Finished Horror Trailer

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

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

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

Our media product uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products in many different ways.
A common convention of a horror trailer is to have intertitles throughout the trailer, giving the audience written information about what is going on, in order to give them an overview. These may be shown through; ‘words of warning’ about the film, quotes, or as seen towards the end of a typical trailer, the name of the film or the date that it will be released.

 Our media product has most of these typical conventions. It has a ‘green screen’ at the start of the trailer, and the production company (for our horror trailer we chose to use Liongate production). Adding to this, we have used quotes from a bible in this instance, which also follows typical codes and conventions of a religious horror trailer, which is the sub-genre of horror that we tried to make our trailer to be. As a group, we believed that the bible quotes gave the trailer a creepier, more haunting feel to it, due to the insecurity about religion in modern society, which may cause fear throughout the public. Finally, towards the end of our trailer, we have followed typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer by including our title ‘.Com’, and the date in which our film comes out (13/1/13) through intertitles. In typical horror trailers, intertitles are used to help to build suspense and tension, and to give the audience a sense of fear, the unknown.

A common concept of the horror genre is that there is a fearless, scary killer, hiding in the shadows and darkness and wearing dark clothes, in order to keep mysteriousness to the character, causing more fear throughout the film. This is typical in ‘Scream’, where the killer dresses in a cloak and kills most of his victims at night. We have followed this convention, but dressing our killer in dark clothes, and a hood covering his face. However, we challenge the codes and conventions of a typical horror trailer as most of our killings are in the day rather than the night. We did this to try and show that the killer is just an average person, suggesting that anyone could suddenly turn into a psycho killer, which we hoped would spread fear amongst those watching the trailer. We showed that our killer has power by the church scene, where we have a slight low angle shot looking up at the killer. This adds to the codes and conventions of a typical horror trailer of low angle shots, which shows power. Our trailer possesses this low angle shot, which follows the typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer. (as shown in the screenshot from our trailer below).

Another common convention of a horror film is extreme close ups, which are used a lot. These are used as a way of invading the audience’s personal space, causing fear thoughout the audience. Our horror trailer used a few extreme close ups, such as in the church scene where it zooms into the killer’s face. We wanted to incoporate this close up into our trailer as it shows the audience the lack of emotion in the killer's face, which would hopefully spread fear.

My horror film would probably be an 18 certificate, due to the amount of blood and gore involved. As the film is a slasher horror, and similar to ‘Scream’, it would also add reason to probably certificate the film as an 18. Another reason for the film to be certificated as an 18 would be because it is based around religion. As religion tends to be an eerier sub-genre of horror, it would be inapprpriate for anyone under the age of 18 to watch it. Although certificating it as an 18 would lose some of our target audience, if we were to make it less gory and more suitable for a 15, the film wouldn't be as good, and so would lose us profit in the long run.

One code and convention in which we followed is the scense consisting of scary, desrted, haunted environments (such as the mental asylum in 'Wrong Turn', which is deserted). We chose to film a graveyard scene in the production of the '.Com' trailer. The fact that it was winter when we filmed the trailer helped us as the bare trees gives a more sinister look to the scene. This scene gives the trailer as a whole, a more frightening feel to it (as shown in the picture below)

 

A lot of horror films have a specific scene (usually deserted), used for when the killers does killings, such as a forest, or alleyway. Our trailer has followed this code and convention of a typical horror trailer by including a beach/sand dunes scene within it. This adds realism to our trailer, as it shows an environment used by the public, again showing the audience that the killer is just a regular member of the public, as are the viewers of the trailer. This will hopefully create fear throughout those watching the trailer, which is what the main aim of any horror trailer is.
 

In conclusion, we have tried to follow typical conventions of a horror trailer in the best way possible, in order to try and make our own trailer look more professional, and less like an amateur college production.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our trailer was played in front of the whole class (consisting of students aged 17-19). This age group was helpful as they were the target audience for our horror trailer. This meant that the feedback we were given was even more useful when making last minute changes to our trailer in order to improve it. We got both positive and negative feedback. The feedback we received was compared to actual horror trailers, and how much we followed the typical codes and conventions of a horror trailer. Screening our trailer in class allowed us to not only receive written feedback, but also visual feedback as we were able to experience the class’ reaction to our trailer.

In an actual horror movie production, feedback is very important for the distribution of the film, as it helps the producers to decide what to keep and what to cut out of the trailer, as well as any improvements that could be made.

We had feedback on many different aspects of our trailer, one of which was sound. People tended to like the opening music to our trailer, but were puzzled as to why there was baby’s laughter later on. Due to the amount of responses that disliked the baby’s laughter, as a group we decided to take it out of our trailer. In general, the responses we received show that the majority of people enjoyed the build-up of sound to a crescendo in the final few seconds of our trailer. I believe that the ticking clock sound worked well, which was shown by the positive feedback we received from it. It followed a typical conventional sound in a horror trailer of a ticking, almost heartbeat-like sound.

A point in the trailer which everyone seemed to enjoy was the final shot of someone hanging, and the build-up of music that went with it. I think people tended to like that part because it was unexpected, and everyone had thought that the trailer was over. By adding this to the end of our trailer, we have followed another typical convention of a horror film by giving our trailer a shock and surprise ending to try and make our audience jump. This would eventually hopefully help them to remember our trailer and so want to see the cinema release of it.

The feedback we received in terms of editing had both good points and bad points. In general, people liked the lengths of our individual clips, except for the montage, which was seen as being too long and having too many similar clips in it. We couldn’t change this a great deal as there was not enough time to go and shoot some more footage. However, we spliced some other clips into our montage, making it more fast-paced, another typical convention of a horror trailer. This will help to raise the adrenaline of our audience when watching the trailer.

The feedback we received was very helpful, due to the number of improvements that we made to our trailer due to it. This has hopefully allowed us to achieve a higher grade for our project. As a group, we carefully looked at the criticisms of our trailer and made changes accordingly. We found that some of the sound didn’t work, and our montage didn’t fit the codes and conventions of a montage in a typical horror trailer.

In conclusion, our feedback from the class allowed us to create, what we think is, and much better and higher quality horror trailer.

Full Film Idea

Full Film Idea

Our movie trailer is called ‘.Com’ we came up with this name because it revolves around the dangers and potential threats of social networking in this day and age, we made a trailer to portray one of the worst scenarios from the social networking world.

Our trailer is based around the idea of a person signing his group of friends up to a what seems to be harmless website called ‘how you will die’. Having this sort of thing on a social network you wouldn't usually think anything of it but throughout or trailer you see not to always trust what you think is just a bit of harmless fun between you and your friends. We came up with the idea to get one person to sign his friends up as a bit of fun but little do they know on the other side of the website is actually a killer waiting for innocent naive students/people to sign up to it. and little does Chris (character signing them up) know that the killer will try kill them off one by one exactly how he’s told them on the website.
We decided to make the killer highly religious to put that religious twist on the trailer to show there is a reason for killing the people on the website and it’s not just random killing. The story behind the religious part is we went for the message from God idea telling him to kill people who have sinned and to do it he has to set up the website to pin point the sinners amongst the area he is in. By doing this we challenged the whole idea of God sending a message down to Jesus to sacrifice himself to save us as we done the opposite God sent down a message to our killer to kill the people to save them. We believed this gave our trailer a bit more of a gripping deeper story line and would test people’s beliefs in good and evil.
We all agreed our target audience was mainly the male gender aged around 16-20 because it’s based around college students and based in a college setting so many people this age can relate to the surroundings and the characters involved. We came to the conclusion our film would come under the sub-genre under horror as a religious slasher. We have similar aspects to ‘final destination’ where the students are toying with death and trying to dodge faith after seeing how they are going die. Also we followed the brutal and bloody deaths.
Our trailer contained binary opposition, as it had the idea of good vs evil in the killers mind. He believed that he was doing good by listening to God, when in reality all the viewers and people in society know he was going against all forms of social norms

Filming Schedule

Filming Schedule

We made a filming schedule time table at the start of the process to help organise when and where we were filming and the time frames in which we were going to do it. We done all the filming in a certain order to make the editing easier for ourselves instead of filming bits and bots from each scene then putting it all together at the end. We got our basis and then worked around it.
This was our schedule:

17/12/12- We began to film the college shots, we done them in the afternoon so it gave off a more relaxed and normal college feel to it as if we'd done it in the morning we would of came across quite tired and not as relaxed towards the acting of the shot

18/12/12- We finished all the college shots and uploaded them on to our system to get the starting shots in order.

28/12/12- When we came back from the Christmas holidays we got straight back into filming and this is the date we filmed our computer shots where the group is made, we went to one of our teams house to film this shot as we needed a dark room with a computer to give it the night time effect we went for.

5/1/13- This day we filmed our alleyway shots of the killer running down it and the three friends walking up it we filmed them both at the same time as we wanted to give them the same time of day affect to the sot to make the viewer question if the killer is just behind them. We chose to do this shot around midday as no one would of been walking around at that time and we had it private to get the shots we needed with enough time to focus on getting them accurate

7/1/13- Filmed our crucial shots which gave our trailer the religious factor. This was when we filmed the church and graveyard shots, we done this early so not many people saw what we were doing and we did get the church's permission before we filmed so they gave us all the time we needed to get the shots just right.

20/1/13- We filmed our final shot and this was the chase scene where we went to Caister beach and used the empty dunes to give the effect of loneliness and no escape from the killer. With no one to hear you and see what's happening

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

Shot List

These are the shot lists our group came up with before shooting our trailer. While we were  filming, we came up with a some new shots and changed some of the original ideas. We then updated the changes and new format of the trailer on the page at the bottom right on the photo. 

Original Brainstorm Ideas

Props and Costume List

Props and Costume List

Lewis (Killer)

Cricket bat

Crucifix

Kitchen Knife

Denim Jacket

Grey Hoodie

Black Jeans

Wellies

Chris, Marlon, Fergus, Megan, Alex (Students and Friends)

College Clothes (vary depending on different days of the film it is)

(However, to avoid continuity errors, for the same scenes, students must be wearing same clothes)

The role of the production company

The role of the production company is to advertise and promote a film, in order to try and get it released into cinemas. Larger production companies such as ‘20^th Century Fox’ (X-Men, the Simpsons) will have a bigger budget and can get films into cinemas nationwide. These are usually for mainstream films, so my horror film would want to be advertised nationwide. Smaller production companies such as ‘Vivendi Entertainment’ (Hurricane Season, Fanboys) will have smaller budgets, and will not release the film into as many cinemas, because they cannot afford to. This tends to be for more niche films such as ‘Waste Land’ and ‘M’. My film is a typical bloody horror with a religious side to it, so would probably be classed as a mainstream film. If I was to try and get my film published, I  would go to the big names such as ‘20^th Century Fox’ first, in order to try and get my film released nationwide throughout all cinemas.

A major production company releases a substantial number of films annually and gets a share of box-office revenues. In the Western and global markets, the major film studios various movie production and distribution subsidiaries command approximately 90% of the U.S. box office. The "Big Six" majors, whose operations are based in or around Hollywood, are all based in film studios active during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. In three cases—20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Paramount—the studios were one of the "Big Five" majors during that era as well. In two cases—Columbia and Universal—the studios were also considered majors, but in the next tier down, part of the "Little Three". In the sixth case, Walt Disney Studios was an independent production company during the Golden Age; it was an important Hollywood entity, but not a major.

A production company is responsible for the development and filming of a specific production. Firstly is the pre-production phase. Most productions never reach this phase for financing or talent reasons. In pre-production, the actors are signed on and prepared for their roles, crew is signed on, shooting locations are found, sets are built or acquired, and the proper shooting permits are acquired for on location shooting.

Next, a production begins filming. Most productions are never cancelled once they reach this phase. In many cases, the director, producers, and the leading actors are often the only people with access to a full or majority of a single script. Supporting actors, background actors, and crew often never receive a full copy of a specific script to prevent leaks. Productions are often shot in secured studios, with limited to no public access, but they are also shot on location on secured sets or locations.

After filming, is post production, which is overseen by the production company. The editing, musical score, visual effects, re-recording of the dialog, and sound effects are "mixed" to create the final film, which is then screened. Marketing is also launched during this phase, such as the release of trailers and posters. Once a final film has been approved, the film is taken over by the distributors, who then release the film.

Audience Research (Independent)

Audience research

Independent

From the results of my questionnaire, I can conclude many different results. I sent out a questionnaire around college, 50% girls and 50% boys. Of the boys, 60% said that horror was their favourite genre, compared with only 10% of the girls. This could suggest that horror movies are more appealing to boys than girls, which is why my horror film is aimed more at boys, with shots that support the male gaze theory (leaving the girl on camera for longer), and more bloody and gory deaths throughout. This will hopefully maximise profits. Of the boys, 75% go to the cinema on a monthly basis, and 15% see horror films at the cinema once a month, whereas only 30% of girls go to the cinema once a month, and only 5% see a horror film at the cinema once a month. This shows that the cinema still has strong viewings, particularly among teenaged boys, and that horror movies are still most popular among teenaged boys. Finally, I established from my questionnaire that 80% of males want to see an attractive female play the ‘final girl’, and 90% of females wanted males on camera in an attractive way (e.g. body shots etc.)

Concluding my results, it is easy to show that the main target audience for horror films are boys aging from 15-25. For this reason, my horror film would contain the ‘male gaze ’theory idea, as suggested by Laura Mulvey. This is the suggestion that the camera is male, and looks upon women in usually a sexual way (e.g. a chase scene for a woman capturing only her body, whereas a chase scene for a male would have lots of face in the shots). This would probably attract more of my target audience (male viewers) and so maximise my profits.

Audience research (general)

Audience research

General

The main target audience for any kind of horror movie is mainly people ageing from 15-25, particularly teenagers. This may because they look for more of a thrill when watching a film, a kind of thrill that only a horror movie could give. It is mostly aimed at men as they are more likely to be able to interact with the characters on screen, and men seem to enjoy the blood and gore more than women. Women can interact with those on screen to but they would tend to react differently, since most women prefer no blood, or gore, due to it being a social norm for women not to like blood. However recent figures show that females watching horror has exceeded male viewers for the first time. The secondary target audience is dating couples, more likely to be either very close to marriage couples or first date couples.

In the table below, it shows that horror films have less than 5% of the market share. This tends to be because the audience is less mainstream than genres such as comedy and adventure, who have over 40% of the market share between them.

Top-Grossing Genres 1995 to 2012

		Movies	Total Gross	Average Gross	Market Share
1	Comedy	1,751	$44,792,158,044	$25,580,901	23.48%
2	Adventure	521	$38,199,674,469	$73,319,913	20.03%
3	Drama	3,132	$33,621,012,632	$10,734,678	17.63%
4	Action	570	$32,066,637,809	$56,257,259	16.81%
5	Thriller/Suspense	561	$15,495,734,985	$27,621,631	8.12%
6	Romantic Comedy	403	$11,286,883,357	$28,007,155	5.92%
7	Horror	329	$9,093,205,812	$27,638,923	4.77%
8	Documentary	1,076	$2,063,950,710	$1,918,170	1.08%
9	Musical	113	$1,865,013,970	$16,504,548	0.98%
10	Black Comedy	85	$781,440,299	$9,193,415	0.41%