Storyboards

Storyboard 1

Storyboard 2

Storyboard 3

The difference between a teaser trailer and a theatrical trailer.

A teaser trailer is generally shorter than a theatrical trailer as it is released before the theatrical trailer. The theatrical trailer has more information in it and is obviously longer than the teaser trailer. The teaser trailer doesn't give away any characters or the plot of the story. A good teaser trailer builds up the audience so they want to see more. It creates excitement and means that more people will watch the theatrical trailer resulting in more viewers for the film. The Teaser trailer also helps create suspense and publicity, it 'hypes' up the audience.

Target Audience Research

This pie chart gave us more control over what the audience says about scaring them. These were ideas that we debated on having and the results helped us choose what kind of story line to go along with.

More people would like to see the monster in the trailer but it is quite close with people who wouldn't want to see the monster of the film. We wanted to show the monster as our trailer wouldn't make much sense without it.

As a group we liked the ideas of reflections as we have seen it used in many horror films and it always makes us jump so we thought it would be good to use in our trailer. The majority of people asked said that if they saw a reflection of something it would scare them.

We asked this question because the monster in our teaser trailer is going to have black hair and white skin, if the audience didn't like girls with black hair and white skin and didn't see them as that scary then it would have changed our ideas for the film.

This question allows us to see what the audiences worst fears are. The group had their own ideas of what scared them but it helped to find out everyone else's. This meant that we could broaden our ghost story.

This chart clearly shows that the majority of people asked did like gore to be in the horror movie they're watching. This helped us as we wanted to use gore in our trailer and knowing that a majority like gore allowed us to do this without a bad review.

This pie chart shows that the majority of people asked were aged 16-24. This is the age that we wanted to target so this made our research more useful.

For our target audience we a group of people who are mainly girls. This wasn't intentional but the class that we did it in just so happened to have more girls in it.

Draft Film Poster and Magazine Cover

Magazine Cover

Poster

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? (The script)

The script

[Im Laura Ireland and im one of the makers of the horror teaser trailer Asylum]


-The story line

-Poster

-Magazine

-Initial idea

-Shots

-Conclusion

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

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

Here is an image i made in photoshop using print screens of some of the computer technologies we used during the process of making the trailer.

We also used final cut pro, garage band, the mac computers, cameras, video cameras and other websites such as survey monkey and facebook. All of this equipment and technology allowed us to do the things we did to our trailer, such as cutting sequences, editing sound and getting research. Without all of these key components we would have been met with many challenges.

1. Using final cut pro was the most important aspects for us to create our trailer as without it, we wouldn't even have trailer. Learning how to use final cut pro was really difficult, it was so complex and no wonder considering people in the film industry actually use Final Cut Pro to make movies. If you know how to use the programme it makes editing, cutting and changing footage so easy. I learnt how to cut sequences, ins and out points, rendering, fading in and out, music editing, linking and unlinking. On Final Cut Pro i had difficlty when it came to finding things such as saved files and finding specific tools as i hadnt had much experience with a Mac before i started making the teaser trailer.
2. Blogger and Youtube really helped us with making our trailer. Youtube inspired us with its already existing horror movie trailers that other people had put on Youtube. It also helped me with creating my blog, i got trailer from Youtube and analysed them on blogger, which I'm using now! Blogger has been a big help also as it has allowed me to keep everything done in class etc on here instead of carrying it around on paper or in text books etc. I personally didnt like blogger alot as it looks old, I would of rather written everything down. I found blogger hard to use and it doesnt have all ofthe tools that i would find useful like text sizes(there isnt enough choice). Youtube was our broadcasting network because without Youtube only a local audience would see the trailer where as on Youtube, anyone from anywhere can watch it and rate or comment on it, which would then give the group feedback on a much larger scale.
   
3. The cameras we used to film our footage were more technical as they were HD and new, meaning they had better quality footage and the sound that came of it wasn't crackly or unhearable. These camera helped us achieve a much better looking picture.
4. Flickr really helped us with analysing pictures for our research. Its a picture site for anyone to analysis pictures on, from magazine to posters to magazine covers. Also its free so that came as an extra. Using a site like Flickr really helped me to understand the horror conventions because when it came to analysing the horror movie posters it helped me to remember why things were there and why they had certain colours and more.
5. Facebook, Myspace and Twitter are all social networking sites that could of allowed our group to reach a much wider audience for research. We did use Facebook to advertise our survey on survey monkey (a website) but unfortunately only a few people took the survey so in the end it wasn't really worth it but i can see how it would of been useful to others.
   

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback has helped me realise what needs to be changed with the trailer and what the audience prefer to what we did.

To get audience feedback from our trailer, we handed out a piece of paper, the picture below is what the paper looked like. It asks the questions, What did you like about the trailer? (1-2 sentences)and the question below this is What do you think could be improved in the trailer (1-2 sentences). This allows the audience to tell us most sides of their opinion of the trailer. This helped us to see what they liked and what they didn't.

The pieces of paper were handed out to a majority of the same people, the majority of people asked to fill out the questions were aged 17 or 18, as this was our target audience. We used younger people in the trailer as we thought this would appeal to the same age group as what we asked the questions to. Usually people watch movies with people their own ages in because they can relate to whats happening. For most horror movies the target audience is 16-24 year old boys, but we decided to look at both boys and girls opinions as they are both as important to the research.
The two highest compliments of the trailer were the shot techniques and the scene where the girl appears in the camera flash. The flash with the girl in was also one of my favourites, it looks like it was a hard scene to make but it really wasn't, all we did was split the camera shot in half and then put a really small clip of the girl in the middle and it worked. At first it was just an accidental experiment that just so happened to turn out to be a really good shot, therefor we used it.

From the sheets we found that our music track in the trailer was really slated. 9 out of 14 people said something about the music needing to be improved which clearly says that the music track was not up to scratch, which in all fairness the music tracks were rushed and some of them were meant to be changed as they were only fillers at the time but they never got changed and ended up being in the trailer when it was shown to the class. Most people said that the music should have been edited to fit the pace of the trailer. This i agree on because towards the end the footage gets quicker but the music doesn't really change in pace. This is probably because at the end its a heartbeat and although the heartbeat does get a tiny bit faster, its not that noticeable, and also we tried to fit the footage to the track and not the track to the footage which may have been a better idea. Something else that the audience thought could be better was the repetition of the scary girl. They thought that she showed up in far to many places, far to many times. I also agree with this as it takes away the scariness of the girl. The more someone see something they more they become used to it, which is why the girl shouldn't of been shown as often as she was. I also disagree with this statement because although she did appear maybe too many times, the places that she appeared in were clever and scary, like in a cupboard and behind people and in the camera flash.Most people said that the actual horror content was quite scary and jumpy at times. One other person said that because the girl appeared so many times it was funny.

The criticisms and compliments of the trailer have taught me that different people have different opinions but they matter as they are the audience and the audience would be the ones to pay to see this movie and if the trailer isn't good enough then no-one would go to watch the movie. Its also taught me that audience feedback and audience research are really important and perhaps the group should have paid more attention to this instead of going by what we thought would be good.

Asylum, The Tralier

1. In What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (Part one)

My groups media product (a horror movie trailer called Asylum)uses, develops and challenges the forms and conventions of real media products.
Below you can see a selection of 9 key frames taken from other horror movies.

1. This is a shot from the movie trailer Forget Me Not. It is some teenagers about to drink some shots of alcohol, we chose this shot because it shows teenagers messing around and doing what teens do and this is what we wanted to portray in our video too.

2. This shot was also taken from the movie trailer Forget Me Not, this shot appears to show a random girl by the side of the road as a car full of teens drive past, this is the first odd sign in the trailer and it works effectively as the audience try to recognize her by they cant.

3. Is a shot taken from The Grudge movie trailer. Its a door closing on it's own, this is something that is sure to frighten the audience as its something that could happen in your own home, it also suggests that something you cant see has closed the door meaning that there are other people in the place that you never knew about.

4. The fourth screen shot was taken from the trailer, The Woman In Black, and it shows someone behind the main character (where he cant see them) with their hand on the window of the door, and it again this would suggest that there is something within that the main character cant see or communicate with.

5. This shot show three Innocent looking girls standing, looking at something. This shot is clever as it appears to show three innocent, sweet, young girls but the audience can tell that something may have happened to them or perhaps they are the evil because they aren't smiling or playing as young girls should. Their white/pink clothes and pale faces are what makes the audience think of innocence as these are colours issued to characters such as angels and baby's; people who couldn't possibly do wrong.

6. This shot was used for our media project because for us a bath/ shower scene in horror movies always scares us and in this picture the monster in the movie has her hand in the victims hair which is very scary, the idea is clever as its not something obvious, or something that has been done before.

7. This shot shows the power that a simple 'over the shoulder' shot can have. The mise-on-sene in the scene is clear as the woman in the background is part of this, her old fashioned clothes and her age are show us that shes from the past and is back in the present. This makes the scene scary as again she is unseen by the main character so we already know whats going to happen where as the main character doesn't.

8. The use of a Title in a movie trailer is obviously important but the fonts etc make it even more interesting. In this title the use of bold simplicity is effective as the audience want to read the title, also the way it goes from a lighter shade to a darker would suggest that the audience are stepping into the dark, where the horror is.

9. This shot shows some text asking the audience a question and this is something that i initially wanted to put into the groups trailer but it wasn't agreed on so we agreed on informative text as we all agreed that it would work better with our trailer. Questions and set put the audience on the edge of their seat because they want to know more but they cant usually until they've watched the movie which draws the audience in.

Below you can see 9 key frames taken from my groups teaser trailer ASYLUM.





1.This picture taken from our media trailer shows a teen, irresponsibly drinking alcohol before hes about to go into an abandoned hospital. We wanted our character to drink because then the audience aren't sure if the horrors they see are because of the alcohol the teens have drunk or if its real making it even more scary as the audience are left to figure it out for themselves.

2. The second picture was used for the intention of making the audience confused, with the help of the sound track alongside this frame we hoped that it would also make the audience jump as the girl in the shot in flashed in and out of shots with the same background but in a different shape, to give the illusion of blinking.

3. This scene is a match on action of the girl in the shot watching TV then turning around when the door opens mysteriously, to her then turning around from another view point so we can see the scary girl in the scene. The use of technical code in this scene is for tension building so the audience are 'freaked out'.

4. This shot the group had all seen in many horror movies before and we all agreed that it is an effective way of scaring the audience. We used it as a quick flash in our trailer through out the montage of other scary shots. We found this to be effective because it only flashes up so the tensity of the trailer because bigger.

5. Shot five helps create a narrative for the audience (without giving too much away). It shows a young, innocent girl playing with a dolly. The mise-en-sene also shows us that shes in a mental hospital through the white walls and white dress which is stereotypical of a mental hospital.

6. This shot shows how we chose to use some gore in our trailer. We originally wanted a gore biased trailer meaning that there would be lots of blood and unattached limbs etc. In the end we chose not too as the audience research showed that the audience would rather see ghostly behaviours etc. This scene shows a boy with with a slit neck in the bath tub, to the audience this would make the scene seem like the victim wasn't expecting the death.

7. The seventh shot shows one of the teens in the trailer, who has taken drugs and consumed alcohol, and the camera person who may also have done so, which is why the ghostly girl in the back ground makes sense. The audience get confused though as they can't tell if the girl in the background is just a hallucination or if she is actually there. This creates confusion and fright.

8. The Title shot is to tell the audience what the movie is called. For our title shot the voice-over whispers "Asylum". This gives the effect of things from the past, coming back to the present or, an someone who has been killed in the present whispering a haunting word.

9. The text also helps create a narrative for the story, the text in our trailer gives information and hints as to what might happen next. This creates suspense and drama and helps the audience to comprehend whats going on if the footage in the trailer doesn't.

Magazine cover Analysis - Fangoria

Horror magazine cover 1, a photo by LILLOZZAA on Flickr.

Magazine cover Analysis - Empire

Magazine cover Empire final copy, a photo by LILLOZZAA on Flickr.

I Spit On Your Grave Horror Movie Poster Analysis

I spit on your grave horror movie poster, a photo by LILLOZZAA on Flickr.

Dead Silence Horror Movie Poster Analysis

Dead Silence Movie Poster, a photo by LILLOZZAA on Flickr.

Initial meeting

In the groups initial meeting the group descused the smaller ideas and any story ideas anyone already had. The idea of a young girl who had come bakc from the dead to seek revenge was discused also the mental hosipal idea was brought up. We descused things such as where we would film and who we would need to ask to be in the movie as these are important things to consider.

Location and Propps List

Locations
- Vic's house
- Roads around Vic's house
- Mental Hospital in Hales
- College Building

Propps
- White dress/ Long white t-shirt
- White coat (science coat)/ suit
- Fake blood (bottle of blood)
- Black wig
- Digital Camera
- Latex
- Salt/Sugar/flour
- Wound makeup/ face paints

Essay On How Women Are Represented In Horror Within The Media

Representations of women in the media are known for being stereotypical due to previous ways in which women were portrayed. Women were shown in the media on ashing up adverts and domestic roles where common for women to be seen doing on tv. But not all medias portray women in a stereotypical way.

The classic theoretical view of how women are represented in the media is that males are strong, independent, dominant, and authoritative where as females are seen as passive, submissive and having a focus on their own appearance. They are also often defined through their relationships to men, such as their father, partner etc. Research by Jeremy Tunstall (The media in Britain 1983) found that the women in the media were seen around the groupings of domestic, sexual, consumer and marital. this shows that women in the media are shown as objects and not real people. It is also thought that the media ignore women to a certain extent. Research carried out in 1992 saw that on screen men outnumbered women at a rate of two to one, this shows how women are invisible to the media. Their invisibility means that although women are shown in the media, not all kinds of women are seen, for example, Black women, Lesbian women and older women were practically unknown to be seen in the media. An example of when age can be depicted would be on a news tv programme. Nearly all the time the male newsreader is twice as old as the newsreader.

Women being shown as sexual objects has always been around in the media, from page 3 girls to figures such as Lara croft. Lara Croft breaks the stereotype of women but also reinforces the fact that women in the media are seen as sexual objects. She fights and uses a gun and could be seen as a bit masculine but she also has long hair and wears revealing clothes such as a small vest top and very short shorts. So overall she would be seen as a bad role model. Laura Mulvey sees that the media force the audience to look at women in a sexual way. She says that the use of close ups, point of views and reaction shots encourage the audience to relate the male as the subject and that the use of long shots, tilts up the body, fragmentation of body parts ( only seeing an arm or a leg etc) force the audience into looking at the women in a sexual way. Therefor Laura Mulvey and others argue that is it the medias fault for the objectification of women. But Carol Clover, who writes the text 'Women' sees that males (young males, teens) identify themselves with the female character in horror movies. Meaning that males don't want the female in a horror movie to die ending in the theory of the final girl. The final girl theory from Clover says that horror movies generally always have a survivor,which is almost likely to be a female. Sometimes the final girl doesnt necessarily die but is the last to die. Horror films that back the final girl theory are The Shinning, Carrie, Eden Lake and many more. In these films the final girl is actually seen to turn into the monster searching for revenge or seeking safety for loved ones. This would suggest that horror is not a part of the media that presents women in a negative way.

In conclusion the horror genre in the media doesn't objectify women as sexual objects, domestic, consumer or marital on purpose or in a bad way, as a majority.

The return of the repressed

Psychological repression is where one keeps its desires and wants and repels it into unconsciousness. It is seen that repression is found in many cases of mental illness.
Freud saw that anything that had been pushed to the back of the mind or into unconsciousness would once again reappear, weather that was while the person was doing something or if they were to just think about it. The return of the repressed seemed to have stimulated from Russia. People in Russia were remembering things from the war that had been pussed into their unconsciousness,which caused mental illness etc. All of this meant that for horror films and audiences, there was a hole new reason to be scared. Film writer could used characters who had suffered from repression. They would make their characters have fantasies about killing people but it would be pushed aside and then one day their muderious thoughts would be re-kindeled. this would have been very scary for the audience as the horror within the horror movie was infact a real illness.

A new horror movie idea, Title- Woodland Blood Bath

A typical group of teenagers (2 boys, 2 girls) who have just finished college, head out to the forest to stay in a cabin so they can celebrate their achievements without any disruption. Little do they know, the town they are about to enter has a hidden secret. The teens arrive at the cabin and immediately decide to go exploring so they all get back in the car and head back into the town. The teens notice that in one of small food stores the man behind the cash register looks very unnerved. One of the girls speaks up about the man to the others and the others convince her its nothing. After this the teens head back to the cabin and start to drink alcohol. One of the boys then heads of into another room to find his cigarettes and in turn sees a ghastly looking man. This man one by one kills the teens in secret, the last girl left is first afraid and runs as far as she can until the manhunt is over and she runs straight into an uncharted part of the woods were she is left for the killers pray.

The Role Of Distributor.

Identifying The Audience
When identifying the audience we need to consider things such as, age certificates for the film, genre, gender, etc. These things all contribute to what kind of audience is going to watch the film. Also things like Lifestyles, social networks and media consumption patterns contribute to where and how a film is promoted.
Audiences vary for different kinds of films and this is why it is important to figure a target audience. Families, young teens and the older generation are not likely to see the same films. Cinemagoers are more upmarket, particularly for the more specialised film whereas cinemagoing is someone of leisure, that groups of people participate in. Target Audiences are important to a film company but the distributors want to reach out to as many people as possible including niche groups.
The role of the distributor is to deliver the movie to the largest demographic possible. Things like online movie downloaders also help the film to become more distributed. Distributors need to be able to make the film reach its full potential and make the movie seem as good as it possibly can. They make sure that the film reaches the best possible theaters and bilboards. Posters inside cinemas are crutial for distributor to reach and complete.

Market plans determine how they are going to target the audience whereas a distribution plan is made to go along the whole of the film process so the distributors know how best to distribute the film. The marketing plan depends on what kind of movie they are disritbuting for example a comedy or romance film may fit better being advertised on a poster whereas an action movie would be more likely to go on a bilboard in a city or even online strategies like in pop ups and in facbook.

The Groups Horror Movie Initial Idea

Our horror movie trailer is biased on the brutal murder of a young girl who lived in a mental hospital. Years later, after the mental hospital had been closed down and abandoned, a group of typical teens decide as a joke, to explore the abandoned mental hospital, after performing acting of drug abuse one of the teens goes of to explore and this is when the audience first see the ghost. After this, one by one, the teens have an encounter with the ghost and then die in a brutal way.

Moodboard

The pictures used in this moad board were chosen because they are the things that i find scariest. For example, the coseups of faces with wide open mouths is something i find terrifying and would like to encorparate into the horror movie trailer my group are to create.

Do the main narrative theories work in relation to The Shinning ?

We applied the theories and ideas of four narratives theorists to do The Shinning. Propp was a Russian critic who explored the underlying structures of folk tales and proposed a set of universal character and narrative functions which he thought were the basis for all stories. His ideas are an uneasy fit with The Shinning. Propp identified the characters of a movie as being:

1. The villain — struggles against the hero.
2. The dispatcher —character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
3. The (magical) helper — helps the hero in the quest.
4. The princess or prize — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. the hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.
5. Her father — gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
6. The donor —prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
7. The hero or victim/seeker hero — reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
8. The False Hero - takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess

Only some of these roles apply to the characters in the shinning. And the roles that do apply are confused and not solid character roles for example, The hero in The Shinning could be seen as Wendy as she takes it into her own power to trap Jack in a storage room and try to save her boy, but also Danny could be seen as the hero as he can see the future and warns his mother of the terror in room 237. Tzvetan Todorov believes that there is an equilibrium to every story. An equilibrium is where the story starts out normally showing normality in a village etc. Then there is a disequilibrium; something to break the equilibrium, resulting in a new equilibrium. This can be applied to The Shinning as The Beginning starts of as a a normal job opportunity then normality is disrupted by jack becoming crazy and possessed, then the new equilibrium is Wendy and Danny getting away living on their own. Claude Levi-Strauss thought that the theory of binary opposition can be applied to movie stories. Binary oppositions can be seen in The Shinning, for example:

• Past - present
• Cause - Effect
• Good - Evil
• Natural - Supernatural
• Normal - Abnormal
• Community - Isolation
• Sanity - Madness

Bordwell and Thompson in their book 'Film Art: The Introduction' defined narrative as "a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occurring in time and space". It defines where things take place, when they take pace and why they take place. In the Shinning time is a big object to think about as time is confused and muddled so the audience have a misunderstanding of what is going on. In the movie, days and months are shown but they aren't in a continuous manner. As the black screens come up with days of the week on the days start to skip for example it goes from Saturday to Tuesday.

Forget Me Not Horror movie trailer

Forget Me Not trailer.

This video trailer is about a group of friends who forget one of their old bestfriends who took their own life, because of this she comes back from the dead to haunt and taunt them.
Genre Conventions
Settings
Typically the Movie is set to be in the middle of nowhere as the teens traveling have just graduated and are in wish of celebration. Them being in the middle of nowhere gives a sense of isolation and secrecy. We see that the dead best friend returns from the dead. Things that are done at night time like when they go through the graveyard. Something is bound to happen to the group of young, typical teens.

Technical code
POV and LS are used in the trailer. This portrays issues about identification.

Iconography
The lighting has a general green tint, and is generally dark unless the lighting is natural. This conotates that the film may not be focused on blood but on the ghost theme. Another theme is brought up in the trailer and that is zombies.

Narrative structure/ Character types
Typical modern, teen horror. There is a clear villain, but no clear hero, as horrors generally end up in the killer winning and the victims tend to die. The stupid, naive teens are the ones who usually die, and the one who seems to take an interest int he suspicion seems to live.

Themes
Dracula related as someone comes back from the dead.
Vengeance
Anger
Past times