Introduction
Over the last twelve weeks I have created a media product that was a teaser trailer. I have done this with two other people from my class who are Adam Armstrong and Zoe Hartshorn. We decided that we wanted our trailer to be in the horror genre. We called our film ‘The Uninvited’ which was the story of two teenagers who go into the woods and never returned. In order to create our product we did extensive research into the conventions of the horror and also the way in which the horror genre is branded.
In what ways does your media product, use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of media real products?
For my research into the horror genre I decided to look at some teaser trailers and posters from horror films. I took quite a selection in doing this by choosing some recent films and some not so recent ones. The first teaser trailer I looked at was from the 2001 film Signs, which proved to be very successful at the box office.
After studying this clip a few times I gathered that you do not need to introduce a character or even say the name of a character. Also I found that you don’t need to give much away to the viewer or even let them know what the main plot is. This is in order to create enigmas and not give too much away because then it would.
As part of our research we needed to take into consideration the types of sub genre and also the changes in time of horror trailers. We found Paranormal Activity to be another suitable teaser trailer to study.
From studying this clip we found that it used many clips in a quick motion with fast changing clips every second or two. This makes it a lot more jumpy and a lot harder for the audience to take in what is happening. So in return this creates enigmas in their head and as a result they want to watch the film to find out more.
In order to take our research to another level we looked at all the different types of sub genre involved with horror. These are the sub genre’s I found:
Stalk and slash - Halloween / Texas Chain saw Massacre
Torture porn - Saw / Hostel
Zombie Horror - 28 days later
Techno Horror - The paradox of the post human
Body Horror - Dawn of the Dead / Shawn of the Dead
Gothic Horror - Dracula / Frankenstein
Gothic Horror - Dracula / Frankenstein
After researching these sub genre’s we decided to take one on board and make our product a hybrid. By doing this we added different conventions to the final product. We took on board sub genre of Stalk and slash as we felt it was appropriate with our outdoor setting for the trailer. When editing, I used a series of effects in order to give our trailer more effectiveness in terms creating enigmas and complying with the conventions of the genre. I added dark backgrounds and used the colour corrector in order to give some of our scenes in the woods a more eerie and scary feel to them. Our unique selling point to our film was that we were going to create realism through using lots of handheld footage.
We thought that this gave a more realistic view as it makes the audience feel as if it is being seen through their eyes in appose to just something they are watching on a screen. This technique of showing footage through a phone or by handheld footage has been used in a few recent successful horror films such as The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity.
We thought that this gave a more realistic view as it makes the audience feel as if it is being seen through their eyes in appose to just something they are watching on a screen. This technique of showing footage through a phone or by handheld footage has been used in a few recent successful horror films such as The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity.
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?
One thing we had learned from researching the horror genre was that it was required for us to have the correct brand image. Having already decided that we wanted to focus our product around lots of hand held footage we turned to the internet for inspiration. The internet was proving to be a very useful and reliable source for research in our project as it allowed us easy, quick, and free access to many video clips that helped us in our project. We watched a few teaser trailers on the broadcasting site you tube and then picked out some of our favorites. Here below is the teaser trailer from The Blair Witch Project in which you can see the effectiveness and realism that the hand held camera gives.
In this trailer we see the unique cinematography of the hand held effect which has proved to be successful at the cinema. Blair Witch Project is in Indie film which shows how it has been shot in a different format and has gone against the rules of the normal conventions of the horror genre. These are conventions are often ‘The same but different’ but in 1999 Hollywood films were focusing on other genres. I gathered this information from the Wikipedia website, and the link to this page can be found below.
Having looked at the information on the history of the styles and techniques used in creating horror movies I found that the Blair Witch Project was some sort of a turning point for film makers in the horror genre. This was in appose to many of the zombie films and the un realisticness of zombies and people rising from the dead.
In the next stage of our research task we took an approach to think about what the audience were aiming to view in our product. We looked at the GRASS model which gave us a strong model to base our research on.
GENDER
SOCIAL ECONOMIC
STATUS
After looking at these sections we decided that our product should be aimed at an audience of people who go to the cinema most commonly and the age range which most commonly watches horror films. Our research allowed us to find this as the age 16-23 group. This is also Males and females as well as being for people of any race. We aimed it at this section of people as they are most likely to visit the cinema. The GRASS model also influenced the creation of the teaser trailer as we wanted to make our film a 15 certificate. This was then important as it meant we could not have excessive violence or explicit content in our trailer. Many films do this nowadays as it allows a younger audience to see the film at the cinema and in return the film will make more money. This plays a large part in the film industry today and can create great controversy as it can spark rows with the BBFC into what is classed as acceptable in a '15' certificate film today as the film makers push the boundaries further and further in search of great entertainment for the audience.
I also looked at Hall’s reception theory. The reception theory focuses on the role of the audience in the interpretation of a text instead of the text itself. In other words the theory suggests that audiences play an active role in reading texts. Also it says that each person has the ability to interpret the same text differently, and that a text by itself – i.e. without a reader, has no specific meaning.
Audience theories play quite a large part in creating a film I feel so I also studied the ‘Uses and Gratifications Theory’. This theory again challenges the assumptions of the effects theories by claiming that the audience is seen as intelligent and capable of knowing fact from fiction. It says people may be effected by the media only of it confirms their beliefs or enhances role or image. However it argues that the media will not change beliefs that have been accumulated by life experience. The four pleasures that media texts satisfy are, Diversion/escapism, Personal Identity, Personal Relationships and Surveillance on the world. Both these theories proved to be useful when deciding what audience we would target our film at, and also how the audience would interpret our trailer.
Advertising can be very key in the amount of success a film can gain. It can change a film completely and give off different vibes to the audience into what the film will contain and how it will make them feel. From our previous research of our questionnaire we had already found out that we knew horror film watchers liked the films they watched to be realistic. So with our idea of creating a hand held movie this fitted perfectly as we came to the conclusion that this was the best way of creating realism for the audience. A tagline is something a film uses in the advertising campaign and mainly places on posters. It is a short phrase or sentence that creates enigma's and tension for the audience, with in return them wanting to watch the film. We found a great example of this from the film that we kept reffering back to, 'The blair Witch Project'.
We then decided to research if our target audience would like the innovation of handheld movies. This fitted in with the use of our question we had put in our previous questionnaire which was, “Do you like horror films to be realistic?” The audience replied 100%, ‘yes’. Films nowadays tend to need a lot of advertising in order to gain publicity and to get people to go see them. This advertising most also coincide to show that the film is realistic. An effective way that films use to make them successful is through the use of taglines. I looked at many taglines and the two that stood out to me the most were from, once again, The Blair Witch Project and Quarantine. What we liked about it's tagline of 'no evidence, no witnesses, and no details' was that it was short, catchy and repetitive. By using repepetion on the word 'no' we think about it more and create more enigma's and want to watch the film. It makes the consumer interested and we knew we would have to take this into account when creating our ancillary task and the teaser trailer itself. The branding of the film research gave me plenty of help and inspiration into creating the teaser. It gave me the idea of not sticking to the regular conventions but trying to make it different as well to give it our own sense of uniqueness.
3) How I used media technologies in the…
Construction,
Research
Planning
And Evaluation stages
We knew that in order to create this product we may have to deal with some of the latest technology which we may not have used before. In my first year at college I gained experience with the Mac’s by using the programme Imovie. In creating this project I also used a Video camera and a tripod from which I gained skills and knowledge in how to use them. Here are a list of different websites and programmes that I used in the planning and production stage of my product.
Editing software used;
- Final cut express
Capturing technology used:
- Digital stills camera
- Cannon video camera and tripod
Websites I used:
- http://www.youtube.com/
- http://www.slideshare.net/
- http://www.photobucket.com/
- http://www.creativecommons.com/
- http://www.wikipedia.com/
- http://www.empireonline.com/
- http://www.totalfilm.com/
- http://www.associatedcontent.com/
- http://www.blogger.com
The main website that I used was Blogger. This was where we shared and saved all our findings and creations. The main advantage of blogger were that we were able to access this from any computer which allowed us to post from home as well as at college. On the other hand though there were some downsides to using blogger. There were certain issues that we had to deal with when uploading content. This was because the content we were uploading was quite large. This meant that it took a very long time for blogger to upload this for us and sometimes did not upload it at all. This proved to be frustrating as well as time consuming.
In creating our product I had to use a programme that I had not worked with before. This was Photoshop, for which I used in my ancillary task of creating a poster. For my poster I took some pictures that we had taken from our setting and inserted bits of them onto a blank canvas and used them as a background. I created an outline effect on the text on my poster by copying the text and then changing it to a different colour and putting it just behind it as a background. This gave an effective and professional effect as it almost jumped out of the poster. This fitted in perfect with our genre and showed the conventions by having the blood red text and the dark mysterious background. Here below is my masterpiece of a poster and a logo from Photoshop the programme in which I used to create it. The advantages of Photoshop were that were able to easily colour grade pictures and edit them in order to fit in with the conventions of our genre.
When creating our product we had to consider which studio we thought it would be best for our film to be created by. After various research on the internet we came to the conclusion that this was Fox Searchlight. This was because Fox Searchlight has created many good horror movies, with big name titles such as The Hills Have Eyes and 28 Days Later. These films had both done very well at the box office and both exceeded their expectations.
Probably the most vital and important application that we used in the creation of our product was Final Cut Express. This was the application we used in order to edit our footage that we had gathered and turn it into a teaser trailer. There were hundreds of tools and features that this included and we managed to use many of them in creating our product. One of my favorite features was the way we could change the angle of shots once they were on the computer in order to give a somewhat distorted view that created realism and enigmas. Another great feature of final cut was that it allowed us to insert music into our film. We used to mp3 tracks in our product which were both non digetic. These were the tracks, ‘Teddy bears picnic’ and ‘Long walk’ a piece of soft eerie music. We managed to get these tracks from the ever realiable source of the interent, from a a website called creative commons. The advanced technology of final cut allowed us to fade the two tracks in and out of our trailer. This was very helpful as it allowed us to give different volumes at different points in the trailer. This was effective as it created mood and atmosphere in our trailer, fitting in perfectly with the conventions of the genre.
What I have learned from audience feedback.
After creating our product it was important for us to gain some audience feedback. This proved to be very useful as it helped us find out if our project had been a success or how it was poor in places. It was good to hear the different views of people on our project and what they thought the strengths and weaknesses of it were. Here is a slideshow showing the questions and an example from the response that we gathered.
Once collecting our audience feedback, we then closely studied it and got a real feel for what the audience thought about our film. Most people preferred the start of the trailer to the end. We thought this was because of the opening fast pace which got their attention and immediately created enigma’s. If we were to do the project again I would change the pace of the trailer and make it fast paced throughout. When we asked the audience about the brand of our product they said it was very similar to real media texts from horror films that they had seen. This was very pleasing and gave us a real sense of realism that we had created. Overall our project had been a huge success and we had achieved all the things we had set out to do. Technology proved to be ever present in the making of films and media as it allowed us to create and edit our product in many ways. Without this amazing technology we would be lost today. My favorite part of the trailer is the part where the newspaper blows in the wind. This is because it was simply down to mother nature herself blowing the piece of paper to give it a realistic effect that matched the conventions of our genre. I feel to a certain extent that our product does come close to the real thing and that maybe a film company would be interested in it. The realism we created has proved very successful and all in all I am very happy with our final product.
