Evaluation Question 3.

3.) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We created a questionnaire using SurveyMonkey to ask one hundred people about our teaser trailer to gage opinion on certain aspects of what the audience expects.

Our Media Survey.

The first question we asked was to find out what gender the audience would prefer the news reporter to be. This was so we could decide whether to follow the conventions of what the audience suggested or subvert them. In the time when this clip would be set there were more male news reporters than female as depicted in the post, so we were inclined to have a male reporter. However out of the 100 surveyed 66 said they would prefer a female news reporter subverting the conventions of the time. Therefore we went with those surveyed and used a female actress to be our news reporter.

Our female newsreporter.

The type of genre our teaser trailer would be means that if we followed convention, either the whole film would be shot in hand held or a mixture of hand held and tri-pod shots. As this type of style of film is relatively modern , inspired by The Blair Witch Project (1999), we asked those surveyed whether they would want the trailer to be shot in hand held.

Question number 2.

The answer was split almost evenly so we decided to film the majority of our teaser trailer in hand held  to give the point of view of the actors, similar to the clip shown below from Blair Witch, and then to break it up we had tripod shots to create a sense of stillness.

 

A major issue we discovered when planning our teaser trailer was how much of the villains/monsters to show. The other teaser trailers or theatrical trailers we used for research seemed to vary in whether they had villains in masks and also whether the audience saw the villain straight away, never or just fleetingly at the end. As a group we were undecided how to proceed on this issue so created a question on our survey to see what the audience would prefer. To keep the villain hidden until the end would create enigma and suspense throughout the teaser trailer but to show it at the beginning may lead to an anti-climax. We first asked whether they would want to see the villains face or for them to be hidden for example by wearing a mask.
The majority of those surveyed said they would not want to see the villains face. Therefore based on this result we decided to only show the villain briefly on two separate occasion creating suspense and enigma for the audience, securing this idea further we went to ask whether the audience would prefer our teaser trailer to focus on the victims, villains or a mixture of both.


The two scenes where our villians are shown

This was split 50/50 between focus on the victims and fair amount of both. Whilst taking into consideration these results we decided to focus on the victims leading on to their terror as they realise they aren’t alone. This ensured the audience could sense the disequilibrium but didn’t know what they were afraid of necessarily till the final few seconds.

Question number 3.

Another question we asked to those surveyed was whether they would expect to see a majority of male or female victims. Convention dictates normally victims are young females and as a group we were unsure whether we wanted to subvert or conform to this convention. We therefore also asked how old the audience expected our victims to be. The majority of those asked said they would expect our victims to be aged between 17-20 years old this conforms to conventions already set. We subsequently decided to choose actors from this age bracket as actors were easier to find but also it follows a natural convention set by horror films.

Our young actors aged between 17 and 18.

Linking on from this we decided based on result to our survey to have a majority of female victims; we had three female victims and one male victim. This was due to the fact the plot of our teaser trailer involved a group of young teenagers going in to an abandoned factory.
 

Evaluation Question 2.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

To ensure our products were effective as a cohesive promotional package we ensured a number of factors were the same such as colour schemes, typography and imagery. Our main product was a horror teaser trailer and our ancillary texts were a poster and website.

Products: Poster, Website and Teaser Trailer

Our poster has a colour scheme of metallic colours consisting of browns and black reinforcing the factory location element of our teaser trailer. The single bright light added to the filters used to edit the poster over expose the actors face creating binary opposition with a sense of light versus dark. This idea is reflected in other aspects of our products with the website having a colour scheme of brown and grey and reflecting more subtly the idea of binary opposition and good versus evil, the use of the time lapse as a background establishes the idea of our film being location focused on the “Klinger Factory”.  The editing of the time lapse creates a vivid contrast with the brightness of the clouds creating a darker “Klinger Factory”. And this links more cohesively to our teaser trailer which focuses directly on location with the Klinger Factory shown in the first four seconds.

The same title typography on all three texts creates consistency and a brand associated with our product with which the audience can identify. The typography was chosen to conform to other films similar to ours such as Chernobyl Diaries. Our typography was chosen to make an impact and tie in with the idea of an abandoned factory this is highlighted by the fact it is a rusty brown colour and has been edited to look eroded.

The use of a tagline only on the poster is to reflect the plot of the teaser trailer as it can’t accurately be shown any other way. It is needed on the poster only as the teaser trailer has title slides which highlight the plot and this is similar to the website whose background reflects the narrative similarly to films such as Amityville Horror.

Poster tagline to suggest narrative to the audience

Our poster follows convention by having a single victim inside our main location with the hand creating a hint of the danger that will unfold.  The single victim is also easily recognisable in relation to our teaser trailer as they have a speaking part creating a sense of cohesion between the two.

Actor prominent in both the poster and teaser trailer

More obviously the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is effective by having the trailer directly on the homepage of the website playing automatically. This reinforces the brand created and enables the audience to quickly identify with our teaser trailer and product.

Website; embedded video of teaser trailer which automatically plays.

 

Sound

I recorded, produced, mixed and mastered the soundtrack using Logic, internal and external Synthesisers, effects and compressors. 
I started by watching the trailer through several times to get a feel of where the mood, dynamics and texture of the music should change to reflect whats happening on screen.

Arrange Window for the sound track:

I could watch the trailer at the same as I layered down the different SFX and long drones. I mainly used ES2 and EXS24 to create the bass and different filter sweeps heard in the drones and SFX:

I used effects such as reverb, delay, phaser, chorus, stereo spreading etc. I used 'SpaceDesinger' to create a similar reverb to what may have been made inside the Klinger factory. I used the EQ tools and ADSR envelope to create a cold sounding reverb:

For the drums/rythmic beats, I used an 'Ultrabeat' drum synthesiser which I heavily processed using a Compressor to create a hard, 'thud' like sound:

Finally, to Compress and master the music, I sent the audio through a Focusrite Compressor and Noise Gate. The compressor would prevent the audio from distorting or sound too loud. The noise gate would silence any background noise heard from any audio recordings by reducing the volume of the file when it whent below the Threshold:

Editing Effects

Whilst editing, I added a number of different effects to the footage to make it more effective towards the audience. The fine detail in these effects make the film more interesting and can be used as a transition between clips.

One effect I used was 'Bad TV'. This simulates the effect of a distorted/old Tv set. I used it to emphasise the 'dodgy' camerawork of the 'amateur urban explorers'. I also used it to simulate interference or the camera becoming disconnected when the explorers ran when they were in dangerous situations:

I can adjust the effect including the colouring, the type of grain, the roll of the camera (placement of the screen up and down) and the strength of the effect on the clip.

Below is a screenshot of a clip without the effect applied and one with it applied:

 Before:

After:

Poster Final

Final Trailer

Final Website

This is the final website promoting our film trailer.

http://pierj017303.wix.com/klinger