Final Teaser Trailer!

This is our finished version of our horror teaser trailer, Deadline.

Started Evaluation

Today in our lesson we agreed we needed to finish anything we're doing as a group. This meant finding and adding music to our trailer, getting feedback for our trailer, and doing question 1 of the evaluation.

We were quite sure we wanted a melodic, creepy piano piece of music and after lots of searching through YouTube, Ben did find a potential piece which we download and added to our trailer. We aren't 100% certain at the moment, we still need to blend it with the other piece of music we found to tell if it's right for the style and genre of our trailer.
We began question 1 (group answer) of the evaluation by sitting down and writing very basic notes about how our teaser trailer, conformed, developed and challenged genre conventions. We thought about, narrative, genre, mise-en-scene, camera shots and angles, location, lighting etc. To help remind us we looked back through our blog at some of the research and original ideas we had.

Convention: Narrative through camera and mise en scene rather than dialogue, teaser trailers have limited dialogue because there so short.

Conventions: camera shots; close ups (engage with characters, conveys emotions), p.o.v. Handheld

Conventions: mise en scene: costume and house and props, normal middle class, big white empty house. Make up, bloody

Conventions: genre; one location, isolated

Conventions: lighting, light when good dark when bad, contrast.

Conventions: editing; fast paced

Challenged: most teasers start with equilibrium then suddenly go to disequilibrium, whereas our trailer starts with disequilibrium and it snowballs.

Challenge/develop: no dialogue at all, no v.o.

We had originally decided to make a video blog, however we weren’t all comfortable about being in front of the camera, therefore thought a podcast style audio would be much better. Instead of writing a script, which would have made us sound boring and robotic, we used our notes as guidance and talked as though in conversation, so it was natural and we could bounce off each other thoughts and ideas. I think this idea worked really well because it got across all our individual opinions as well as the group consensus. Also, we hope it will sound intesrting and authentic to the listener.

Music for our trailer

We found some music to accompany the ticking so we put it onto the trailer. However they didn't flow well together and we weren't all agreed that the music suited the style of our trailer. However a friend of ours, who studies music at university and is actually currently learning about music for films, offered to write and record some music for our teaser trailer. As this is our trailer, we have very specific ideas and will guide her throughout the process so it is exactly what we are after.

Our main ideas:

• As we had no dialogue, voice over or text, we really wanted the music to compliment and enhance the narrative. We wanted the music to change tempo and feel with what was on screen; start slow with the equilibrium, then to build up and gets faster as the action really begins. We also wanted the music to compliment the editing, for example, with the fast paced editing, we wanted fast paced music.
• Secondly, we wanted a ticking clock or heartbeat sound to get the audiences heart pumping and to create tension.
• As a main part of the narrative and theme is the email, we made the title to look like it was being typed, therefore we wanted a subtle typing sound to accompany this.
• We thought that a main instrument should be a piano because we found after listening to lots of horror film theme music, pianos were used a lot as they can create a brilliant creepy sound.

Our friend creating the music, Natalie, shared her music knowledge with us to help us make informed decisions about what we wanted for our trailer.

The beginning starts off slow and eerie with piano and pluck guitar with lots of reverb. The reverb is what makes the instruments sound distant and eerie. A suggestion of Natalie's was to make the instruments play dissonant parts; something that is dissonant means that it sounds wrong. We loved this idea because it meant that it wouldn't sound safe and normal, reflecting the forthcoming danger the characters are in.

Then guitar string scratches are played and a violin plays a tritone interval which Natalie told us is commonly used in horror. We researched the tritone interval and found that The Church called this interval the "devil's interval" and once disallowed it in any music. We also found that it was used in Alfred Hitchcock's psycho, which we loved because we were inspired by this film as it is of the same sub genre as our film (suspense). Also the violin mimics the scream of the protagonist.

The end builds up and energizes the action on screen. To create this great, dramatic music was drums, electric guitar, cello and bass. We had told Natalie that an idea we had had for music was the music from the zombie horror film 28 Days Later, because it is big and dramatic and heightens the audiences emotions.

I think our collaboration with a knowledgeable musician has worked really well and we have created a piece of music that adds to the narrative and creates atmosphere and tension; imperative elements to making effective horror trailer music.

Final Stages of Editing

Today we are getting to the final stages of editing our teaser trailer. We have taken into account some of the feedback we have received from comments on YouTube and from our classmates. (Both target audience!!!!) and friends and family. It was positive about the fast editing, they said it was tense. However, they didn't get the full impact of our trailer because we've yet to find music that matches the pace and genre of our teaser.
We weren't completely happy with the pace in the middle of our trailer; it dragged and didn't build up tension fast enough, therefore we have corrected this by removing a knife scene. We have also added a filter to the last shot of Dean tied up because it was on an iPod, so we wanted to represent this to the audience by adding a raster filter. The filter we have added gives the clip a more digital look giving the representation that the scene that Alex is viewing is in real time.
Finally, after researching music from other horror films and lots of searching for suitable music on YouTube, we have found a piece of music to use at the end of the trailer. It is a fast paced piece with a ticking in the background that builds up. We really liked this because it supported our theme of time. However, we are still yet to find the perfect creepy music to slowly build tension at the beginning.

Feedback

To develop our teaser trailer, we needed feedback from our first version to find out what was good and what we could improve. We got friends and family to fill in a short questionnaire after watching our teaser trailer to get this response from people fitting our target audience. This has given us a wide range of feedback from dozens of perspectives, and we will be sure to use this wen considering possible change to our final trailer. There are some obvious improvements that we ourselves could see, such as adding music and changing some our our shots around, but other than this it was useful to get the opinion of others and make some well-places edits accordingly.

I have typed up our questionnaires ad they are on a seperate page. You can find the feedback from a link on the right hand side of our blog, or from this link: http://soullessproductions.blogspot.com/p/feedback.html

What did we find from our results and how did we use them to develop our trailer?

Would you watch this film? Why?

From our survey we found out that most people would go and see our film because it was gripping and left them with many unanswered questions so they would go and watch it to find out.

Can you tell what genre it is? How?

Everyone could distinguish that it is a horror film. It was great to find out that it was the signifiers that made it the genre clear, like screaming, blood and dark lighting. (A signifier are the things that show it's a horror. For example, blood is a signifier of the horror genre because it is used in all horror films.)

Is the plot clear?

Most people could understand our basic narrative, but it wasn’t completely clear. We improved this in our trailer by adding a shot of the villain because we found that it was unclear who the villain was in the trailer.

What do you remember from the trailer?

Many people remembered the email with the date which was great because it is vital to the narrative, as it is the catalyst to everything going wrong! Also, we were very pleased to find out that the last shot of the male tied up was memorable. This is great because we wanted the last image to create impact and be shocking. Our research led us to find that the ending and the beginning are memorable, but the middle lacks any impact, therefore we have added a really quick flash of the villain stood threateningly with a knife in the middle of our trailer, to make people jump and hopefully that image will be memorable.

How would you improve it?

Everyone mentioned adding sound or/and music to create an atmosphere, so now we added some music, that changes with the narrative. Also the villain isn't really seen, it isn't completely clear who the baddie is, so we added a flash of him stood in a strong menacing pose.

YouTube Feeback

This is the first version of our trailer which we uploaded to YouTube in hope of getting some audience feedback. Unfortunately we only got two comments, but they were really constructive and helpful. We will take into consideration their comments and suggestions when we further edit our teaser trailer.

Collecting Feedback

We needed to find a way to collect reliable and honest feedback on our trailer so as to make successful improvements to our final trailer. The most accessible route for doing this was to create a questionnaire or survey that we will each take copies of and ask for feedback from our family and friends etc.

The questions that will feature on our questionnaire need to be clear and open, thus inviting the person filling it out to provide a wide and varied response; we don't want to gather the surveys back to find that all say the same thing. Therefor, the questions we asked were these:

Would you watch this film? Why?

Can you tell what genre it is? How?

Is the plot clear?

What do you remember from the trailer?

How would you improve it?

Any other comments:

If we each do this we will be able to gain feedback from a range of ages and genders, but that will also include many people from our target age audience. It is also helpful that most of the people we ask are not/have never studied media and so will therefore take what they see at face value and in a way, judge our trailer the same as they would any other professional trailer that they see.

Trailer Uploading Completed!

The trailer is in its final phase of editing, the main heart of the production is now done! Our main task this lesson was really to make sure it was uploaded to YouTube so we can gather any last minute critic, and change aspects of our trailer to accommodate this. We are also currently debating the soundtrack to go over the trailer, there are a few ideas in motion its just trying to find the one that fits video the best; something dark and sinister would be ideal.

While editing has been underway, we have also been tidying our group blog, trying to make it more aesthetically pleasing and updating magazine research for our individual blogs, which are all now well underway.

Youtube uploading

Today we have come back after two weeks of trying to upload our trailer onto YouTube, and really need to get it uploaded in order to give us time to obtain audience feedback. This problem has caused us several delays as we need to use the feedback in order to successfully finish our trailer! As it is our last lesson before half term, we really need to make it work today so we will try to resolve this problem with uploading from iMovie.

Filming and Editing

On Wednesday we met up again to continue the filming of our trailer. The scenes we wanted to accomplish were the opening part of Alex opening the email and the ending hostage scene. Due to lighting issues and practicality of us filming in Sam's house, we had to change the location of the hostage scene featuring Dean tied up and injured, from a room inside the house to the garage. However in recollection, we feel that this was in fact a very positive change and the mise-en-scene actually works better here than it would have inside. The first scene set in the kitchen of Alex finding another mysterious email was actually harder to film than we had anticipated due to the varying shots and the lighting in the room and computer screen. It was then hard to decide how to make a smooth transition from an over the should shot and for the audience to see the content of the email.

This was solved in our editing today, and with some quick shots and lighting chan

ges we have managed to make the footage work how we had envisaged.

We did our photo shoot for the magazine and poster images after filming as our actors were in costume and make up already. We all had our own personal ideas for how we envisaged our ancillary texts, so we took turns to be the photographer. We experimented with lighting and different angles, but there will be more about the photographs on our personal blogs.

We uploaded our photos to our Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soullessproductions/

Uploading to Youtube

Today, we tried to upload our existing trailer to Youtube, although it is not finished we want to gain feedback from viewers on how our trailers look at the moment. It is important for us to get a reaction from our target audience and also the fresh view could highlight slight improvements that we may have overlooked.

Editing, Blogs and Magazine Covers

In our lesson today, Dean was absent due to an exam, but the rest of us were able to carry on work and we feel that we really made good use of our time.

Editing
Ben took control of our editing today, and made a lot of progress. As mentioned before, we wanted the ending of our trailer to feature computerised writing and a flashing spacer which would fit in the the clock sound and resemble a heartbeat. After we discovered that there was no established way to do this, we had a discussion last week of how we could create such an effect and we are pleased that it worked. Ben did this by using the title creator; he chose a title template which had the text as centered on a black background and did so for each letter of 'Deadline'. But the way the title works is that each letter would disappear as the next one came up, so he used all the past letters for each letter that came for example it went "D" "De" "Dea'' etc, this meant also gave thetitle a very computery flash to its text. He then created what looked like a flashing cursor before the text was written, he did this by making a title that was just a line followed by a title of nothing but the black background and he repeated it three times and also by making the line last slightly longer than the blank parts it gave it the look of a flashing computer cursor before the text seems to be typed. We also managed to create a few new sequences and improve upon the timing on the ones we already had but we do need to film some more; we need an intro where Alex and Dean seem to just be having a peaceful, happy time together, we need some shots of Alex running, Ben dragging Dean and the second ending of Alex finding a phone which is showing Dean tied up and tortured.

Blog
Today we also took some time to improve on the layout and functioning of our blog, putting in more useful links and building up what we had done lately. We felt that this was important to keep us up-to-date and as the project is coming together we were able to see what gadgets we could make use of and how our blog would feel to users reading it. We added links to our Flickr and YouTube accounts so that our videos and pictures can be accessed easily.

Magazines
In this lesson me (Kathryn) and Sam also started research for their magazines and created their own blogs to record their progress. We will all do this so as to keep our individual work clear and easy to find. We started looking at existing magazine covers and analysing what makes them successful. Find more of our work on the magazine covers and posters on our individual blogs via the links on the side bar.

Magazines & Titles

Today we have stepped away from editing and have all started our magazine covers to add some variation to our lesson. Ben was also missing today due an exam, so we thought that we should perhaps get on with the individual elements of the project, so we don't leave Ben out of the editing process. Also, we decided to create separate blogs for the poster and magazine part because then when we are updating on our progress etc., it will be clear whose work it is.

We also considered how we are going to bring the title Deadline into the film. We like the idea of it appearing as if it is being typed because it relates to the theme of the mysterious emails and also it targets our target audience, the YouTube generation. However there is not an option for this desired effect within iMovie so we have to look for alternate ways of achieving this, possibly with some basic animation using shots from photoshop, or pass the idea entirely. While doing this we have also started the entrance credits that introduces "Soulless Productions" to the film but we need to run this by Ben to make sure he is ok with it.

Kathryn Peers' individual blog: www.soullessproductionskathryn.blogsot.com

Samantha Pople's individual blog: www.soullessproductionssamantha.blogspot.com

Dean Cuthbert's individual blog: www.soullessproductionsdean.blogspot.com

Ben Baker's individual blog: www.soullessproductionsben.blogspot.com

Fast Paced Editing

Todays lesson has been mainly about editing our footage. After our first attempt was somehow erased we had to work quicker to keep up to our schedule. We have all taken turns to edit our footage and have worked together to establish our ideas on how the trailer should run and the editing techniques that we will use. As our work is all saved on Ben's desktop we have needed to access his computer, although the editing has been a mutual effort and we all feel confident with how our content is taking shape.

During our lessons as we've started to piece together our trailer, we have been looking closely at some new trailers for inspiration on editing and specifically today, trailers with a fast pace. We then come across this film, Bonded By Blood, and although it is a completely different genre (a british gangster film) the way it is pieced together is very much in lines in what we want to achieve. It is effective as its fast cuts keeps the viewer "on their toes" and make the trailer interesting and enthralling for the audience.

Title Sorted!

After a group discussion, we finally came up with a short-list of 3 possible titles! They are: Dead On Time, May Seventeenth, Deadline. We then asked our class to take a poll of which name they thought was best for our film because they are the age of our target audience, therefore a great source of feedback.

After they had voted, we had a class discussion about their votes. The feedback we got from the three names was that Dead on Time is quite cheesy which is not the impression we want to give of our trailer. May Seventeenth got mixed reactions, but in the end the majority voted that it wouldn't be obvious that our film was of the horror genre, it didn't have any scary implications. So our winner, and the title of of film is Deadline. This is because it is ambiguous and it cleverly relates to the theme of time. Also the word 'dead' clearly relates to horror, however it's more subtle because there is another meaning to the word deadline. Our title 'Deadline' is a homonym which means that it has two different meanings.

We then looked at possible fonts we could use for our title, on the trailer and posters. We liked the idea of our title being in a digital font because it suits the technological theme of the film and also fits into the new 'digital identity' that our target audience have.

Some examples of possible digital fonts:

New inspiration

Despite being near the end of our filming and trailer part of our project, we have found new inspiration for our trailer in a similar new release on DVD called 'F'. It has similarities with our trailer due to the 'evil' being portrayed by a hooded character with no face, terrorizing people. This shot in particular is one that we liked as it is similar one to something that we could re-create for our trailer using our antagonist character, who is the anonymous hooded character.

Editing

Today, me (Kathryn) and Sam did some editing of our footage outside of our lesson, to get familiar with iMovie and to get us a bit further on in the editing process as we are aware that we are slightly behind schedule for finishing our teaser trailer. However, after we had set up the computer to our hardrive we came across a problem in that our previously edited sequence could not be accessed or played, we could only use our un-edited footage. We are not sure why it is that we can't access it, but we have let the other members of our group know, and tried to get on with just practicing with the programme without using the film we already had.

In our lesson on friday we will try to get this problem sorted and hopefully we will be able to find our sequence so that we don't have to start again and loose the work of two lessons. Today we also discussed further the ideas for titles that we have and at the moment we would like to use a one word title, or maybe the idea of a date eg. November 13th. We like the date idea because it relates to our theme of time, and the one word title would also need to reflect this theme.

Editing & Discussions

Today we continued editing our trailer together. We have produced several sequences that we are happy with and want to build on to finish our trailer. We also went through old blog posts, just editing and spellchecking them all and giving them a bit of updating to keep them relevant with where our work is now. Meeting up again as a group has allowed us to discuss what we have left to do for our production and we have spoken about re-shooting some of our scenes because we don't like the way that the originals have turned out. This will be done over the next couple of weeks, due to exam times of our team and actors.

Flickr

Today, in preparation for our last film shoot after the holidays, we thought it would be a good idea to create a Flickr account for our production. This will enable us, as we will need to take photos for use on our magazine covers etc, to share our pictures with people on our blog rather than uploading them all singularly. We haven't yet taken any still images to upload onto our site, but these will hopefully be taken during our last filming day, scheduled for the beginning weeks of January. Before we decide what kind of photographs should be on our poster and magazine, we will research and analyse professional horror posters and film magazines.

Although our trailer should have all been shot by now, there are a few joining scenes we would like to shoot in order to make our trailer flow better for the audience. These would be a reflection of what is actually happening in the storyline, and most won't actually feature our actors, but will be more focused on objects like a computer screen or a clock. We feel that these shots are important to the narrative of our movie, and although the idea was communicated at the start of filming and in our plot and storyboard, this part of the storyline has become somewhat overtaken and we think that by adding these extra visual scenes, it will help the audience follow the plot of such a face-paced trailer.

http://www.flickr.com/people/soullessproductions/

username: mediabdks@gmail.com
password: soulless

Start of editing

Today we are putting everything we've filmed on each one of our college users so we all have access to it.

Ben started to put together a little string of clips from our collection of film rushes, to get a feel of iMovie. It is important for us to each try out the program and work out how it is used, so we can gather an idea of what exactly is possible for us to do. iMovie is the program we are using for the editing of our trailer. It is important for us to get practice in using it, because we want our trailer to look as professionally edited as possible.

We also had discussions about titles for our film, we intially started by thinking of words that related to our film and would convey the story and genre.

We looked for synonyms of these words to see if any sounded good as a film title and suited our story, as we all agreed that we would like a title that isn't so obvious with the plot, but still conveyed the horror genre subtly because the suspense/thriller horror genre we chose for our trailer is more understated.

We also considered a title of a place, like the film Eden Lake, and even used Google Maps to find eerie sounding road names around out area but this idea hasnt come up with anything yet. However we still have plenty of time to think of the perfect title as it is one of the last things something we add into our trailer and posters.