Eval Q1

My A2 film trailer challenges, uses and also develops forms and conventions of media products. Personally I’d say in general, I tried to break and challenge classic media text conventions. All of the trailers in my media class are really impressive, it is noticeable the amount of work that has gone into them. But I tried to make mine more psychologically challenging for my audience and I had said that from the start. The first thing I did was cutting out the audio, in my trailer there is no speech at all, bar the whispering in the end credits. And this is because I wanted to create a certain mystery, and tension behind my trailer. Revealing very little about the plot. I was very careful with the audio I chose, and I mix it up throughout the trailer. The first half of the trailer is daunting, tense music that sets the scene, building tension from the get go. Then in the second half I found some non copyrighted music on youtube, that had quite a trippy, unnerving sound to it. I did this because I liked the way it made my trailer flow. My film is about being stalked and the descent into total paranoia and insanity, and I believe that my trailer represents this as in the second half when I start speeding up the footage with different flashes combined with the trippy music it creates a psychologically challenging atmosphere for the viewer. It’s unlike any other horror film trailer I’ve seen, where they reveal characters, the plot itself and has quite a lot of speech. It’s the same with the other trailers in my class. And I find when making a trailer or short film with little to no budget, it’s easy for it to look cringey. I didn’t want that, I wanted to create a trailer that generally unnerved my audience and would be taken seriously. And I believe I have done that. I paid very close attention to camera angles for they really set the scene, more so than anything else. My favourite shot is in the opening 30 seconds were Luke (my actor) is sitting on a bridge looking out. The camera is situated to the left and a little lower than him, showing him looking out onto the setting son showing the day ending. It was really effective for it gave this impression of emptiness and loneliness, and it was filmed early in the day when it was sunny, so when I put it into final cut pro I played around with numerous filters until i found the right light. Creating a trailer with no budget isn’t easy, you have to be creative. And the thing with making a psychological horror is you cannot rely on cheap jump scares, gore and blood, you really have to play with the audience's imagination, and also your own. I wanted to do a scene where you see a hanging body, and I couldn’t work out how to do it. I realized it would be to hard to get a full body shot, so I just tried to film the legs. I covered my legs in mud, and hung from the rafters in my loft by my arms and got my friend Callum to film my swinging legs. Initially the footage looked poor, it didn’t look realistic. I was swinging too fast but also it was to bright. Final Cut Pro was great for manipulating images, far more effective to use than photoshop and also easier. I added a few filters over it, like an old recording frame and also different filters to make it look more grainy and dark. Then combine that with the distorted audio and you have a really great piece of footage. The last scene before the film title wasn’t even planned. We were sitting in the sixth form room and I was playing around with the camera and filmed Luke, he didn’t know I was filming until he turned and looked at the camera, so when I was editing I had to cut the last two seconds out. That scene seems genuine, it’s at the end of the trailer and the vacant expression on his face helps with the flow of the trailer. One of my biggest inspirations when making my trailer was a youtuber called cinemassacre. James Rolfe is an American amateur film-maker who I’d actually been a fan of for a while, right back since 2006 when he first started his account. He is known for his angry game reviews but is also a huge horror film buff and has created numerous projects with little no no-budgets. I took a lot of inspiration and got many ideas from him, even his name itself, “cinemassacre” meaning cinema massacre, breaking the codes and conventions of how a film should be made because of a lack of facilities and money to create a film. Looking at his work he uses mostly practical effects but still manages to produce a great film. Here is a link to a video called

eval q4

Comparing A2 to AS, this year in A2 I used far more sophisticated and advanced software and also hardware. Firstly the camera I used, the Panasonic Fz330. It was a good camera, good quality, great zoom and also built in effects. For example when we were filming in the woods during the day, I dimmed the brightness and put a filter over it that made it look like the sun was setting. Add that to the filters on the software and you’ve totally manipulated the footage. It took me a while to work out how to use the camera for it was quite a sophisticated piece of equipment. Compared to last year were i took the photos with my phone, the quality was so much better. I also tried to mix up various different software. Last year to manipulate and edit photo's I used the free online tool that is Pixlr. It was simple, easy to use and I was happy with the look of my photo's however they could have been far better. With Pixlr you are limited to what you can do, where as with something else like photoshop you can create anything out everything. It's infamous for altering photos for good and for bad. I took a photo of my friend Callum with a reversed KISS mask on, it looked pretty stupid at first but when I put it into photoshop and changed the contrast, brightness, hue and other elements it ended up looking very scary and professional. Using final cut pro made a big difference swell now instead of having to use just still images like we did with the magazine, now we were using real rolling footage so if was a big difference using different editing software. At first I found it quite challenging to use but after I started using it more and more and started to get the hang of it, it now seems simple. Like photoshop it was great for editing and manipulating scenes to give a different vibe or affect, like many of the shots were taken in the morning sunlight, very bright, but when I put some filters over it and changed the brightness it really changed the effect and mood of the trailer.

eval q3

3) What have I learnt from audience feedback? One of the most important factors in creating a good trailer is taking advice and constructive criticism from your peers. Not only did I receive feedback from the people in my class, but the rest of the school’s year 13 sixth form and also friends outside of school. Every other week, in class we would show each other how our trailers were coming along and we would give each other feedback of what was good and how to improve. It was really helpful for you got the positives and the negatives. One thing that people always commented on was the audio, the original music I had was a old toy music box, sort of like a jack in the box wind up. My peers said it did not fit the genre of the fim, and looking back in hindsight, it didn’t. Also I felt as if I was restricted to that one song, when I changed it I found many more different pieces of audio that i liked and it sounded a lot better, and looking at the trailer now the audio is one of the key parts, it helps shape it and set the mood. One of the most important things about getting feedback from your audience is that it keeps you on your toes, it makes you strive for something better. You don’t settle for second best, every time someone makes a bit of criticism, sometimes taking it personally can be a good thing because you put that extra effort in. I’ve mentioned before, the trailer itself is supposed to be psychologically challenging, it appeals to a smaller group of people, a niche audience. So I was getting feedback on things like the quick change in audio, scenes moving too fast and too slow or the lack of speech itself. And this is what I was trying to do, so if my film is going to appeal to a niche audience I’m going to receive a lot of feedback on what to alter and what to change.

CASSETTE I (Final Trailer)

Hammer Film Production Company

In order to create a successful film, it's important to look at other production company's and what they did for the horror industry. I wanted to research a lesser known company like Hammer instead of someone like Universal or WB, plus Hammer is primarily horror / thriller. I remember watching old Hammer films from the 60's when I was younger and it looked so tame when I seen them, but to put it into context, an audience at the time would have been very shocked.

Founded in November 1934 England. It actually started off making comedies and crime films like 'The Public Life of Henry the Ninth" 1936 and "The Bank Messenger Mystery" 1937. But a crash in the British film industry in 1938 forced Hammer into bankruptcy. Luckily it was bought out at the last minute and started to produce films made by other companies. A few years later after WW2 hammer began to make cheap films to fill gaps in cinema schedules and support big feature films. So after years of creating small crime thrillers and comedies Hammer opened their door to the horror genre, 'Hammer House of Horror films' started in 1955. They took advantage of the Sci-fi situation in the US. America is where all of the huge films were made, and still is today, and during the 50's it was rife with sic-fi films such as 'The Day the Earth Stood Still". The horror golden age was 20 years earlier in the 30s. But Hammer seen a gap in the market for horror films and jumped on it. Their first feature horror film was "The Curse of Frankenstein" featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, who at the time were big stars of the screen. They re-made other 30's classics like 'Dracula' and 'The Mummy'. But this time was different, better picture, sound, colour and also blood. These Hammer films were in colour, something that was rare at the time, also no one had really seen blood in a horror film at this point. Hammer changed that, instead it was full of blood, and it was bright red so it stood out. The cameraman let you know it was there for they lingered on it for longer than usual. This was breakthrough stuff at the time, people couldn't believe it, they had never seen anything like this before. Even the Americans loved it, Hammer films were huge in the States.

But during the late 60's with the rise of directors like Roman Polanski and films such as 'Night of the Living Dead' by George A. Romero, Hammer was struggling to compete. There films of the 50's were already looking outdated and the gore and graphics from the US was far more superior. They tried getting in new directors and writers but it didn't work. Despite going bankrupt in the 80's and being bought out and failing multiple times, in 2007 Dutch media tycoon John De Mol bought them out and they began producing films again. Perhaps the most well known was 'The Woman in Black' from 2012.

The reason I wanted to talk about Hammer was because they were a small company that dominated the US for a brief period with their breakthrough. Also they produced truly great horror classics, and despite the blood being a big feature of Hammer, they relied on a strong narrative, good acting and suspense to keep the audience engaged.

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This is a scene from the classic 'Dracula' where Dracula dies, watch after 2:40 when you see the special effects of the day and why Hammer was so famous.

Using Final Cut Pro

To create my media trailer, I have been using a piece of software on the schools apple Macs called 'Final Cut Pro'. There is other move making software out there like Sony Vegas and Windows Movie Maker but I believe the best is Final Cut Pro, and I also have free access to it. Last year in A1 we weren't making motion picture texts just still magazines so this year was a big step up for I'd never done anything like this before. I did used to have a youtube channel which I regularly posted on a few years ago but not to the level we are at in A2. At first I found it quite hard to pick up, like photoshop its all about trial and error for the first few attempts, until you get used to it. The thing that makes it so good is that you can manipulate everything, images, the footage and the one big thing I thought was great, the sound. One of the pieces of audio we have is an old music box, so I put two audio effects over it called 'Telephone' and 'Short Delay' which makes it sound even more creepier than it already was. One of the tools that really helped me out at times was the stabilise tool, often without the tripod we couldn't get a steady shot depending on the angle. And what was good footage was ruined by shaky camera work, until i found out how to stabilise. This is a feature that stops the shaking, but at times it can blur the footage and make it look worse so I tend not to rely on it too much.

But I learnt many skills last year that were transferable to this year like how to manipulate photo's to get a different vibe from it. For example look at the pictures above.

The top one has no filter, and the bottom one has the 'cool tone' filter. This is what I mean, the first shot didn't look that creepy, whereas when I put the filter over it' looked much better. This also allows me to film at different times of day, sometimes. I could be in a sunny room at 11 o'clock in the morning but i could turn it into midnight on FCP. I kind of did the same with my poster, the main image for that I edited in Pixlr which I used to alter my photo's last year.

Poster Inspiration

For my auxiliary poster I researched other horror film posters, teasers and theatrical and took influence and inspiration from them and others in order to create mine. Despite not being finished as of now all I need to do is put on my new main image. The main poster I focused on when creating my poster was this one, 'One Missed Call' originally a Japanese film from 2003 with an American re-make in 2008. If you research horror posters, many of them look the same, or have the same general layout as the one pictured above. And when you compare this one to mine you can see the similarities, the credit block, main image, title and tag line.

The tagline 'WHAT WILL IT SOUND LIKE WHEN YOU DIE?' is suspenseful, it leaves you thinking what it means, and with my poster 'THE NIGHT IT CAME HOME' does the same thing, makes you question what it is and what it will do, enticing the audience. Also the main image I really liked, notice how around the hand and the face it seems to blend into the darkness as if it is coming out of the dark, hiding in the unknown. That's the image I tried to create with my poster, and it matches with the film. The 'antagonist' whatever it is, is never fully seen, it's always lurking in the shadows. It's a very unsettling poster. The round face, dark, dull wide smile and also by using two mouths as eyes creates a certain eeriness and makes you feel uncomfortable even just when looking at it. There are many other posts I took inspiration from such as 'Scream 4' and 'Mirrors'. But this one especially for it really does make me feel uncomfortable just looking at it. What makes it so good is how scary it is with no blood, gore or guts, just playing with your imagination and using simple techniques to scare the audience.