A2 media coursework, we was set on creating a film teaser trailer. To start, we looked at film teaser trailers that already existed to get a good understanding of what a teaser trailer was like and what we all agreed would make a convincing and successful trailer. Although we liked the teaser trailers from the sci-fi genre most we were forced to do another genre as its very hard to produce a sci-fi trailer with out the right stuff and technology and various use of CGI. Once we took all this in to account we all agreed the next best thing to do after sci-fi was horror thriller or action, in the end we went with a horror/thriller genre as our choice. Despite choosing a very common genre we thought that we should make it as different to the existing films as possible whilst still being recognizable within the horror genre. We research a large number of horror genre teaser trailers to see what techniques we thought proved successful but were not used heavily throughout the genre and decided to use a “hand-held” style when shooting the trailer. It was clear that it was a very unusual and uncommon way to approach the horror genre but of the films we encountered during our research, the ones that had used this approach were very entertaining.
Once we decided on the “hand-held” approach to film we decided to study trailers to see the techniques used. We made lots of notes on the different styles of camera shots used, the music that used in the trailer, how the storyline of the film was shown and the horror conventions that you would expect in these type of films. We realised that the music that went along side with the trailers all had the features and that our own piece shouldn't be hard to copy. The next thing we picked up on was that although some of the trailers showed the antagonist or within the film, the trailers that we found more successful where the ones that only showed glimpses of antagonist. This was a great way of building the need to know what it is and keeps the audience wanting more and entices them to see the film.. When it came to researching the conventions of these films, we found it very easy to pick out key recognizable features that we would include in our own trailer.
although we have seen these conventions tested and we know they help create a successful horror film, we decided we wanted not to stick to traditional conventions and use conventions that were seen less in popular film but were still affective. This meant we could create something that was typically from the horror genre, but also something that hadn't been seen often. With all this in mind we decided we still needed some of the main conventions used in horror films as they were key in producing our desired trailer.
Now after all the research had been completed, we had a clear outline of what we wanted to do with our project, we wanted to produce a clear horror teaser trailer, but using less common conventions. We started do piece together a plot for our trailer and began drawing up draft storyboards. It began with what would be included within each scene and what camera shots would be needed. To better understand which shots would be most effective, after deciding what happened within the scene we drew out a number of different ways of shooting the scenes and decided on which we liked most. If we still couldn't decide which shots to use we often filmed each scene a number of times from the different desired positions and then decided on the final shot when it came to editing. we had the draw storyboards finished we went on to make a photo animatic storyboard which we shot in the location with the camera shots we planed.
all the planning was done, so we wanted to test the equipment we had before filming the final footage to see if we could get the desired effect we wanted to achieve, so we took the cameras to our filming location and tried and tested different light conditions to see if we could achieve our desired look. After getting all the test footage we wanted. we tried some test editing to see if we could get closer to what we had imagined and through the use of the editing software available to us we were able to do so. We were now able to film our final trailer, but first needed to create a schedule of when we could get all of the people involved on location at the same time which was a struggle with people as I live in a different town and different people have work and lessons on different days for example we had to work the filming and editing the trailer, poster and webpage. We found that the most suitable time to film would be during free periods throughout the week and also a couple of nights straight after school. To begin with we started filming during the day in the free periods designated to get the opening scenes for the trailer but we soon found out that when we were filming at night the location had a much better feeling and was more suitable for what we wanted to achieve. This presented us with another problem as the location we were filming was in complete darkness at night so finding actors willing to help was an issue. We managed to overcome this problem by filming scenes with less people needed in them whenever people were unavailable and getting the larger scenes with more actors needed when we could get everyone together. This was a pain when it came to editing as due to the filming stage taking so long we had less time to edit so were unable to re-film some important scenes due to actors letting us down.
When all the filming was finished we decided all the footage we had filmed and began editing it together. We started by cutting down all of the footage down and removing any undesired footage so we were left with all usable clips. We made sure that we had collected as much usable footage as possible as we had encountered problems in the past of not having enough footage which meant we had to use scenes we would have either re-filmed or not included where as this time we had more then enough footage, me and Luke learnt that the hard way for are A.S production we collected around 25 minutes of usable footage for a 2 minute trailer. we produced a draft of our trailer so we could get feedback from the rest of our media group to see what alterations could be made. The feedback we received about the trailer was pretty much all positive although we didn’t even have music to go with it .it was still affective and created the mood. Next we went straight on to creating our soundtrack for the trailer and due to our vast research of horror trailers we had a clear outline of what was needed to produce and develop our trailer. Once we had finished producing our soundtrack and added it to the trailer we were happy that it did empathize the suspense.
Now that the trailer was complete we started on the ancillary tasks. Having all of us taking Art and Design as well as technology we was very confident with this task as we were familiar with the technology we would use and have done tasks like this in the past. We used a generated image manipulation program called G.I.M.P which we all had used in the past. Once started on the Website homepage. We used a picture from our test footage which we then manipulated and created animated links for the website as well as an animated header. We also had to create a poster which we again used G.I.M.P. To manipulate a picture we took ourselves especially for the poster and created out own logo to appear on it as well.
