Website research

One of the feedback points for our website was to research more into other film websites to get the right idea of what we need to do to make it look more proffessional.
We decided to do more detailed research into our first inspiration for the website, 'Prom Night'. Because the film is distributed by Sony Pictures the website is based within their URL of sonypictures.co.uk/movies/promnight/

The above screen shot is of the first page of the films website. It has links to the homepage, to watch the trailer, register for email updates, and the films Bebo page. The main image is from the poster with just the film title, the tagline and release date. We are thinking of making an opening page for our film leading to the main website but aren't sure whether we have enough time. Another way of incorpreting the style of this website is to have a similar layout for our homepage, using the poster image with the title, tagline and release date and having a few links maybe to a facebook page etc.We will also have to put the institutions and rating, which we already have anyway on our website at the moment.

This is the homepage of the website: sonypictures.co.uk/movies/promnight/site/

After clicking on the 'ENTER THE SITE' link on the opening page the official site opens in a new tab. They've used the same image but enlarged to fill the page with the text in a different layout with the release date above the title. The background is moving, although it is difficult to see what the image is of, it looks like hands with light flares and is obviousley quite dark so not to draw attention away from the main image of the girl. The sites navigation is at the bottom of the image with pages such as 'About the Film', 'Cast & Crew', 'Trailer', 'Gallery', 'Downloads' and 'Soundtrack'.
The ideas we have interpreted from this page are using the poster image as the main focal point, and we've also chosen similar pages, as in other research we found most websites use these headings. Our navigation is at the top of the page however using a consistent font to the rest of the website.

The 'About the Film' page has information on the story, production notes, the making of, and the cast and crews prom stories. For our 'About the Film' page we will just have an outline of the story with some images.
On the 'Cast & Crew' page, detailed info about most of the cast and 'The Filmakers' is given. We will just write general info about the main characters/cast and about us the 'filmakers' perhaps with profile pictures also.
The trailer page obviousley just shows the trailer in the centre of the page. The theme throughout all the pages is the same, background, and text of the title and release date stay in the same place, the centre picture changes to various stills from the film with text boxes overlayed.

The 'Gallery' ^^ shows important images/stills from the film of characters and crucial scenes. The images come up as thunmbnails at the top of the page, when you click on one it shows up underneath but larger for example like in the screen shot above. Our gallery page will have the pictures from the photo album and important stills from the film.

'Downloads' has downloadable backgrounds and buddy icons. Our site will have the poster and backgrounds as downloads.

The 'Soundtrack' page links to a Myspace page with the soundtrack available to listen to and other information available. We've decided not to make our soundtrack a page as we feel it isn't necessary, because the 'Prom Night' soundtrack is a well known song and ours isn't.


We also researched 'The Crazies' website: thecrazies-movie.com
HOMEPAGE HERE!
The homepage has the film title in the top left corner with the release date underneath and also in the centre of the page above the trailer. The background is obviousley a setting from the movie with a sign to the right saying 'HELP US'. The navigation is at the top of the page with pages such as; 'ABOUT', 'VIDEOS', 'GALLERY', 'DOWNLOADS', 'CAST & CREW', and 'BATTLEMAIL'. Below the trailer is the institutions, release date, a phone app link, 'register' (email updates, promos etc), Facebook and Twitter links, and 'find show times' for local cinemas.

The 'ABOUT' page just includes the storyline with the same background as the homepage. (Similar to our idea)
'VIDEOS' has a few different versions of the the films trailer,our trailer page will obviousley just have the one trailer.
The 'GALLERY' has scattered polaroids on the page and when you click on one, similar to the 'Prom Night' website, it comes up larger.
'DOWNLOADS' includes wallpapers, screensavers and buddy icons.
'CAST & CREW'
'BATTLE MAIL' is an interesting idea, at first you have no idea what it is. It is an interactive game. You type in your email and a friends email and start an email battle, obviousley linking to the idea of the films story. Your friend can email you back and so on, continuing the battle. This is a good device to interest the audience and make them more involved and attracted to the film.

Titles research

Looked at titles of 'the strangers', 'the grudge' and 'prom night'. All have institution at begining and title of film at the end with a quick film clip after and then 'coming soon' website and institutions. Then sometimes after that the institution again, actors and directors etc.

Research for new storyboard

After realising we would have to scrap all the filming we had already done (although it wasn't that much) I decided I was unsattisfied with the opening scene we have for our trailer. I spoke to a few people, some who also do media, and they said maybe we should start it with scary shots, not the calm atmosphere we had before. I think this is a great idea and will really improve our trailer. I did some more research into trailers to get ideas of how to do this new idea.

Paranormal Activity
This trailer is really effective, it shows the first audience who ever watched the film in the trailer. Seeing their reactions is quite shocking and I think these shots scare you more than the film itself. However in the film a good technique they used was infrared. Most of the film was recorded at night so obviously a night vision camera was used. We originally wanted to use this technique in our film but decided it would be too tricky, but now I think it would be worth giving it a go. Another film we watched at the begining of our research also used infrared, it was called Quarentine.


Skin Walkers
The start of this trailer uses taglines to introduce the story. It also shows quite graphic shots which makes you keep watching. I found this was quite an action film and not exactly horror but they did use intersting techniques to attract the audience and tell the story. Flashing/quick editing of shots is used which creates the action feel and also throughout I noticed a copper theme in most of the shots like a tint, maybe to link in with the characters eyes which were copper coloured.


Thir13en Ghosts
The begining scene of the Thir13en Ghosts trailer has a spooky atmosphere, a blue tint to the shots make this. It also shows that it is dark and looks cold. A white flash is used to skip to a more coloured scene and then as the action comes back into play more white flashes skip between different shots. I think the first flash makes it seem like theres a flashback.


The Strangers
This trailer starts with a calm atmosphere and uses taglines to introduce the story. MUSIC. It also shows the views of the characters having double takes, in the first shot you see a person and in the second you don't. When I watched this it was really creepy and definately worked at scaring the audience. Also the use of masks for the other characters really adds to the atmosphere, not being able to see their face, and you can imagine how scared you would be in that situation.


The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
2-4 second clips are used for the first part of the trailer to set the scene. Then 1 second clips which fade to black are seen, these start to set the pace and atmosphere. I liked the use of freeze frames to show the panic on the characters faces and then faded quickly to white. The last sequence of shots at the end of the trailer are short with quick editing, the clips are also quite dark and the speed of the editing creates an action feel and makes the audience interested.


The Grudge
This trailer really creeped me out. The main element I like about it was how they used a wave of hair to bring the text/titles in and out of the frame.


The Unborn
This trailer also starts off slow and uses white flashes inbetween the scary shots. I really like the titles for this trailer and the background they used. I think the characters really show the genre of this film and just looking at them scares you.


Shaun Of The Dead
I love the trailer for this film, I really like how they've managed to mix together funny and scary and be able to laugh and be scared at the same time.


Looking at all these trailers gave me a great idea for the storyboard. The trailer is going to start with quick editing so you see very short clips, almost flashes, of whats going on like in some of the trailers above. The shots will be of our main character, already been kidnapped, tied to a chair in a room, it will be dark with just a light on her. There will also be shots of the stalker/kidnapper but you won't be able to see all of their face and there will also be pictures he has taken of the girl when she didn't know. All these shots will be interspersed with each other creating a mix up of the shots and hopefully creating a scary/anitcipating atmosphere

Inspiration/Ideas

Jay-Z & Alicia Keys-Empire State of Mind




This is a music video that we thought was effective in terms of how the photographs are displayed artisticly in time with the music.  Even though this is a music video we thought about having our stalker photographs maybe displayed like this obviously in a much more horror way with scary music.  We may be able to do something similar, but obviously not to this standard, as the macs don't have this effect available.

Website Hosting Search.

Today's lesson we looked at different website makers which are free to set up our own website, for our horror film. But most of them have a clause were you have to pay, so we are going to continue looking.x

Title

Titles

These are the titles we designed on a graphics website, interactimage.com, as you can see the title we have chosen is 'Possessed'. The reason we chose this one out of our choices is because it gives a twist to the story perhaps making the audience think someone is possessed in the psychiatric/paranormal sense when in fact we mean that the boy wants to own the girl and wants her as a possession. We asked a few people which of the title designs they liked best and which would be best suited to a horror movie poster and the majority of them chose this one:

We will do a mock up of the poster next week when we have a few ideas and samples of images we will use for the background.

Picture Ideas For Poster

Here are some pictures I found on deviantart.com in the photography/people&portraits/expressive section. I looked at portraits because we want our photo to be of the main character on her own, and I looked in the expressive section because we didn't just want a plain portrait of the character we want it to be showing something about the film. These photos have given me lots of ideas and inspiration of how we can do our poster photo and it's also given me some ideas for shots we could use in the trailer as well.

I like this photo because of how they've layered a few different positioned photographs. I think using the same technique of this but using a close up of our characters face would work well for the kind of effect were going for on our poster, a distorted view.

This photo doesn't really relate to our theme exactly but i think it looks really effective and real, but obviously wouldn't be right for the style of image we're going for.

I like this image because of how close up it is which is what we are doing for the photo on our poster, I also think just showing the eye shows more expression but keeps the identity of the person hidden. If we used the same setup for our poster photo as this I would probably want to have the eye look bigger and probably make it black and white and with the eye a little further down so the eyelashes aren't cut out of the photo.

This is my favourite of the photos I looked at, it gives off an obvious vibe of horror which we want and it also draws you in and makes you interested and look closely. I think the fact it's black and white with the blood drip in colour is really effective and makes it fit in with the horror genre. I think this image would be easy to achieve just using a good camera and the editing tools on photoshop. I think maybe combining this photo idea with the first one using layers of photos could also work really well.

I also really like this photo because it's quite scary, a close up version of this maybe of just one half of the face would work really well for our poster. The girls expression makes her look terrified but it also makes the person looking at it scared as well because the eyes are like popping out which scares me but I really like the black going down her cheeks.

This image was created by scanning the face directly onto the computer. I think it gives a really good effect of being trapped but I don't think we would want to use this technique or layout as there are a couple of other effects that look and would work better.

Music Research

Title Ideas

This is a wordle of the possible titles we could use for our film.

Music I Like

This is a song that I like at the minute, I think we could use music like this but if it was toned down if you know what I mean. For the beginning of the film we want to have dance music something your able to dance to, to get ready for night out. This is a dance track something similar to what we want to have, I think maybe the beginning of the song or the chorus. We looked at the music in the Prom night trailer which was non diagetic when it shows them getting ready and then the music stops as soon as the scary part of the trailer starts, whereas the tormented trailer uses diagetic music in the party scenes. This is something to think about when we decide on our music.

Music

We've been looking for the type of music we want for our trailer and I was listening to this song, Litteboots-New In Town, and thought it fits the kind of feel for the first scene of our trailer where the girls are getting ready.

To Do List...

By the end of this week we aim to...

-Finish storyboard
-Research/decide type of music we want
-Analyse filming that has been done
-Choose picture for poster background

Poster Background Idea

This is a picture which advertised the most recent Skins series, we are going to look at the skins series to give us inspiration as they experiment with different camera angles, they have a teenage cast and use typical stereotypes for some of the characters. this is similar to ours as we want to have teenagers in our teaser trailer. In skins the friendship group seems to be mixed, you wouldn't like necessarily think that they would all be friends, so this challenges some stereotypes of teenage groups. We have included this poster as we think it illustrates the characters straight away and tells you a little bit about them, we may look at this sort of style of photograph for our film poster, showing you all the main characters. I think what makes the photograph effective is because its an action shot, which makes it easy to recognise with because it relates to the program.

Shot/Editing Ideas

These two clips gave us an idea to use similar angles and editing for our trailer.

Prom Night

The Prom Night trailer starts with a group of girls in a hairdressers. A range of different angles are used for example over the shoulder, mid shots, and side views. The sequence in which these shots are shown is: side/mid, mirror view/mid, mirror.over shoulder/mid, tagline, mirror/over shoulder/mid, mirror/over shoulder/mid, side view/mid (only focused on one girl), over shoulder/mirror/mid, tagline. This opening sequence helps to introduce the characters and also gives a clue to the story as we hear the girls in conversation. Our trailer will also feature this range of angles of the main character and her friends getting ready for her party. In between two of the shots a tagline on a black background is seen which reads 'The Preparation' and after the scene in the hairdressers the next tagline which links to the next setting is 'The Anticipation'

Mean Girls

Institutions

Today I researched the different institutions who produce films of the same genre and target audience as our film.

• Alliance Films, Newmarket Films, Original Films - Prom Night
• BBC Films - Tormented
• New Line Cinema - Final Destination (and sequels), A Nightmare On Elm Street (and sequels), The Cell, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and sequels), Friday The 13th.
• Lionsgate - Hostel, Saw (and sequels), Blair Witch Project (2), Cabin Fever, My Bloody Valentine, The Descent, Serial Killing 101, Teeth.

We've decided to use Lionsgate as our production company as we have seen more of the films they make than the other institutions we researched and think they make more films for our age range than the others. We will show the Lionsgate logo at the beginning of our trailer.

Trailer Inspiration

The 'Tormented' and 'Prom Night' trailers inspired us most when coming up with our storyline, we liked these movie trailers, as they seem pretty normal at the start of the trailers but then things start to happen which makes you instantly recognise the genre of the film. They use quick shots from lots of different angles with quick editing, the trailer picks up in pace, with suspense building music to captivate the audience, keep them watching and leave them wanting more.

Prom Night

Prom Night uses

• a teenage cast,
• the events happen at a party/prom,
• they show the characters getting ready,
• use short clips and quick editing for the horror scenes,
• suspense building/changing music,
• has one protagonist and one antagonist,
• the antagonist is a known villain,
• tag lines,
• white flashes in between shots.

All of these techniques etc we have also decided to use in our trailer.
Tormented

Tormented uses

• teenage main characters,
• storyline is based on revenge,
• uses party scenes,
• quick editing,
• suspenseful music,
• character roles,

All of which we have taken inspiration from and will be using in our trailer.

Pitch

A2 Pitch

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Here is some of the feedback we got after we presented our pitch to the class.

• need to research/think about the kind of music/soundtrack we want
• dialogue?
• continuity of costumes/makeup because it's all set in one day/time space
• distinguishing who the killer is - show obsession

We now also need to think about

• institution
• film name
• poster background/photo ideas
• storyboard
• list of shots/camera angles
• music
• dialogue