Feedback from Questionnaire

The most common age group was the 15-20 bracket, so we our aiming are film at people of this age.

We asked an equal amount of males and females are questionnaire, as we want are film to be suitable for both genders.

Suspension, confusion, and tension were the three most popular answers that people thought created good physiological thrillers.

A soundtrack that creates suspense, fast paced shots and suspension.

Inception was the most popular movie choice.

Questionnaire

1) How old are you?
10-15
15-20
25-30
35-40


2) Male or female?

3) What makes a good physiological thriller?


4) What would you expect to see in a physiological thriller?

5) Which of these physiological thrillers is your favourite?

Shutter Island
The Dark Night
Inception
Psycho
The Sixth Sense

Storyboard video

This is our story board that we scanned in and edited on iMovie. This allowed us to add transition effects to show what the trailer could roughly look like when finished. This will hopefully help us with our timings and make the shots and order we could use.

Initial Poster Design

This is the initial design for our movie poster. This is just a rough drawing to help us work out what layout we could use for the poster and roughly what it could look like. It hopefully will help when making the poster in Photoshop as we wont need to figure out where everything needs to go.

Storyboards

These are our story boards for our teaser trailer. This is just the initial stage of planning so the teaser trailer could change quite a lot depending on decisions we make, however, this will help as a rough guide when planning our filming etc.

Location Shots

Location: Mendip hills

Scene: Car pulling away quickly, with main character chasing after it

Location: Mendip hills

Scene: Another scene involing the main character running

Location: Mendip hills

Scene: Main character running through woods

Location: Alex's house

Scene: opening scene of trailer, which will be off the main character writing Target Audience: Spooky, dark, room - create a mise-en-scene feeling designed for our target audience

Checklist for filming

This checklist helped prepare for the day of filming. We had everything we needed, so we able to get straight on with filming on the day.

Check List for Media studies teaser trailer:

Crew
•Adam Sims- Camera/Soundman

•Tim Elliott-Camera/Soundman

•Alex Swain-Actor


Locations
•Alex's Kitchen

•Alex's Second Bedroom


•Mendip hills/woods


Equipment
•Camera

•Tripod

•Microphone

•Boom stick


Props
•Paper (to burn)

•Car


Costumes
Alex


•Black/blue hoody

•Jeans

•Trainers

Gantt Chart

This will allow us to manage our time well, and make sure we keep up to date throughout the project.

We fell a bit behind when creating the magazine cover and film poster; but made time up when editing our trailer; which allowed us to complete everything on time.

Magazine cover research

In this Empire magazine cover featuring the Dark Knight, you can see straight away that it features the on of the main, recognizable/memorable character from the film as the focal point of the cover. Other conventions that the cover follows are the bar-code in the corner, price and issue date, title of the magazine in bug font and the title of the main featured film in a big font as well. Other things that the cover features are the other articles that are inside the magazine in smaller font.

This cover goes against some of the normal conventions of covers. This is because the picture featured is of Harry Potter, however there is no big font about Harry Potter being featured like in other covers, instead is has a smaller font with a star next to it. This might be because Harry Potter is so universally well known and does not need a huge font to show what it is. There is also another small picture featured which also challenges regular covers. Other then that the rest of the cover follows normal conventions including bar-code, price, issue date, title of the magazine at the top in bug font and other articles that are featured inside.

This magazine cover features Inception, with this cover the theme of inceptions trailers and films is carried through to the magazine cover, this has been done by using the background as the recognizable city scape from a birds eye view. Other than this it is similar to other covers, apart from the skewed affect on the text showing what articles are featured on the inside, this effect draws the eye towards the main focal point of the cover which is a picture of the main character from the film. Also featured is a bar-code, price and issue date and titles of the main film and the magazine in big font standing out.

Poster Research

Inception Movie Poster

The poster features the title of the film, which is the biggest text on the whole poster, it also features the movie's tagline. The main focus of the poster is the main character from the film. Other things that the poster includes are references to actors in the film, to attract audiences to the big names, it also features another successful film that the derector has done. At the very bottom it has the billing block that says which film company the film is owned by and all of the directors producers and actors that star in the film and also has the studios logo. The main focus of the poster is a picture that relates to the movie and features the main character.

The Bourne Identity Movie Poster

In this poster from The Bourne Identity the main character of the film is featured and is the main focal point of the whole poster, the title of the film is also featured and is the biggest text in the poster to make it easily readable, the tagline of the film is also featured in small text on the left again allowing the audience to have a glimpse of the storyline. In this poster the billing block has been put in the bottom corner rather than taking up the whole bottom of the poster. But it features all of the main information and logos as normal. The poster also features images from the film in the background to give more of a taster to the audience of the film.

Shutter Island Movie Poster

This movie poster is very dark, this gives off a very mysterious and dark feel to the poster and sets the scene for the film. The only light in the whole poster is from the match that the main character is holding, this shows half of the characters face. The main character is featured in the poster and again is the main focus point of the poster. The title is also the biggest writing on the page and again there is a billing block at the bottom featuring all the information on the production of the film with the logos of the companies involved. The poster also contains the tagline of the film which adds an element and taste of what the film will be about.

Our Pitch

This photo shows us presenting our film pitch, within our pitch we explained the film idea using a simple tagline explaining the film in a brief sentence and also the main beats of the film that helped explain the film in more detail and also gave us a good idea of what kind of scenes would be in our teaser trailer.

After we presented the idea we got feedback from our teacher and the rest of the class. They believed that the film idea was good and that the main beats shown could be incorporated well into the trailer.

New Idea

Heavy Rain (Console Game)

Heavy Rain teaser trailer

Sliding Doors

After another long discussion and some research on more films we decided to change our idea again. This time we wanted to create a thriller style film that would hinge on the decisions the character makes and how these decisions would create separate paths in the characters life.

These two examples represent the type of film we would like to create. Heavy Rain is a console game that takes different paths depending on the decisions that the player makes throughout the game. This means that there are multiple different endings that are possible within the game.

Sliding doors is another example that we could take inspiration from. Although this film is a romantic comedy/drama the story line is what we were inspired by. The film all hinges on whether the characters in the film either catches a train or doesn't and how that one decision changes the future.

Horror/Thriller Research

After a long discussion about what type of horror trailer we wanted to try and produce we decided upon setting the film trailer in a post-apocalyptic time. This was after going through options such as a paranormal thriller, such as 'Paranormal Activity', however we thought that it would be hard to come up with a storyline that is actually original and not copying what has already been covered by the film.

We then decided to research films and programmes or series that are set in a post-apocalyptic setting:

28 Days Later



This teaser trailer for the film 28 Days Later manages to create a lot of tension within it. The way that the tension in this teaser trailer is created is through using many different techniques. These tension building techniques include; using dark images and quick flashes; using sound effects to add to the flashing images and fades to black to create an eerie atmosphere. This teaser goes against many of the conventional techniques used within teaser trailers. Conventional technique include using a lot of dialogue from the film almost explaining what is going on, instead of this 28 days later uses fades to black and text explaining what the images are representing. Also the music used in the trailer is very minimal, using small instrumental bursts and subtle music to go with the sound effects to create even more tension, challenging the conventional use of dynamic music that gets louder and quieter in certain parts of the trailer to add to the images being shown.

Survivors (BBC Series)

This is not a teaser trailer, however, it uses similar techniques to the conventional horror/thriller trailer, using quick cuts, music, varying speed and fades to black to create tension and keep the audience on the edge.

It also shows the kind of film we would like to replicate in our own way. Survivors is a post-apocalyptic drama that is produced by the BBC. The story line consists of a virus that wipes out 90% the population leaving only 10% of the population to fend for themselves in an eerie, empty world. This drama seems to represent the strength of people to recover from such a devastating situation and gather together to help eachother, but it also shows the other end of the spectrum, with greed, people taking over warehouses of food and supermarket store rooms and keeping people away from the food with force, using guns and weapons to defend the food. Initially the show bought in a huge audience throughout the UK as they watched the series beggining on BBC 1.Narrative

Film trailer research

The Expendables



Shutter Island



The Book of Eli



All of these action/thriller trailers follow a similar function. They all vary in pace, there are slow parts which build the tension within the audience and then there is a burst of quickfire action scenes, usually filled with the most action packed parts of the film. The trailers then usually slow down before the end to let the quick burst of action settle in the audiences mind.

These action trailers also usually fade to black inbetween the different shots in the trailer. This is becuase black is portrayed as a dark and mysterious colour and creates tension, where as white is used in lighter films, such as Romantic Comedies.

We have decided that to create an action film trailer on such a low budget would not really work, as the action in the trailer would not live up to any of the other trailers above as we do not have the funds to make sets and we do not have any special effects to work with. We have decided to focus more on a thriller or horror genre trailer, this is becuase we have found a lot of horror films that have been filmed on a budget and feel that we could create a good trailer for the genre.

The A2 Course

I am looking forward to trying to learn new skills to help improve my editing or broaden my knowledge about the media industry and I also likew the fact that there is more than one thing that we are goin to make. I want to make a media text that is as close to professional quality as I can with the skills I have and are going to learn. I know the course will encorporate a lot of work and will take up a lot of time, which is quite daunting, however I am looking forward to getting stuck in.

The AS Course

First of all we had to do a preliminary task which had to include all different types of camera shots and movement and we also had to use pre-production and post productions skills. We then created a thriller film opening using the skills we learnt doing the preliminary task e.g. storyboarding and editing the film.


I enjoyed making the film opening, using different camera angles and equipment to film the scenes and then use post production to merge all of the existing scenes into one smooth and flowing film opening. I think that we did well in incorporating music into the film as it fitted almost perfectly.


I think we could have improved on the editing of the film, for example using different effects to add more depth to the film. I also think we could have improved on the credits as they were quite simple and lacked creativity.