Trailer
When doing my research on horror movie trailers I noted down certain conventions which I noticed appeared in basically all of them. These were:
- Dark Lighting
- Ghostly Music/ Suspense building music
- Not perfect camera work (tilted, fast moving, shaking)
- Longer clips at the beginning then shorter ones at the end
- Screams
- Abandoned location/ haunted house
When filming my clips I found it hard to ensure that the lighting was dark due to the fact I didn't have access to artificial light sources where I was I had to work with the natural lighting and go out to film when it was still light outside. So to make my trailer look darker I had to edit the clips and decrease the brightness, I did this in windows movie maker.
Here is a shot from the trailer, originally the clip was very light so I decreased the brightness, I think it looks more effective like this as it is like shes running into darkness. Makes it fit in with the horror genre more.
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The location was meant to be mysterious. The girls had heard stories about what does on in the block but nobody really knew the truth. I had to portray the setting which was described as 'Hell' in my trailer to look fearful due to the fact it was the setting of a horror movie, I had to stick to the genre at all times. I decided to explore with the camera techniques and do something which I didn't see in any existing trailers, all the trailers I watched contained footage all in focus, so I thought id go for a new technique and have some out of focus and see what the audience think. I started off with a close up of a bit of the block, the close up was in focus, from seeing this the audience wouldn't really be able to tell much about the location. The camera then slowly zooms out revealing more of the building, when the camera zooms out it does out of focus which I thought made the building seem more mysterious and help to build up the tension and atmosphere surrounding the location.
The location in itself was a convention of the movie genre I chose to portray, it is a cliche scenario, 3 females going to an abandoned, apparently haunted tower block will usually indicate something bad would happen. The location and plot is similar to that of 'Halloween Resurrection' so I decided to use this theme of an abandoned settlement and develop it.
I went on freesound.org to get my music and sound effects, it took me a while to find what I was looking for but the sounds were effective and helped to build the effect I was looking for. Originally my trailer had a scream sound effect at the end but I removed it as I thought the scream sounded a bit too fake and sort of killed the emotions that were built up. When doing trailer research I looked at a trailer of the film 'Orphan' and noticed that at one part of it a short (1 second max) clip would come up, then go black, then another short clip would pop up again etc. I felt that this was an effective technique as when the black parts came up it left you wondering what was going to happen, building up tension. I decided to adopt this idea in my own work but decided to have a banging sound effect to play whenever the clips popped up to create a certain mood and to potentially frighten audience. I got the bang sound effect from freesound also.
The majority of trailers I watched all had the green screen at the beginning and some sort of company logo. At first I didn't put them in but I then after audience feedback they said it didn't look very professional so I decided to add them to my trailer, it did look alot better afterwards.
This is one of the titles from my trailer, the background is black and the font is red. I chose to use these colours as black and red are commonly related to 'Horror' black represents death and red represents blood and murder so I believed these dark colours would be better than yellow and pink for example which are happy colours. The font I used was chiller, since I couldn't create a fancy background and effects I decided to use a 'horror' type font, the most appropriate and readable one I could find was chiller, it sort of looks like it was written in blood which is why I chose it. Below is a title from 'The Messengers' trailer, if I had access to better software I would have tried to create something like this, I like the way the background is sort of decaying and then there is a basic font. For my title I had to do the opposite of this.
Poster
Here is my final movie poster, when doing my research on posters I noticed that most had a section at the bottom of the poster containing producers, actors and directors of the film, at first I thought i'd challenge this convention and not include it in my own poster but then audience said it needed it to look more professional, after I added it I did realise it looked alot better.
Most of my ideas came from this movie poster here, this poster is quite unique, I didn't see another one like this. Like this poster I placed my skyline/ tag line at the top of the poster, the subject (in my case a picture of a girl) in the middle, and the credits and movie title at the bottom. The thing that is different about this poster is that they have put special effects on it to make it look old and decayed. I decided to try and use this idea in my own poster. Also the eye on this poster has been edited so it doesn't look normal and I have done the same to my own poster. I think the editing of the image fits in with the horror genre well as it looks scary. On my poster I also used a horror type font which I got from dafont.com it looks like blood dripping.
Magazine
When looking at existing film magazines I noticed that many of them had the model on the cover, which was a character from the main film the magazine was discussing, had a part of the models body covering part of the mast head so I decided to use this technique in my own magazine to make it look like more effort has been put into it and it would look more technical. My magazine has 2 models on the front cover advertising the film 'escape' however I didn't see any other magazines using 2 characters as the main image. Alot of the magazines placed their model in the middle but as I had 2 models I decided to place them on the left hand side of the cover to allow more writing space and so everything could be in a neat order. I used basic fonts like all the other covers and stuck to a particular colour scheme of 3 colours, anything more would have looked messy and unprofessional.
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