Media Evaluation

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

Making a horror trailer was extremely difficult. Coming up with a plot idea was what was our first tackle and arguably the hardest task of the project. Each direction we turned, we had to think about whether it had been overdone or whether we would be able to pull it off successfully. In the end we decided on a film about a girl being stalked, and based our idea on the 2009 film, Obsessed. We decided on this because it was a modern hybrid film, stretching the limits between psychological and horror. I thought this worked well because modern day horror films have to rely heavily on a strong and complicated plot in order to be successful, such as Cabin in the Woods with its post-modernist storyline that includes aspects of almost every horror film you’ve ever seen. Especially because everything has been done, people are going back and doing remakes and sequels to previously successful films – Like Texas Chainsaw 3D being released soon. We tried to change it as much as possible, making our protagonist a girl being stalked by a boy, rather than a girl stalking a male in a workplace. We had to change a lot of the structure and storyline in order to make it more of a horror trailer as nobody in Obsessed is killed apart from the stalker, as well as to make it easier for us to film in our setting and environment. For example, changing the point of the stalker and protagonist meeting from the work place to a pub. This means all the weird occurrences take place in her home, unexpectedly, rather than encountering her stalker at work like Obsessed. We added the shots of the sister dying and the blood on the mirror, as our horror adaptation of the non-violent spam email scene of Obsessed.

One of the main reasons we decided to make our protagonist a woman, rather than a man like in Obsessed was so we could practice final girl theory. Through the tied up and gagged scene we hoped to get the audience thinking that because she’s captured, that’s it, she’ll die. Which is what the final girl theory is supposed to do, however because she is the final girl, we can also be almost certain she will survive – with multiple occurrences in which we might doubt this. For example in Alien, as a viewer we constantly fear that Ripley’s going to die, but she always manages to escape. In particular when she finds the alien in her escape pod. Below is a video in which we try to explain this.

We thought it was imperative to have certain aspects of horror iconography. We tried to incorporate things typical of horror films. We tried to choose quite dark and gloomy locations, as well as using fake blood on the mirror and on one of our actresses and we had two weapons. We also had a phone, which is occasionally the base of horror plots -like The Ring and Scream. The video below explains our thought process behind what types of horror iconography we used.

In terms in cinematography, horror trailers are very specific in terms of structure. There’s usually a slow build-up, to something scary and fast paced, slowing down towards the end, with something quick at the end to give the audience a last scare. Our slow build-up was at the beginning where we had the story briefly explained, and our protagonist expresses her worries. Followed by fast paced cuts of different points in the film, where the tempo of the music changes and the shots have more horror elements and violence. Slowing down with the creepy intense scene when our stalker finally has the girl. With a final scare, after the title page, of our unknown stalker smashing someone’s skull in, leaving the noise of the squelch and the cry of pain imprinted in our heads. Cinematography is a key element in the structure. In the video below, we talk about what kind of shots we used to achieve a successful horror trailer.

During editing, the hardest thing was finding the appropriate music, because music is such an important aspect of a trailer. During my research leading up to the production of my trailer, I found a few trailer re-cuts that changed the genre of each trailer. The most noticeable difference between them and their original was the change in music. The same story line with the same shots, just different music could completely set the tone of one of these trailers, which was why it was so important for us to find music that worked well. We found songs that had worked well with our own trailer, which had even been used in other horror soundtracks, such as There will be blood by Jonny Greenwood for the film There Will Be Blood. We wanted to incorporate something of our own, so we added the scream we had recorded. We also wanted to add a scream to increase the horror aspect, and enhanced its sharpness to in fact scare the audience, which is the objective of a horror trailer and draw in a potential viewer of any horror film. Horror fans want to be scared to an extent, because that’s the purpose of this genre, but if our audience isn’t scared or can’t appreciate the plot of a horror film/trailer, it is unsuccessful. Our target audience is someone young, who would appreciate a post-modern hybrid film. With a young cast, I thought it would generally appeal to someone of young adult aged status.

When filming the boyfriend kidnapping scene, I thought it would look good if we had our stalker appear from the darkness to drag our protagonist’s boyfriend out of sight. As well as having Nell walk into the darkness showing the start of her misfortune as she disappears into the darkness. In the ‘being watched’ scene where she walked looking over her shoulder, we tried to use as many angles and shots we could to reflect the feeling of her being watched. After doing our research we discovered that mid shots and close-ups were most often used in horror trailers, which is what we tried to do with our trailer.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? (Poster and film magazine front page)

It was hard thinking of something that was scary and that went with what we were trying to portray to photograph and put in our poster and magazine cover. We wanted to incorporate a scream in one of our pictures, but didn’t want it to look too stereotypical, like the Scream poster. With manipulation of lights we were able to have a screaming shot without it looking comical. It also fits well with the horror genre and the darkness and sinister atmosphere of our trailer and film concept. We used this for our magazine cover.

For our poster, we used an untypical picture of our girl being drowned in the bath, which is a typical fear. Drowning. As well as the stalker being able to get that close to her to put her in that situation. Just like the bath scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

What have you learned from your audience feedback? (teacher, parent, peers)

We got feedback from family friends and teachers. Reactions did differ. My mum said she found it hard to understand and it was too quick for her to have any time to understand. However, when I showed my cousin, who is 21 and would be our typical target audience, said it all worked really well, and when I asked him to tell me what he thought the plot of the film was, and he got it exactly right. The only criticism he gave was the cut from the Nell calling out for Cyrous, to the shot of her footsteps being stalked, saying that in the former shot she held the dog in her hand, and in the latter it was on the floor. A friend said that our non-inconspicuous kidnapping of the boyfriend was unsuccessful in this case because it was too obvious and in reality our protagonist would have picked up on it with a faster reaction. However, when filming this was something I particularly liked because she does look up and with the noise of Cyrous hitting the wood it is obvious to the audience he’s being taken against his will. We got some of our peers to film their reactions to our trailer and say what they thought worked well and what didn’t, here’s what they said:

We also got some from our teacher throughout our process. Before we had the faster cuts of the burning of the picture and the boy being beaten up, as well as the sister dying up against the wall, we were going to put in another long scene in which a friend visits her and discovers a picture frame being tampered with, like how we did in our practice trailer. But after his suggestions, we attempted to create a faster middle sequence, with what he had already and anything we could shoot and add in the time we had left. A video of his thoughts after viewing our end product is pasted below:

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

This project relied heavily on technologies not failing on us. Using the video cameras was the easiest bit, however we did end up with one vital piece of footage being deleted and having to be re-shoot, but this was fairly easy. We did encounter a few difficulties with our computers in school. It would sometimes be the case that we couldn’t access our blogs because we had written something on it that meant the school would block our sites. In addition, when editing, one of the websites we used to download music wouldn’t let us download one of the songs we wanted to use, so we brought up the track on YouTube on one of our phones and recorded it as a voice recording, making the best of a bad situation. Before we did our chase sequence at the end of year 12, I had never used iMovie before, but it’s a very user friendly software and was fairly simple, straight forward to use and easy to get the hang of.

When editing we had to think of cuts and transitions that would reflect a real horror trailer. Most of the transitions offered by iMovie looked quite amateur, or comedic, therefore we were left with simple fades to black/white and cross dissolves, which is what we used most. Although we were limited with what we thought would look believable, it did not affect the trailer in my opinion. It didn’t look particularly repetitive or unprofessional.

Doing the poster and magazine, we used Adobe PhotoshopCS5 to edit the pictures and Adobe InDesignCS5 to add the texts and borders around the image. Doing media for the past 4 years meant Adobe PhotoshopCS5 was very active in my life, and I had gotten a lot of practice with it meaning I knew how to manipulate the images on it. However, Adobe InDesignCS5 is different. It’s a lot harder, but we had used it last year for our media magazines, so we weren’t beginners as such with the software, but we did have to Google certain things we were unsure about.

Making of: Film Poster

This is our original photo for the film poster. We came up with the idea because, we thought it accurately represented the fear we wanted to have our protagonist feel. Moreover, we took influences from A Nightmare on Elm Street with the bath scene, when Nancy gets dragged under water against her will. It’s a universally scary feeling when you’re being held underwater against your will, leaving you feeling powerless against a stronger force. We did our poster on Adobe InDesignCS5. We started with our border, leaving larger spaces at the top and bottom to put the credits and the title.

We started by adding the films production information at the bottom in order to make it accurate to a real film poster.

Then we added the credits, with the films information. Things that you would typically find on a film posters credits. Such as, the names of main actors, name of the production company, name of the producer, Costume Designer, Film Editor, Production Designer, Director of Photography, Executive Producer(s), Producer, Screenplay and Director.

Then we added our date of release and the social media connections. We thought the social media aspects made it more current and in keeping with how other films these days are promoted through online social networking.

We put our title in next at the top, adding a space in between each letter to give it focus. We used ‘Trajan Pro’ for our posters title like we did for our magazine cover because we liked it’s dominance, yet simplicity. We relied on hard hitting simplicity for our film poster we wanted the image of the dead looking girl to be the first thing seen.

We untypically added the image last. After having edited it, manipulating the saturation in order to make our protagonist look less alive, we added it to the poster. We zoomed in to her face more in an attempt to make her face more striking. The make-up running from her eyes was to give to effect she had been crying to induce a emotional response from a potential viewer.

We later added a slogan in the top right which said ‘One Touch is Fatal’. This is supposed to play on our ‘Pestilence’ theme. For her, her pestilence is this stalker, as fatal as it is when he comes into contact with her once, is the same with someone who comes into contact with the plague.

Our finished product shown above.

Making of: Magazine Front Cover

We took this image, by manipulating the lighting before we took the picture. After having the original picture we put it onto Photoshop and used a black and white effect, as well as experimenting with contrasting. We thought this accurately represented our film, and the horror genre. Once we had the image we had to think of what magazine we might use to represent it and what other text we would put onto the front cover.

Once we were happy with the image, we put it into Adobe InDesignCS5. We started by adding a title, date, website and price. Most, if not all magazines include a website, date of issue and price on the front, which is why we included it. We chose Premiere because it’s a well known film magazine.

We manipulated the title, adding different effects and colours. We wanted to use a red colour, but not the default red -so we messed around with the swatch options and colour percentages. We liked the colour of the title and decided to use it for the ‘Pestilence’ title as well, so it stands out from the rest of the featured issue titles.

We thought the grey went well with the red of the title, so we went with a grey/red theme.

We used yellow on the other features to add to the colour scheme. Made the cover brighter and contrasted well with the dark red and grey.

We wanted to use a range of fonts, and tried to use a different font for each feature. For our title we used ‘Trajan Pro’, because it was quite dominant and strong, standing out at the top. We used ‘Minion pro’ for our movie title and some of the features like “2013 movie…”, “Brad Pitt…”, “Free Pestilence…”. We liked its simplicity. For other things like “Starring” we used Lucinda Calligraphy and “The Chainmail:” was in Lucinda Fax. “The return” was done in Lydian BT and “20 must see” was in Grenoble Light SF. 

It’s imperative to include a bar code, which we did, but we went a step further and added a QR Code because of the amount of people using smart phones, it would make sense to link promo’s and special issues to the technology available these days.

We added a sticker in the bottom right of the magazine, which is an exclusive free gift to our magazine, designed to encourage people to buy our magazine over another. We added effects to it, just like we did to the text on the magazine. We wanted to it to be slightly transparent so manipulated it’s opacity and the shadowing, making it look more 3D.

We wanted to portray an accurate representation of a magazine cover and our finished product is shown above.

Magazine Cover Ideas

Finished Pestilence Trailer

After a few weeks of stressful filming and editing, we finished our trailer. Here is the end product:

Editing:Take Three

Having put together our whole trailer, with only a few tweeks needed, we showed both our media teachers to get their opinions on what they thought would work better, or needed to completely scrapped. One of them suggested that ‘an innocent temptation’ wasn’t the right phrase to use, because it wasn’t her who tempted him. Me and my partner came up with ‘A harmless attraction’ instead. However, this involved getting another voice over done. Moreover, our other teacher had critiqued saying he thought the voice overs needed to be scrapped all together. He thought the actors voice didn’t work, and was slightly comical. So, because we didn’t have the time to do another voice over for ‘A harmless attraction’, we deleted all the voice overs, as well as changed all the fonts of the black clips, which was another suggestion made.

One of our teachers also suggested we add a final clip after the title credits to give the viewer one last jump. For this we decided to put the bit where Nell’s stalker, Alfie, is beating someone up and hits him over the head with a plank of wood. We put a fade to black after it, which is intended to give the effect that he’s knocked, me the viewer, out.

We chose Paramount Pictures as our production company logo, because of it’s prestige. We found the iconic image and dragged it to the beginning of our trailer. It’s default setting was to make the picture zoom, which wasn’t what we wanted, so we altered it by making it ‘fit’ to screen, as well as adding a ‘fade to black’ transition after it to make it fade into our newspaper review.

We made the font ‘Big Caslon Medium’ and changed the colour to red, which made it stand out and more dominant. As well as added a bit more colour to the trailer. We also added another fade on the other side of the quote, for it to fade neatly into the opening scene.

We also changed the fonts of the white text clips to ‘Trajan Pro’ to add more variety to our font choices.

We wanted to add a video effect to the fight scene. We chose the hard light effect as which contrasted the colours, but because it was too dark we had to change the brightness of the clip.

We used ‘Heat wave’ on the photo burning clip because it enhanced the colours and highlighted the intensity of the fire, but we had to increase the exposure/brightness again because the effect made the clip very dark.

Editing: Music

Next we filmed Nell’s sister dying, the fight scene between her friend and Alfie and the burning photograph clips. We then added them as jump cuts after the audience become aware of Nell’s growing fear during her phone conversation. We needed a fast paced section in which we could add different music and possibly even a scream, to follow the standard slow build up, fast paced centre, slow break down, dramatic ending structure of any other horror trailer.

Find the appropriate music for a horror trailer is hard, because you can’t just use any pop song. It has to work well with your genre, your plot and can completely change the atmosphere of any film (Like those comedy recuts of horror films spoken about in previous posts). We thought it could be useful to type into Google, ‘horror soundtracks’, so we could find some existing music that might work with what we were going for. Luckily we found ‘Jonny Greenwood- There will be blood’ on youtube, which was down the side of a video we were already on as a recommended watch. We thought it worked well paired with the mirror and dying sister scene. We also found ‘Screams of insanity – original composition – scary music’, which was already on the computer that we used at the beginning of the tied up and gagged scene.

We tried to use some iMovie sound effects too. We found ‘creepy ambient music’ on our computer, which was quiet yet menecing, which was perfect for the ‘being watched’ scene that had a lot of dialogue. Because it was so quiet we put ‘Dark drone suspense 1’ over it, just to add to something extra to it.

We had difficulty finding a song that was slightly more fast paced for our jump cut sequence. After a thorough search we did end up finding a song we thought might work well called ‘scary music’ on YouTube.

After trying and failing multiple times to convert the video to an Mp3 using ‘www.video2mp3.net’ we ended up using the microphone in iMovie to make a voice recoding, in which we played the music out our phone for the computer to pick up the sound. Then we copy and pasted the voice recording three times so that the music overlapped, giving it a different sound to the original and making it go on for longer.

We also really wanted to have a scream in our trailer. So we did another voice recording in which my partner screamed into the computer’s microphone. We put it over the shot of the blood on Nell’s hands and her sister’s dead body.

Editing: Take Two

The next scenes we filmed were the phone scene, the mirror scene and the tied up and gagged scene.

The phone scene was primary a voice over for the being watched scene, but in order for the audience to know whats going on we decided to put two clips of our actress on the phone looking out of her window expressing her concerns about recent events. After detaching the audio from the clip, we split it, deleted what we didn’t need and trimmed the clip to selection. Then we muted the audio of walking scene because it was just background noises, like cars and wind, in order to enhance the volume of the phone conversation. This way we can spread the audio across all the clips and have the voice over as well as have the viewer know that she’s having a phone conversation.

Next comes the mirror scene, in which we split the first clip twice, leaving us with 3 different clips. After cropping the 2nd clip, we were left a close up of Nell’s reaction in the mirror. This was one of the small changes that made a big difference. It would have been one long mid shot throughout if we hadn’t edited how we did.

We changed the volume of the tied up and gagged clips, muting everything apart from the clip where Nell’s stalker says ‘Why can’t we have a happy ending?’. Later, we’ll be able to add some sort of creepy music to compliment the true sinister atmosphere of this clip.

Editing: Take One

After having filmed two of our scenes, the ‘being watched’ scene and the boyfriend scene, we took what we had back to the classroom and started to play around with what we had. We created a ‘New Project’ called ‘TheaandMarianFinalTrailer’ and imported our footage into an event with the same name onto iMovie. We did have some useless footage that we couldn’t use, so we picked the clips we could use and that worked well. We did in fact film the boyfriend scene twice, but went with the first cut in the end. Sometimes we’d get clips that we wanted to use, but maybe went on for a bit too long or someone laughed at the end, in which case we’d highlight what we wanted of the clip and ‘Trim to Selection’.

We placed everything we needed and wanted to use on the event before messing around with video effects or rearranging. Doing it this way gave us a chance to get comfortable with iMovie, before we brought in the other footage.

There’s a shot of Nell walking away with her dog, but is being closely followed by her stalker. Originally the clip was much longer and Nell and her stalker’s footsteps were much further apart. So we split the clip twice, which left us with three clips. One with Nell walking by, one with no footsteps and one with her stalkers. We deleted the one with no footsteps as it made the shot too long. We also had to flip the clip in order for it to coincide with the continuity of the previous clips.

While filming the boyfriend scene, we had our actress call her ‘boyfriend’ by both the scripted name and his own name, and decided to keep to our actors real name. It added to the sincerity on our actresses part.

Once we were happy with the placing and arrangement of the opening scene, we decided to figure out where we wanted that first voice over, as well as to see how well it worked with the trailer. We put the first voice over after Nell tells Cyrous that someone sent her a drink in the pub the other night. This is where is how the audience become aware that there is a problem, and making them aware that Nell recognises this problem. This links to the ‘An Innocent Temptation’ voice over, so we put that first. We also added a ‘Cross Dissolve’ transition on either side of the black clip for a gradual fade between clips, rather than a simple cut.

We adjusted the duration of the black voice over clip to 1.3 seconds so that the audience could read it without it being too long that they had to wait. We brought it to 1.3 seconds rather than it’s default 4 seconds, because it flowed better as well as kept with the pace of any trailer.

We came up with four phrases to use for voice overs and got someone who we thought would do the voice overs well and believable to perform them for us. Above is a video of what they sounded like.

Filming: Locations and Props

Choosing specific locations and using the correct props is vital to a horror film and we wanted to be in keeping with the horror iconography.

Alleyway: The first scene with Nell and Cyrous

At first, we were going to have the dog walked in a park, but spotted this location behind the Pheonix Theatre in East Finchley. This is when Cyrous is grabbed from behind Nell, and we thought the dimly lit location creates an ominous feel for the audience and would add to the dreary atmosphere of the opening.

Street: The ‘being watched’ scene

In this scene, all we needed was a quiet, dark street we could have our actress walk down and luckily her road worked perfectly.

Inside the house: On the phone, dying sister, tied up and gagged and blood on the mirror scenes

Because majority of our trailer was in the dark we decided to make the window scene in the day. This is where she expresses her fears to a friend on the phone.

 

When filming the scene of Sofia, Nell’s sister, dying, we found a wall in the house and thought it could look cool if she was falling down it slowly, clutching her wound. Something like the shower scene in Psycho. We drenched our actress in blood, to mimic a murder as well as the horror iconography that comes with blood. It was imperative for us to show a body with blood, especially because our film concept is so close to being a psychological thriller.

We used the kitchen for the scene where our actress is tied up and gagged. Her stalker has finally got her. This is the last scene so we wanted to make it as creepy and sinister as possible. The fact it’s in her home, somewhere a person should feel safe adds to the fear factor. Her stalker uses a knife, trailer up and down her side.

The blood on the mirror was simply done in our actresses room. It would be terrifying to find someone had broken into your room, your most personal space and put blood on your mirror. We thought the idea was creepy and worked well.

The blood on the mirror was simply done in our actresses room. It would be terrifying to find someone had broken into your room, your most personal space and put blood on your mirror. We thought the idea was creepy and worked well.

Back Garden: Boy beaten up and photo burning scene

For both these scenes the location wasn’t too important because they were jump cuts. However, it was vital to have a weapon, and seeing as we did it in a back garden with a fence, the plank of wood seemed believable and was a good way to add other weapon that wasn’t a knife but just as threatening.