Location Ideas

The locations that my group have thought about fit in well with the trailer. At the start of the trailer was are including a clip of the five best friends walking though the corridor, and the best place to shoot this scene was in our school corridor because it sets the scene for the trailer and also shows how popular the group of friends are.
The second location for our trailer is a our school again, but there is a place where it looks like a house, so we decided to film the party scene there instead of filming it at someones house. The reason why we decided to change the location for this scene was because when we thought about how we could do it, we thought of the problem that how are we going to get that many people to the location. By changing the location makes it a lot easier for us because, everyone would be there because we have a school, so it would be easily to film everyone.

Filming a certain scene in the forrest is very important for our trailer, so we are lucky that we have a forrest right next to tour school which means that, it makes it easier for us to transport the equipment form the school to the location. When we are filming the forrest scene, at first we wanted to film it when it gets really dark but when we really thought about it we realised that filming when it is really dark the quality gets worse. So we decided to film as its getting dark so about 4.

The Narrative

Five girls who’ve been best friends for seven years have received their results for their final year of college and are pleased with what they have received. Because of this, the girls decide to throw a party in celebration of their hard work. The girls have made a reputation for themselves over the years and are very popular amongst their peers – especially Aisha who is the leader of the group.

Three years before this Aisha, Seda, Leyla and Stephanie went on a road trip however Tiffani couldn’t make it as she had to attend a family wedding. On the car journey home, the girls had too much to drink which resulted in a car accident and a young male was killed. When the girls rushed out to see what had happened they realised that they had accidently hit their best friend Tiffani’s boyfriend. In a panic, they got back in the car and drove away never speaking of what happened that night again.

The next day the group set out to prepare for their fancy dress party and it wasn’t long before their friends started flooding in.  During the party, a mysterious figure kept appearing within the crowd however; because it was fancy dress no one suspects anything.

After a great night of partying, the five best friends pass out (from tiredness) at Aisha’s house and are woken by a loud noise during the early morning. As they get up the girls notice that Tiffani is not there but they are not alarmed as she is very ‘adventurous’ and often goes off on her own. However not long after, Leyla and Stephanie notice a trail of blood leading outside and quickly inform the rest of the group.  The four remaining friends fear the worst and start searching frantically for missing Tiffani. As they run outside to search for her, trails of her belongings such as her phone, bracelet etc. are found in the garden and the girls begin to panic.

Moments later, a scream can be heard not too far from the house and so the girls decide to split up to look for her. Leyla and Seda are too scared to go out alone (as they play the innocent, shy and nerdy characters) and therefore end up going out together. Aisha and Stephanie go into a wood type location, whereas the others stay in familiar territory and look for their friend in areas close by.

The girls agreed to meet back every half an hour at a spot near the house to get updates on each other’s findings however one by one, at every meet up, another girl disappears. As Aisha and Stephanie explore the woods in the hopes of finding their best friend, Aisha catches a glimpse of the mysterious hooded figure that was present at their house party. She quickly turns to tell Stephanie but she is nowhere to be seen.

After half an hour, Seda and Leyla go back to the meeting point to tell the others that they have had no luck but already waiting is distressed Aisha. She tells the others that Stephanie has also vanished and about the hooded figure she saw in the woods. The group then decided that it would be safer to stay together and so they set off for the final time in the hopes of finding their two best friends.

The girls reach the woods a final time still desperately searching for their friends when suddenly a loud noise startles them and they start to run. Aisha trips and falls over a mysterious object but soon realises that it is the foot off Stephanie who has been buried and covered with leaves. Before she even gets the chance to scream the villain covers her mouth and drags her away.

After a tiring struggle, she manages to break free, and out of nowhere, Seda hits the villain over the head with a log of wood and the hooded figure falls to the ground. The three girls struggle to reveal the identity of the villain but when they do they come to the shocking discovery that it’s their best friend, Tiffani.

In disbelief the three friends ask her if all of this was some sort of joke but they soon realized that she was far from playing games. Tiffani then hurtfully explained how she knew what they had done to her boyfriend three years ago and thought that through getting revenge, she could finally move on and get on with her life.

Aisha, Leyla and Seda began to cry and tried to explain how sorry they were and that the whole situation was an accident. Tiffani began to get angry and pulled out a knife from inside the hoodie. She proceeded to stab Aisha and the others but before she got the chance to the ‘thought-to-be-dead’ Stephanie appeared out of nowhere and turned the knife back on her, stabbing her in the side.

Story Boarding

Before films and trailers are made the ideas of how the film/trailer is going to look is story boarded. The storyboard is created by showing what is going to be happening in each shot, and in each shot you can illustrate and write what is going on, who's going to be in that shot, where is it going to be and how long it is going to be on screen for. After storyboarding creating the trailer/film becomes much easier because you now know what is in every shot. Story boarding was developed at the Walt Disney Studio during the early 1930s.

Pretty Little Liars season 1 trailer

The Pretty Little Liars season 1 trailer 

Pretty Little Liars has influenced our idea for our narrative and trailer, because we thought the story line in the series was very clever and could work well in a film. The have taken some elements from the series such as the main characters in our trailer will be five best friends, and one of them goes missing and as the girls goes looking for her, and they go also go missing one by one. The series and our trailer will have many things in common but the important one is that the trailer will be about the best friends trying to find their missing friend. The big twist in the end is going to be different from the series because the missing best friend will be the one who is taking the girls and tormenting them for something they had done in the past.

Narrative ideas

I have displayed our narrative ideas through a brainstorm, because I think it shows the different ideas well and displays the different avenues we have thought about.

Fears in Society

Fears in society can be included in films making it more personal to the audience, and it can make the audience more scared because they will fear that what happens in the horror film can come true and take over. Some fears in society are:

• Unemployment 
• New illnesses
• Crime becoming more frequent 
• Drugs 
• School shootings 
• Climate change 
• Natural disasters 
• Murders 
• Being watched by the government 
• Terrorism 
• Riots 
• Injustice 
• Ghosts 
• Loss of loved ones 
• Rape
• Stalking 
• The economy 
• Technology 
• Inmigration 
• Fear of the unknown 
• Mental health
• Taking religion too far
• Loneliness

My group

For creating our real trailer that goes towards our final grade we were put into small groups. In my group I was put with Jodie and Precious, I was very happy with my group because we all have an area in which we are strong in. Also we all get on and have a clear vision of what we want our trailer to look like and be about.

Audience Reactions

                       
                       Audience reactions from Melisa Hasan on Vimeo.

For my audience research I decided to show my target audience the trailer for Grave Encounters. The reason why I decided to show this trailer was because the trailer uses good filming techniques such as the trailer includes clip from  a video camera giving the effect that the film was filmed on a hand held camera, and also the trailer switched from that footage to the clips being filmed professionally. When I first watched this horror trailer I was very scared because I don't like films to be about ghosts and paranormal things, and my reaction was very similar to the ones I have included in this video. At the end of the trailer I thought it was very effective because the trailer looks like it is finished and the audience feel relieved but what they don't know is that there is a very jumpy clip after. The screen goes black but then you hear a females voice whispering and a clip quickly jumps on the screen with a loud noise. The sound was very effective because in all the reaction videos each of the individuals jump because it was not expected.

The video of the first reactions to the trailer, they show the most fright. The parts where they are most scared they cover their eyes and look away, they done this where they felt something was going to jump out and when the music started to build up. Another reaction that I thought showed fright was that instead of covering her eyes she just looked away. When I asked her after she said thats the best way of her dealing with the scary clips in trailer and films. The male viewer in this video didn't really show any emotion that he was scared, he just looked like her was watching a normal film. This shows that the male viewers of horror films don't get as scared as the females because maybe they can draw a line of whats really and what is made up to scare the viewers. I decided to show the trailer in the dark because the darkness alone sometimes scares the viewers, and the darkness takes away all the detail away from whats around the room so they are tempted to look at the screen.

From my audience reactions it can help me with making my final horror trailer. It can help me because in this trailer music was used to create tension and this made it more jumpy and scary to the audience, I can tell this because when there was sudden loud noises the audience jumped and also covered their eyes. This shows that if music is used correctly it can make or break your trailer and it can also determine how successful your trailer is.

Our Prelim Trailer

For our prelim task we were asked to create a scene from a horror film of our choice. The prelim task is helping us to get familiar with the filming, editing and creating our plot, this will help us with creating the final horror trailer because we will be more prepared and we can improve from the mistakes we made completing the prelim task.

When my group was first told about making a short clip from a horror film, we all had a similar idea involving a a young girl and a villain. We were given 1 day to create the clip so because we didn't have enough time, so we decided to film the clip in the school bathroom. One of our group member had to stand outside the door so no one could come in and disrupt our filming, this was a bit of a challenge because there was a lot of people who wanted to use the toilet so we have to film very quickly. We planned our shots while we were filming, and they all worked out well, but we had trouble with having all of our shots in focus so we had to film some of the clips again. Editing the video took longer than filming the clips because we have a clear vision of what we wanted our video to look like so we were very particular of where the clips should go and the order. We decided to add some effects where in the middle of the video we wanted it to look like a surveillance camera.  We created this effect by adding a darkish green filter on top of the video and we got the time at the bottom right hand corner, we got the time from a video on Youtube and then added it to ours.
The last scene was quite last minute because after we finished editing the video we thought that something was missing so we decided to quickly shoot a tap scene with the fake blood around the sink. Originally we wanted to have fake blood coming out of the tap but we only had red paint to use and when we ran it under the tap the water looked pink instead of red so we decided to change the idea. This idea worked be effectively because it linked in well with the other footage that we filmed.
We remade the clip form Cry_Wolf, this clip was towards the end of the film. We had to change what happened slightly because in the film, the girl took a photo of herself and sent it to her boyfriend and when her boyfriend saw the photo there was a dark shadow behind her. We decided to leave that part out because we were limited for time and we thought the idea of having the villain standing behind her and the girl screaming was effective because it would scare the audience, and it would also leave the audience to wonder what had happened. 

Audience Reactions

Analysis of questionnaire results

Question 1 

My first question asked my audience their age. I gave this questionnaire around my sixth form so I got similar ages ranging from 16-18. This age group would be who I will be targeting my trailer to because from Paul Well's research he found out that younger people like horror films more than the older audience. This proves that my trailer will be more successful if I target the more younger audience. The age groups also suggest that younger teens prefer to watch horror films because they get a buzz from being scared where as the older audience get more affected by the films. 

Question 2  

My second question asked if my audience who completed the questionnaire was male or female. The results were that more females completed my questionnaire but from this question I don't think that it will influence the results that much because females are becoming more interested in horror than males and it is becoming more popular with females. 

Question 3 

To get a feel around whether my target audience like horror films I asked the question 'do you like horror film?'. More people said yes, but there was still a lot of people that said no. Some of the reasons why the my audience said no was the horror films played in their minds over again and it would be hard for them to forget, another reason was that they are just get too scary and the last common reason was it makes them paranoid at night, which makes it hard for them to sleep. For horror films to be scary they need to find out why people do not like them, and they can use this research to make their trailer and make it scary to the audience. 

Question 4 

The reason why I asked this question was because the horror films include either special techniques or they have key events and characters that have made the films good. Some of the films mentioned were Paranormal Activity, Silence of the lambs, The fifth sense etc. The horror films that were mentioned are mostly the theme of Paranormal, this helps me because it means within my target audience they prefer horror films which are based around the topic paranormal. Paranormal horror films seen to scare the audience more because it is the fear of the unknown, and the films leave it up to the audiences imagination to guess what it could be. 

Question 5 

After I asked my audience what their favourite horror film was I thought it was important to ask them what their worst was. I felt this question was important was because there is reasons why people didn't like the films, and I could use the answers to create my trailer because to make your trailer successful to create a horror trailer around what your audience like and you would try and avoid things they don't like to see in a horror film. 

Question 6 

Finding the favourite type of horror my audience favour was important because although there are so many there are always a few that are more popular. The triller/action horror films came on top, because I think these horrors are not that scary and people who isn't a big fan of horror can even watch them. The second top was psychological these horror films you have to sit and listen to what is going on in the horror film, but they play with your mind and what you thinks going to happen doesn't and the total opposite does. This genre keeps you at the edge of your seat and surprises the most. 

Question 7 

I thought it was important to ask what my audience expect in a horror film. These could also be the conventions found in horror films because for example weapons will defiantly be found in slasher horror films and the weapons would either be knives, chainsaw and axes. Blood was a very popular answer, the blood in horror films make them more gory and scary. Scary music was an answer that came up more than once, I think this is very important in horror films and trailers because it creates tension and it is even used to scare the audience at an unexpected moment. 

Question 8 

Question 8 can be liked linked to the previous question because they find out what is a convention in a horror trailer and this question finds out what scares us in a film. Music again was a common answer, and the reasons was that the music creates tension and keeps you at the edge of your seat. Certain objects such as dolls and clowns my audience found scary this could be because in horror films they are being used as symbolic objects that are evil, and carry bad with them. 

Question 9  

Horror films make people feel very different some people like the rush of being scared and others get too scared and the films play on their mind. The most common answers were scared, some people just don't get scared they just get a buzz from being scared and they enjoy it. But some people get really effected when they watch a horror film, for example they would become really paranoid and can't sleep at night. 

Question 10

My final question asked what my audiences fear was. This question can be used to make the horror films more personal to the audience and they can feel a connection. Spiders, clowns, heights and  ghosts were some of the answers I received, these fears can be included in the horror films and trailers. 

What makes an effective trailer?

Trailers are a series of extracts of a film or broadcast, used for advance publicity. 

Trailers should include: 

• Best bits if the film, but the short clips shouldn't give too much away of the film, because then the audience wouldn't have anything to look forward to when they watch the film
• The clips shown in the trailer do not have to be shown in narrative order
• The title of the film does not have to appear to the end, this is an effective technique used in a  trailer because it keeps the audience guessing of what the film could be called
• Normally the trailers showcase the more popular stars in the film towards the end of the trailer 
• Most trailers include voice overs which give the audience credit information 
• Images and clips from the film are flashed on the screen for a very short time and they are shown in a fast pace. Sometimes the clips are shown in sync with the music played in the background 
• In the trailer if there is a conversation between the characters they are most  likely to say one line each  
• Trailers always include music to go with the clips, the music creates atmosphere. The music always links with the genre and type of the film. For example the James Bond films are most likely to include the theme tune for the Bond films
• Unusual angles are often used to show a series of events or characters 
• All trailers include the image of the green screen with that confirms that the film has been approved for all audiences 

Carrie 2013

  

 A remake of the classic horror film about Carrie White, a shy outcast who doesn't fit in at school and doesn't have many friends. She is sheltered by her very religious mother who punishes her daughter by locking her under the stairs. When Carrie is pushed too far at her senior prom all is revealed about her and her powers. 

Sequels

Why are sequels made?
If a film performed well in the box office then it gives the producer a chance to make a sequel which will earn them more money. If the first film was very successful then the audience are more likely to watch the second one because they knew it would be similar to the first one. My opinion on sequels are that most of the time the second film is not as good as the first one because they feel like a repetition of the first film made. On the other hand some sequels are just as good or better than the first one because they answer unanswered questions that were left in the first one and the story becomes more clear.

The  Final Destination are very successful because it was the first film like it, and the concept was new to the audience. Final Destination is a film about a group of characters that have been involved in a tragic event that other people have died in, but they have all survived and death is taking them one by one. This film plays on people fears of death because many people are afraid of it, and the film is based all around death. Each of the films of Final Destination follow the main story line of cheating death, but death catching them out. The first film appealed to the audience because it was the first film like it and it was quite unusual. The second film was still successful because it used a different tragic events, but after the second film I think they should have stopped because it became a little repetitive because although the films used different events the main story line was the same. The producers went on and made 4 film in total, but they newly released films used special effects well and created a film appealing to the eye.

Eden Lake

Research Rational

For my research into my target audience, I want to create a survey on the website survey monkey. This questionnaire will include questions that will find out what my audience like to see in horror films, what makes them scared and what their fears are. The answers to these questions can help with making my trailer because I can create a trailer around what fears my audience have and this will make my trailer more personal to them.

Another way of researching into my audience I will do a focus group. In my focus group I will show my audience trailers of horror films and the trailer I will properly show them the trailer for Grave Encounters. I will film the reaction of the audience and post the results on my blog. After I have shown my focus group the trailers for the films I will then conduct another video asking there opinions of the trailers, what they liked best, what scared them and how effective was the music if there was any.

I think it is also important for me to research what are the best selling horror films to this day, because they are the best selling, it also shows that the audience have picked them as the best horror film made because it is the best selling. Once I have  a list of the best selling horror films, I will watch the trailers and take notes on what they included and what made it successful. Also I will use Paul Well's research on which age group likes horror more. In his research he found that the younger audience like to watch horror more than the older audience. This will reflect in my target audience because my trailer will be more successful if i target the younger audience because they like it more.

British Board of Film Classification

Marketing of films

Market campaign - Specific activities designed to promote product, service or business. The market campaign includes a series of steps that include promotion of the product through different mediums such as:

• Television 
• Radio 
• Trailer 
• Music (soundtrack) 
• Merchandise 
• Brands
• Hashtags 
• Social networks 
• Magazines 
• Interviews 
• Word of mouth 
• Bus stops and buses 
• Title of the film 

Market campaigns are very important to films because they advertise the film to everyone through many media texts. 

The trailer of a film is what grabs the interest of the audience to make them want to watch the film. I think it is important that the trailer includes short clips of the film, but they shouldn't show everything that happens because then the audience will have nothing to look forward to in the film.

The trailer of The Blair Witch Project was very simple and didn't show a lot of footage from the film, but the footage they did show made the audience very curious of what the film could be about. To go hand in hand with the trailer they advertised the film in a very clever way by displaying posters around towns. These posters were made to look like missing people posters, and the names included on the poster were the real names of people, so if the names were researched you could read up on what happened and who the individuals were. By using missing peoples posters it grabbed the attention of the public because it is an tragic event where people would stop and read what has happened.

The Cabin In The Woods (2012)

Five friends take a break and go to a remote cabin in the woods, where they start noticing strange things happening. Together, they must discover the truth behind the cabin in the woods. 

The opening of the film conforms the genre of horror because the film opens with ancient tales illustrated in blood. Blood is normally linked to horror films and is very common in them, also blood   is a fear that people have so it becomes more personal to the audience. The opening becomes clear in the last minute of the film where it explains why they have done what they did to the characters. 

This film is similar to the horror film Scream. They both have one thing in common which is they have rules and certain characters. In Scream they had rules such as 'Don't have sex' and 'don't do drugs' if you broke the rules in the film then you wouldn't live to the end and you would normally die first. The Cabin in the woods included the same rule about having sex, and in both film you had the one character that broke the rule. In The Cabin in the woods this character was known as 'The Whore' and she dies first which this rule applies to most horror films. The other characters in the film all had their parts to play in the plan of sacrifice. All of the characters were 'The Whore' 'The Fool' 'The Athlete' 'The Scarlet' and 'The Virgin', all these characters had an order of dying where the whore would always die first. This order become disrupted when the character known as the 'fool' survived being attached and took the role as the hero saving the 'virgin'. The meaning behind everything that happened to the characters was explained at the very end. The Virgin was planned to survive out of all her friends because she was innocent. The plan was disrupted because the 'fool' survived but when the master mind behind the whole project was face to face with the surviving characters she gave the virgin two option 1. kill her friends and the world will survive 2. let her friend live and the whole world will die. 

The film was mostly filmed in the dark making it harder for the audience to see what is going on. Darkness is a fear that many people have, so by the film using peoples fear it makes it more scarier and the audience can relate to the film. The producers used darkness to create tension and make the audience jump. They done this by filming most of the film in the night where it was really dark and hard to see. The darkness also kept the audience at the edge of their seats because there was many scenes where it was really dark and the audience was just waiting for something to make come out, but the audience didn't know when it was going to happen. Darkness is used in many horror films because there is so much you can do with it. For example it is easier to make the audience jump in darkness then doing it in the daylight. Silence also went well with the darkness in this film because in the middle of the film where the 'fool' decides to go out of the cabin surrounding him is darkness and silence. The silence is broken by a loud sudden noise which is very unexpected and will result in the audience jumping. 

The villains in the film I thought were very cleverly thought out. The reason why I think this is because all of the villains were from bad dreams. This is a good way of making the audience feel more involved with the film because everyone has bad dreams but they never want to see them again and the film brings back the memories of the bad dreams. When the Zombies made their appearance in the film it was very dark so the character and the audience were unsure what the villains were. At the end of the film I thought the villains were unrealistic and unbelievable because they didn't really have believable traits. 

Towards the end of the film it gives the audience false hope because when the 'fool and 'virgin' are reunited the audience think everything is over and that they are going to survive. When the characters enter the last room they find illustrations of all of the characters that came to the cabin in the woods. The final scene the audience fully understand what the cabin in the woods was about and why they done what they did, and it also gives away that none of the characters are going to survive. I felt that the ending could have been better, and that they should have let both the characters survive because they did beat the villains. 

Barthe's Enigma code theory

Definition of Enigma - something that needs to be solved

Barthes goes through the story denoting where and how different codes of meaning function. Every narrative is interwoven with multiple codes.

Codes which can be applied to narratives:

Hermeneutic code: Story not fully explained, full truth avoided and keeps the audience guessing till the final scene when all is revealed.

Proairetic code: Action/event that indicates something else is going to happen. By witnessing this, the audience can say what characters will do and what could happen next.

Enigma code: Portrays a mystery to draw the audience in, pose questions and, as such become intrigued in the piece.

According to Barthe's, there was also a sequence which followed:

Thematisation
Positioning
Formulation
Promise of an answer
Fraud
Equivocation
Blocking
Suspended Answer
Partial answer
Disclosure

Twists

The endings in horror films, are very important and I think they can either make or break a horror film. Horror films that keep the audience in suspense keeps them interested throughout the whole film,  instead of giving too much away at the beginning and then the audience can guess what is going to happen in the end. By including a twist in the film it takes the audience by surprise at a time they least expect it, and also the audience are more likely to remember what happened because they would have never thought it could happen.

The horror film Cry_Wolf is a great example of a film that includes a twist at the end.

Cry_Wolf is a film about eight high school seniors who all go to the same posh boarding school, and they are all involved with a lying game. This lying game includes a killer among the group and they have to guess which one of them is the killer. They decide to up the game by including the whole school and create a character for the killer. They decide to call the killer 'Wolf' they give him an identity but what they don't know is that they have actually created a real killer. At the end of the film to begin to realise who the killer could be, but then everything gets turned upside down as you find out that the characters were all in on a big joke trying to scare the main characters Owen Matthews.