience profiling consists of age, gender, lifestyle, media consumption, social networking and other factors. By finding out more about their target audience, the distribution company can use this information to their advantage by reflecting this in their marketing plan. For example, if the target audience of one media product are frequent Twitter users, the marketing plan will involve links to a Twitter account made especially for the release of the new media product.

Poster

The trailer tended to have a lot of symbolism, rather than actual shots, of violence. For example, the sweet wrapper left on the floor is symbolising that the final girl has gone missing and has left everything behind, and so forth. After including this much symbolism within the trailer, I felt that the poster needed to be a symbol for the film itself. I used vectors to create my poster, as this is uncommon in film posters (especially horror posters). And I used a minimal amount of shapes, but managed to convey a lot of information. The knife is the victim’s weapon of choice. The blood drop is in the shape of a heart to symbolise that the kill is a crime of passion, as the victim thinks he loves the girls he kills. The background of the poster is a gradient of light grey to dark. I used a minimal amount of text on the cover. This was for those who do not know the basic plotline so that the poster can bring in new people who haven’t yet heard of the film. I put the title of the film, ‘Obsession’ was the biggest text on the cover, so as to make sure the audience knew that this was the title. It is in black so as to stand out against the greys. The tag line beneath it is smaller than the title, and is the same blood red as the blood on the knife and the heart, ‘Love has a consequence’. I used these words as the tag line as it reinforces that the villain loves his victims.

Magazine cover

Magazines are constantly in competition with each other, each one brighter than the next or with famous models or actors on the front. The magazine cover is supposed to sell the entire content of the magazine. This is why I tried to go against the typical magazine conventions and gave my magazine cover a black background, this is to make the red of the title and other texts stand out. The model of the magazine is staring straight at the camera and is wearing a blood stained shirt. The combination of these factors tells the audience that this is a horror film being advertised, and catches their attention as it is dark in comparison to all the other brightly coloured magazines. This is how I would like my magazine cover to look, but I would have o control over it’s appearance, as my role would be within the production company, not the distribution company.

Both my poster and magazine cover break stereotypical conventions of themselves, this is to attract more attention from the public as they are different to what they are used to seeing. These, combined with the trailer I made, should generate a lot of excitement for te release date of the media product I am marketing.

Recce Report

Forest

We liked this location as it is very run down and isolated. The dead plants help to reinforce the loneliness in this location. We made sure that all of the shots we used in this location were faced away from the fence to the park, as we wanted to make the forest area seem as isolated as possible.

I would have liked to use the forest area at night but when we filmed in the dark the footage was too dark, we had to use video editing instead to achieve this effect

 Hallway

We used this part of the hallway for two scenes – the empty hall shot and the used sweet wrapper shot. The empty hall shot was edited to look like it was at night and the sweet wrapper was at day time. We used this area as the trailer we filmed is set in and around a college. The hallway at night was to emphasise the loneliness in a place that is meant to keep you safe, and the sweet wrapper was to show that the final girl had disappeared.

Stairwell

This area was very good to use as it was both in college and isolated. We only used this area for one quick shot of the villain from behind. This area seems very lonely when the bottom of the stairwell isn’t lit. in the shot we took, the villain is walking from the top of the stairwell and the bottom half isn’t lit, so he walks into darkness and isn’t visible to the audience. This helps to reinforce that the villain is sneaky and can hide in most places, making the audience feel uneasy.

Courtyard

We used this courtyard as it has a variation of scenery in one place. The trees were used as another shot in the forest for when we needed to shoot one more shot but didn’t have time or an ability to get down to the forest area. The benches near the building were used also as a shot just outside the college, and we used the wall as a suspense-building shot, with the villain walking beside it slowly dragging a knife along the bricks.

Media hallway

We like this hallway as it seems very cramped from the angle I took this picture at. The walls seem very close together with a low ceiling.  This helps to make the audience feel uneasy and also as though there is no escape from the villain

Lockers

We used the lockers for a shot with both the victim and the villain, and the final killer shot. We used these lockers as they are in a confined space without much lighting. Also, we had a lot of shots from outside of the college, using these lockers helped to make sure the audience knew this was set in a college with college students.

Full film idea

My film, Obsession, is a psychological slasher horror film. The basic storyline of the film is that there is a college student who stalks female students about the college, and thinks that he loves them, each time that he asks one of them to go on a date with him/tells them that he loves them they think it’s either a joke and they turn him down, and he takes his revenge by killing them.

The narrative structure of this film (following Todorov’s theory) is, at the beginning everything is calm, the villain hasn’t attacked anyone, and all the girls are unaware of him. A disruption occurs when the girls cannot find their friend as she has disappeared. The disruption has been noticed when the villain is found out. The disruption is attempted to be repaired when the final girl and one friend try to calm down the villain (however, her friend is killed by the villain in this process). In the final scene, she is saved by her boyfriend who kills the villain; which leads to the new equilibrium at the end.

This film also follows Barthes’ Binary opposition theory, the villain doesn’t have any good aspects and the hero and final girl don’t have any evil aspects. The good in this film is the final girl and her boyfriend, this is because they are average college students who don’t break any rules etc. The evil in this film is the villain, Brad, as he hurts people who reject him.

The film also follows Propps character types theory:

The villain - Brad, he struggles against the hero and harms those who reject him.

The donor - The final girl’s friend. She helps the final girl to realise who the villain is.

The princess - This is the final girl, as the hero kills the villain to keep her alive and stay with her.

Her father - this character isn’t shown within the film, although the final girl’s friend can be applied to this role

The dispatcher - this is the girl who dies at the beginning, as she starts the realisation between the final girl and the other friend

The false hero - this is the final girl as she tries to defeat the villain but isn’t able to do so

The hero - the final girl’s boyfriend, as he saves the final girl and defeats the villain