More Inspiration

Our Production Logo/Title card

For our production company title, we chose to make it on Final Cut Pro which allowed us access to multiple different editing tools. 

Our group member, Charlie, went and photographed part of a wood near his house that was close to what we had in mind for our title card. We used the font Grunge as we felt it displayed the genre our production company produced, horror, and chose a cool blue colour to fit with our colour scheme. We also darkened the image, lowered the saturation and reduced the exposure to create a more eerie feel, and found it also emboldened our company name. We overlayed the Gaussian blur over the whole image which we felt was fitting with our genre.

Location Scouting

We settled on the idea that our trailer would be set in a forest, the primary setting used in the Slender man games. It was important to find a place not too far away and easily accessible while providing an appropriate atmosphere and mise-en-scene.

The forest/woods we have settled on are situated in Tonbridge and are located near one of our crew's house, meaning we have a base nearby.

Call Sheet

We created a call sheet that is adaptable to each filming session, so both cast and crew knows exactly what is happening and when. This then also gives the crew a record of what was filmed with who and when.

‘ALWAYS WATCHES NO EYES’ TRAILER

Job No: AWNO0-

Call Sheet: 0-

(date)

Production Company:	Trespass Productions	Mob: Contact: Client Contact:
Location & Unit Base:
Travel & Parking:
Production note:
Location note:
Weather:
CALL TIMES:
--:-- – Crew Call
--:-- – Cast Call
CAST:
1. ‘SLENDER MAN’		Mob:
2. ‘MEGAN’		Mob:
3. ‘HARRY’		Mob:
4. ‘JAMIE’		Mob:
5. ‘EMILY’		Mob:
6. ‘HANGING BODY’		Mob:
CREW:
Director:		Mob:
Camera:		Mob:
Production Manager:		Mob:
EQUIPMENT
Camera: Supplied by Charlotte Morris
Lights: Supplied by Trespass Productions
Grip: Supplied by Trespass Productions
Other: Supplied by Trespass Productions
Props:
Wardrobe:

SCHEDULE:

--:--	Crew call
--:--
--:--
--:--
--:--
--:--
--:--	Wrap

Model Release Form

For our trailer, we require model release forms as our actors will all be under the age of 18 when we begin filming. This is so we have permission to use the footage, required by the law.  

Analysing Horror - Until Dawn

Until Dawn is a interactive survival horror game developed by Sony for PlayStation 4 and released in 2015. The game revolves around a group of friends spending the night at a log cabin on the anniversary of disappearance of two of their friends. As the night progresses, they have to survive a crazed serial killer and something more sinister until dawn. The game employs a technique called the 'Butterfly Effect' - the choices the player makes will carve the story of the rest of the game - and this is incredibly immersive for the player.

I thought that the concept of friends together is similar to ours, and the use of the supernatural Wendigos is similar as well to our use of Slender man. I also feel that the cover for it is something we should use as inspiration for our poster with it's simplistic design that conveys the genre and use of time, and the idea of something sinister and uncontrollable watching their every move.

Analysing Horrors - Dead Silence

Dead Silence is a horror film that was directed by James Wan in 2007. It follows the story of a young man returning to his hometown after the murder of his wife. He believes that a ventriloquist doll that arrived at their house the night of her murder is the reason, and hopes to find answers there. However, what he doesn't realise is that the ventriloquist's ghost is hungry for revenge.

I felt that Dead Silence is very similar to what our film is about, both using the idea of a myth/fairy tale to bring fear. Slender man, of course, is an urban myth created for a competition, and the rhyme in Dead Silence was made for the film to imitate the concept of the Bloody Mary rhyme. I thought the build up of tension was executed well, and the way the audience were thrown into the action almost immediately is similar to our ideas.

Analysing Horror Trailers - The Forest

Analysing Horror - As Above So Below

As Above So Below is a found footage horror film directed by John Erick Dowdle in 2014. It is set in the catacombs of Paris, where a team of explorers are hunting for Nicholas Flamel's philosophers stone. However, they also uncover the dark secrets that live in the city of the dead.

What I really liked about this film was the constant use of a found footage style. It's supposed to be a documentary of the experience, and it therefore immerses the viewer in what is going on. This made the film incredibly intense and exciting as you were seeing what the characters saw. This would link in with Blumler and Katz's uses and gratifications theory in the point that the audience want to identify with the characters of the situation.

I also really liked the tension it created with so few "jump scares", instead playing with psychological fears such as claustrophobia and guilt of deaths. However, I felt that the ending wasn't as good as it could have been, relying too much on a supernatural element when it had started off with a more natural style.



I first found out about the film through a promotional YouTube video by Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie). He embarked on a quest through the catacombs with his girlfriend where they were scared in multiple ways, creating an almost real life horror game.

Conventions of Horror

Our Concept - Slender Man

Our trailer is to be based around the concept of a popular Internet meme known as Slender Man.

Created in 2009 on the Something Awful forum by Eric Knudsen (a.k.a Victor Surge), Slender Man was formed for a photoshop contest where users were to create supernatural images. To increase the overall effect, Knudsen added snippets of text that were supposedly from witnesses. It was a hit and soon went viral, fanart, cosplay and fanfiction (known as creepy pastas) jumping from site to site and gradually losing contact with it's original creator. In 2012, the "myth" of Slender Man was formed into a video game named Slender Man: The Eight Pages, and within the first month it had accumulated 2 million downloads, leading on to more variants of the game that included Slender Man for iOS and the sequel, Slender Man: The Arrival (2013).

What made Slender Man so popular was the flexibility of the concept and the highly collaborative nature. People can edit and adapt the story and images due to the mystery behind it's creation and author. In a sense, Slender Man could be considered similar to a campfire story, or urban legend, as Andrew Peck suggests, the story teller able to claim a sense of ownership over their version of the myth.

The concept of Slender Man has become so popular, and the lines between fantasy and reality so blurred, that there have even been cases of Slender Man - related incidents. In 2014, two 12 year old girls held down a classmate and stabbed her multiple times. When later questioned, the two claimed that they were following steps to become Slender Man's "proxies"after reading about it online. Later that same year, another girl of 14 supposedly set fire to her house with her mother and younger brother inside with possible connections to Slender Man who she seemed infatuated with. These are just two examples of cases that have been related to the concept, proving the cultural impact it has had on a generation of technology natives.

Our Vision Sheet

Iconic Directors of Horror Films

History of the Horror Film Genre

Changing Genre

Our group was set on trying to make an intelligent thriller with certain shots, and this was our downfall. We were so focused on two particular shots we were trying to form a narrative around them and it just was not working. So, we took a step back.

We looked at the current narrative we had and noticed that we had been using conventions that were tailored more towards a Horror film. We talked through it more with one of our teachers to find possible routes to follow, settling on a found footage style film before slowly drifting towards something influenced by today's culture and the influence of memes. Eventually we were able to create a horror film narrative based on the concept of Slenderman that we hope will employ the main conventions of the genre.

Analysing Thrillers - Narrative Viewpoint

Analysing Thrillers - Nordic Noir

Nordic Noir, or Scandinavian Noir, is a Scandinavian crime fiction the compromises the genre through the use of a realistic style, and a dark, morally complex mood. It is simple and precise, and stripped of unnecessary words. One critic stated that "Nordic crime fiction carries a more respectable cachet... than similar genre fiction produced in Britain or the US."

One of the most well known Nordic Noir films is 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', and recently Nordic Noir TV series have been aired on the BBC and ITV, including 'The Bridge'.


The Killing

The Killing (Forbrydelsen) was originally a Danish police procedural TV series, later adapted into the US version. BBC 4 aired the subtitled series on the 19th of November 2011. Vicky Frost, from The Guardian, said that The Killing "paved the way for a wave of subtitled European crime dramas" in the UK, and the series proved popular.

The key things in the trailer that I felt made it fit the thriller genre are:

• Dark lighting
• Fast paced with heavy bass music directing the cuts
• Action filled plot points to interest the audience
• A blue-grey colour scheme with a contrast of yellows and reds, the colour saturation being drained
• A dramatic voiceover with no dialogue from the characters 
• Range of shots [close up, mid shots, wide shots, long shots]
• Rural, abandoned locations
• "20 days to catch a killer" - raises questions for the audience, creating suspense and curiosity, and indicates the overall pace of the series

Jordskott

Jordskott is a Swedish TV series similar to The Killing, and was aired in the UK on 10th of June 2015. It was shown on ITV Encore.

The key things in the trailer that I felt made it fit the thriller genre are:

• Again, a blue-grey colour scheme appears and the colour is drained overall, however there is use of harsh white lighting, as if to "shock"
• No audio or dialogue as well, instead a track of Swedish electronic music which is similar to the opening song used in True Detective
• Range of shots used including aerial shots, high angle shots, close ups, long shots, mid shots
• Fast cuts in time with the music again
• Focuses on the plot through the imagery of the news articles to spark interest

The Bridge

The Bridge is a Swedish and Danish production, first aired in the UK on 4th of January 2014, again on BBC 4.

The key things in the trailer that I felt made it fit the thriller genre are:

• Western inspired music
• Blue-grey-green colour scheme with drained colours and reds as a contrast
• Harsh lighting is also used, like in Jordskott
• Fast cuts
• Range of shots including close ups, long shots, PoV shots
• Focus of the camera on an object in the foreground/background with the subject out of focus

Starting Off - How our initial idea relates to conventions

Starting Off - The Conventions of Thriller

Thriller is a genre that uses suspense, tension and excitement to simulate the viewer's moods and greatly heightens adrenaline and expectations, and uses techniques such as red herrings, cliffhangers

and plot twists to emphasise this. Within the genre, there are common sub-genres including psychological, crime, erotic, spy and mystery thrillers. However, we are angling, as a group, towards a more intelligent style thriller.

Suspense is crucial to keep the viewer "on-edge", and the idea is to convey the plot with a sense of tension and anxiety, and constantly implies an impending doom. Ari Hiltunen said that "Aristotle's concept of fear can best be understood by the word of suspense. The audience are aware of threatening danger and would like to warn the character but of course cannot do so."


Common themes of thrillers differ depending on their sub-genre:

• Crime thrillers mainly involve ransoms, captivities, heists, revenge and kidnappings, and they often touch on topics of terrorism and political conspiracies, often being realistic in their style
• Mystery thrillers include investigations and the whodunit technique
• Psychological thrillers use the elements of mind games, stalking, confinement/death traps, horror-of-personality and obsession to leave the audience uneasy
• In paranoid thrillers, fringe theories (a viewpoint held by a small group of supporters), false accusations and the feeling of paranoia are common, and leave the audience uneasy like psychological thrillers
• Spy thrillers, like the James Bond series, involve threats to the entire country/world, spies, espionage, conspiracies, assassins and electronic surveillance to excite the audience and fits with the theme of desire for justice. 

Thrillers often take place in ordinary suburbs and cities, although they can also take place wholly or partly in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts, polar regions, the high seas, abandoned
buildings or fields of farmland.

In terms of editing, thrillers often include:

• Low key lighting
• Quick jump cuts and cross cutting
• Shadows
• Tense/atmospheric music
• Changes in angles of shots
• Diegetic sounds to emphasise silence e.g. breathing
• Black/white shots
• Montages of shots
• The protagonist(s) at the mercy of the antagonist
• A colour palette, usually blue and grey with a contrast colour

James Patterson sums up what a thriller should do, in my opinion, perfectly in his introduction to "Thriller", 2006:

    "...Thrillers provide such a rich literary feast. There are all kinds. The legal thriller, spy thriller, action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military thriller. The list goes on and on, with new variations constantly being invented. In fact, this openness to expansion is one of the genre's most enduring characteristics. But what gives the variety of thrillers a common ground is the intensity of emotions they create, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill. By definition, if a thriller doesn't thrill, it's not doing it's job."

Starting off - Moodboard

At this starting point, my group came together and we discussed our aspirations, both for this year and the future, and skills that we are bringing to the course. We shared thoughts and ideas on our preferred genres, all of us wanting to avoid cliche horror or social realism, and also shared camera shots we would love to use.

Discussing further, Charlie told us about a friend's farm and the hill there. The hill has a factory behind it and thus light shines over the brow of the hill, making an eerie setting.
We therefore decided that we want to incorporate a shot involving a silhouette on the top of the hill in our film trailer. We also agreed on wanting to use interesting arc shots, like those used in American Horror Story, and also shots down an infrared camera on a rifle.

The pictures in my moodboard have particular purposes. Scenes from 'The Girl Who Played With Fire', 'Witness', 'The Bourne Identity' and many Nordic Noir series use similar colour palettes and locations; rural farm settings, washed out or high contrast and lighting, blues and orange colours. I chose two camera angles I'd really like to use as well, being a Dutch angle, such as the one used in 'Girl Crazy', and an extreme close up. The extreme close up comes from watching a short film called 'Unwind', based on the book by Neal Shusterman. I love the ambiguity of the identity of the girl in it, the viewer only seeing her eyes but able to pick up on the panic and distress. I also love the blue colour scheme, linking with our colour palette ideas.

Trailer - Brassed Off

My final trailer involved quite a few changes to the storyboard. A big change was to the music. I changed which pieces I was going to use to help fit better with what the film is about and what the trailer portrays, for example using "Danny Boy" towards the end to reflect the struggle and create a sense of hopelessness to persuade the viewer to want to know what happens and whether things will end happily. I also changed some clips and made others longer depending on what they showed and the camera angles used.

Trailer - Storyboard

For the trailer, I chose to do a theatrical trailer as I feel this would be best for this kind of film. The complex double plotline requires a little more presentation to the audience. However, I've also tried to show this through how I've structured the storyboard, flicking between the band and dilemma of the mines. This presents to the audience the multiple issues, and continues adding to the problems with the band losing at contests, and Postlethwaite's character, Danny, collapsing. The presentation of all these problems is to make the audience want to know how the characters will overcome all this in time for the film's end. I have also chosen to use very little speech, using "Now are we playing or are we packing in?" towards the end to show the resilience or possibly the breakdown of the band, and the "Land of Hope and bloody Glory" to finalise the trailer, the same way as it finalises the film, in summing up the satirical view of the country being so 'wonderful' when they have all just lost their jobs. I've decided to use the two pieces of music 'Floral Dance' and 'Danny Boy' as these are contrasting. 'Floral Dance' is to show the light and jovial nature of the film, whilst 'Danny Boy' shows the more melancholic side, especially with the progression of the problems presented. I have tried to create a sense of ambiguity at the very beginning to draw the audience in, and to make them curious, with the revelation of the Brass Band in the eighth frame. This is also to show that the film is not just about Brass Bands, it's about the devastation the closure of mines brought to families.

Trailers - My Choice

Out of the films given to us on our task list, one film caught my eye: Brassed Off. I have watched this film before and found it interesting, especially since I am involved in the brass band world as well. It is one of the many films dear to my heart, and so I chose to create a trailer for it, to try and show how truly great the film is.

Brassed Off is a British-American comedy-drama film centred on the fictional Yorkshire town of Grimley in the 1970s. The Grimley Colliery Brass Band is as old as the mine that is located there, the source of many of the bandsmen's jobs. However, the colliery is to be closed, and threatens the livelihoods of all who live there. The Grimley Colliery Band's last chance at saving themselves is to enter the nationals, and they seem to have no hope until Gloria Mullens appears with a flugelhorn in hand. The two plotlines of the threat of the mine closing and the band's struggle to get to nationals creates an interesting and unusual fusion that was interesting in both the perspective of historical and social realism. With more and more conflicts and problems arising for the characters, the film keeps you wondering how it will all resolve.

Since I was born, I have been submersed in the warm and musical family of Brass Bands, with family members being actively involved even before I was around. Therefore, I wish to capture some of the warmth and the familial feel that the film creates, whilst presenting the problems they will face effectively.

Reflecting on AS Media - Overall

AS Media has been a real insight into the role and theory behind Media today, and I want to continue learning about this area as the course has sharpened my interest that I had at the very beginning. My main aims of the next year are:

• Aim for deadlines! - try and keep on top of what I need to do whilst presenting a professional and sophisticated blog that is easy to navigate
• Get involved more - talk and work with my group, and get more involved with extra curricular activities
• Get more creative - search and discover new technologies and ways of presentation, and go the extra mile when researching

The History of the Trailer

Film Trailer - A Definition

A trailer (or preview) is an advertisement/commercial for a feature film that will be shown in the future at the cinema. The term "trailer" originates from originally being shown at the end of a film screening, however, now trailers are shown before the film starts.

The History of the Film Trailer

The first film theatre in 1910 only had one screen. Patrons would pay an admission fee and could sit for as long as they wanted to in the cinema, watching films and cartoons on loops, meaning there were no set times for films. There were no trailers for advertising.

However, 1913 became "Year 0" for the film trailer. Nils Gralund made a promotional video for "The Pleasure Seekers", a broadway musical, and used rehearsal footage. It proved to be a big success for cinema owners.
Meanwhile in Chicago, Colonel William Selig made another way to get audiences back to the cinemas. He took the idea of print serials, and went to the Chicago Tribune, proposing the idea to turn a print serial into a short film. This gave birth to "The Adventure of Kathlyn", and each short episode would end in a cliffhanger so audiences would return the following week to view the next installment. This is arguably where the idea of the film trailer was formed. Cinemas began to show promotional videos at the ends of the films, and these first forms of

film trailer were basic. They consisted of clips from the films with text over the top introducing things such as the cast of stars. It took a small group of business men to realise how they could make money from the trailer industry that had yet to take shape. Distributing films through promotional videos was a nightmare for studios until the National Screen Service (NSS) was set up in 1919 by Herman Robbins. The group took film stills, spliced in titles and then sold them to theatres. This didn't actually bother any studios, in fact many liked the idea so much they signed deals to submit their films to the NSS to produce trailers. By the 1940s, the NSS had branched out to poster and paper advertising, and had contracts with all the major film studios. These studios signed contracts with the NSS to make trailers week by week. Between the 1920s and 1960s, the NSS dominated the trailer making industry. These trailers were simplistic, with stylistic features like screen wipes and fly in text, as can be seen in the trailer for Casablanca (1942):

In the 1960s, a new generation off star directors redefined the trailer. Alfred Hitchcock used his gallows humour to tour the audience around the setting of Psycho rather than using the film clips.

 

The re-emergence of cubism in film and commercial art in the 1960s was not lost either by Stanley Kubrick. His trailer for Dr Strangelove is considerably bold and different.

Trailers began to feature antiheroes, such as in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and there was more emphasis on the music used, as visible in the Simon and Garfunkel score from The Graduate.

The cookie-cutter style trailer of the NSS was being moved away from, especially as multiplex cinemas began to rise, meaning there was less space for posters. Film studios and production companies took control over their promotion again, and by the 1970s the film system landscape had changed.

Jaws was the first successful film to see the wide release. It was shown in 464 theatres on the 25th of June 1975, but was shown in 675 cinemas by July the same year, proving itself to be the largest simultaneous film distribution. Out of the $1.8 million budget, the Universal Group gambled $700,000 in national television advertising. This in turn resulted in huge opening box office numbers, gaining $7 million in the opening weekend, and $470 million worldwide. Thus, the blockbuster strategy was born, with trailers being at the heart of this, with big, bold visuals for big films. Don LaFontaine became "the voice" for these blockbuster trailers, his iconic line being "In a world..."
The trailer has adapted with the MTV fast paced edits of today's society, and has become almost a genre in itself, with boutique editing houses focusing solely on movie advertising.

Teaser VS Theatrical

1. A trailer is a series of extracts that depict the plot outline of a film without revealing too much to the audience and intrigues them into watching the film. The extracts tend to be of the most exciting or funny moments within the space of around 2 minutes and 30 seconds, which is the maximum length set by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). There are two types of trailer in particular: teaser trailers and theatrical trailers. 
   
   
   

   Teaser Trailer

   Teaser trailers are usually released long in advance of a product in order to "tease" the audience. These also usually help create "hype" over a film, especially in the case of films in a series, such as Star Wars.
   
   
   

   
   
   Teaser trailers tend to be around 1 and a half minutes long due to the fact that these are released early in production and therefore the producers do not have all the footage they need yet. It also creates mystery as it does not reveal the plot yet, leaving the audience in suspense. These teaser trailers are more common with big budget films that want to build up their audience to be large. An early example of a teaser trailer is the 1978 trailer for the Superman film directed by Richard Donner.
   
   
   

   
   
   

   Theatrical Trailer

   
   

   Released closer to the end of production/in the products final stages, the theatrical trailer tends to be around 2 and a half minutes long and contains more footage that reveals a rough outline of the plot without spoiling the film. It is heavily edited and often contains voice overs and title credits that inform the audience.
   
   
   

   
   

Teaser VS Theatrical Trailers

I have taken ten films and analysed their teaser and theatrical trailers. Each film covers a different genre; historical, drama, fantasy, romance, thriller, horror, comedy, musical, family and action.

Reflecting on AS Media: Research and Planning

Reflecting on AS Media: Real Media Conventions

Reflecting on AS Media: Digital Technologies

Reflecting on AS Media: Post-Production

Reflecting on AS Media: Creativity