Trailer research

There are many films that are around in the film industry at the moment that are of the same genre as ours. Finding advertising for this was easy and helped with plenty of ideas for our radio advert. The only problem was we couldn't find examples of film radio trailers anywhere online, but we did hear a few on the radio when we were doing this. We had to use video trailers instead to learn about the conventions. We need sound that will signify emptiness and gloom and sounds that will scare. We also need a voice over and dialogue from the film.

Radio Advert thoughts

Having looked at some adverts and radio adverts I have discovered what kind of elements need to go into our radio advert to make it successful. Looking at advertisements for similar films to mine it was easy to figure out what the advert should consist of. Including parts of dialogue from the film I think will be effective as well as being mixed with sound effects and other parts of dialogue explaining what the film is about.

Target Audience Profile

We planned for our target audience to be a demographic of people between 16-30, in education and working part-time. The film represents this demographic so it's clear they are the target audience. We thought that the psychographic profile would be people who are thrill seekers and who enjoy being part of a group and going out. .

AGE: 16-30
GENDER: Male and Female
LIVES: United Kingdom
CLASS: Middle Class
INTERESTS: Going out and socialising, meeting new people, learning new things.

The film isn't being made for a profit but we still need to know who the audience are so we can think about what they would like in the film and what they would expect to see.

Film Poster

Ella and I originally had something planned like this gate with a haunted setting for our film poster.  This is a draft of what we had imagined our film poster would be like.  It turned out that this idea was unrealistic as neither of us had that much experience in using PhotoShop to be able to make this possible.  Our film was also in a different location which had no gates or fences so it wouldn't advertise the setting very well. Sometimes film posters a bit different than the final film because they're made before the film is finished or they want to make it more exciting. For us it would mean driving around trying to find these gates and then adding other images in.  

This is the original picture of the main character Beth. We chose this because she is the main character and in the film Beth becomes possessed, she screams at the end of the film and this picture is representing Beths high pitched scream. This image is dramatic enough to engage the audience and make it clear something horrible happens to this character. The medium close up works well too because the audience can see the emotion on her face and it's important to get a reaction from the audience so they want to go and see the film.

Ella and I had an idea to have just Beth as the poster and have the surroundings of Beth disorientated. We weren't sure how to do this at first so we tried out a few techniques. This didn't really work out as we imagined it so we had to keep experimenting.

We found a programme on the internet that had just the effect that we wanted. Using this effect the picture looked just as we intended it to look. The effect was called 'light tunnel' and it made beth look like she was being taken into a spirit world which is exactly what we want the audience to think.

We had a look at other film posters to see what kind of language was used on them and who was mentioned. Also things like the font and the font sizes.  We found this Star Trek poster and used it as a base for ours.  Even though ours isn't a sci-fi film we thought the type of font would suit our genre of film which is horror.  The fonts are similar and so is the poster as is focuses mostly on the face in the middle.

We uploaded the picture onto PhotoShop so we could add the text that we decided to attach to the poster.   We had a discussion about what colour the font should be whether is should be red, black or white.  We decided to go white as it went better with the picture and it stood out, making it easy for the audience to read the details..

Trying out different fonts and different way of presenting fonts helped Ella and I decided which one to use for our film poster. We attempted for the font to look as much as a Ouija board font as possible because it will look effective on the film poster.

We decided that this font wasn't suitable for the film poster but may have been for our original idea.  

We used a website called 'dafont.com' to try out all different types of fonts and see which one would suit our poster best.  We discovered a free font called '28 days later' which we thought really suited our poster.  We wanted to find a font which didn't make our poster look amateur and this font was the one we chose that could do that for us.  We installed the font to PhotoShop and changed the colour to match the other details on the poster such as the release date and the actors.

This is our final version o the poster.  At first we didn't know where to place the title and the other details  because we didn't want to cover up a lot of the actresses face as the font size we chose for the title is quite large.  When we finally placed it where it is now we were surprised that it worked an we thought it looked like a gag as well so it added to the feeling of being trapped. We put it on a wall beside other posters to see how it would look and some people have said it looks like she's trying to get out of the poster, or that it's like a window.

Choosing the ancillary tasks

We had to choose two other tasks to do as well as our film and we decided to go with a film poster and a radio advert.   The other option we had was a magazine feature. We came up with reasons why these would be the best ones to do and how we would do them and when having that meeting we drew a mind map to make it clear and agree what we would do. For the radio advert we knew we would need sound clips from the film and music to explain the genre. For the film poster we needed a photo from the shoot or a still from the film. Like the radio advert it had to advertise the film so it needed to have the name of the film, the genre and the release date.

Audience Feedback from Pitch

After we presented our sample scene to our class we received some feedback which was mostly positive.  There was some constructive criticism which I thought was quite predictable.  One of the points they made is that we should have some gloomy music in our film that creates drama and tension for the audience. We realised this is important so Ella and I found some songs using the films we researched when looking for what sort of genre we wanted our film to be.
We played around with garage band and the royalty free music on there to try and put some sound on the film.

As the style of our film is like such films as Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield there isn't actually any soundtrack in the film except for a few gloomy noises from characters and some sort of animal which is in Cloverfield.  We originally planned to include a soundtrack in the alternate parts of the film where the characters are supposedly being watched.  In our sample scene this would have worked but in our final version of our film it wouldn't have work so well so we decided not to include music.

Presentation

This video shows Ella and I pitching our idea to the class. We used the story board and our sample scene and then we asked everyone for questions and feedback. We did put a lot of work into this so we were relieved when everyone seemed to understand what we were trying to do.
Untitled from Ciara Murray on Vimeo.

I think that our presentation went well even though I would have preferred to receive more constructive criticism than we did. The feedback we got from our class members was constructive but it was predictable and there wasn't anything that they said that I didn't expect them to say.  Even though the feedback wasn't as much as we hoped we did build our skills in Final Cut by doing this and we were able to convince out teacher that the idea would work.