Wordle

Here is a wordle presentation showing some of the things people said about my teaser poster.

First draft of magazine cover

Research

For my magazine front cover I looked at 2 of the most popular movie magazines in the world, total film, and empire magazine. I did this so that I could establish some of the conventions they use and see whether i could pick up some ideas.

I liked the look of this poster because the layout design was both simple and effective. The magazine uses a close up image of the character, which is what I'm intending to use for my cover. Some of the conventions that I can see is that the color scheme is consistent. The cover uses predominantly grey and white. However the font sizes and types do not remain consistent, but crucially they are all of a similar size so that the differences in font size are not too distracting.

Here's another example of how a close up image of a character can be effective because it makes the poster stand out more. I think this would be a good idea to replicate this in my poster because I intend to use the villain of my trailer and so I want the magazine cover to be as imposing as possible. I also like the use of a red and white colors which I think will work well with my poster because the trailer contains blood in it, and so it will foreshadow to the target audience who are buying the magazine that the movie is going to be part of the horror genre.




I particularly  liked the layout of this because of the bottom half of the poster. Where it is offering a book within the magazine. This gave me the idea to possibly to something similar but instead of offering a book I would use it to advertise my film's teaser poster.

First draft of my teaser poster

Here is the first draft of my teaser poster. Some of the things I'm happy with is that I applied a granite effects on the whole of the poster that gave it a cool blurry effect that I think works very well. This is because its distorts the image of the creeper and as a consequence this conforms the conventions of teaser posters because in some horror movies they try not to reveal to much content.

I tried to make the poster as simple as possible so therefore apart from the mask there isn't anything else that's too distracting. I created a tagline that I also think is effective " This Halloween no one is safe" which helps to spread awareness of when the film is released and whilst also creating a scary atmosphere. I used different font sizes because I looked at previous posters such as my blog post with the teaser poster from the movie " scream" and they also used different size texts.

Improvements:

• I made some spelling mistakes that need to be corrected
• And I have used the words Halloween twice in the poster both at the top and at the bottom. So maybe a change of words to something like " coming to thereates this October" would be more appropriate.

making my teaser poster

I used photoshop elements to make my teaser poster. In this blog I will be running thorugh some of the stages I had to do.

First I added a black background and then I dragged the image I took of the creeper and placed on the black background near the top of the page.

The next step I did was go to filters and to look at the various effects that were on offer. I decided to us the graphite effect. The ffect dstorts the image and makes it look like a drawing.

After clicking on this effect the hardest part was choosing which stroke balance to use and what level to put the lightsdark balance.

After putting the graphite effect on the setting that I liked it came out like this. Afterwards I simply had to add text to the rest of it.

photoshoot

Here is all the images that we took form our photo-shoot to be used for both our teaser poster and our magazine front cover. We took pictures from numerous angles and focused on close ups of the mask to the teaser trailer. And we also took some mid shots that we thought would work well for the magazine. Here are 4 of the best pictures that we took.

Ancillary task reaserch

For research for my ancillary task I decided to look at exisiting horror trailer posters to get some ideas and also to look at some of the conventions that these films use to appeal to there target audience.

Horror posters tend to have a very simplistic look. In this example its just an image of a blond woman in distress covering her mouth. The title of the movie is near the bottom  and also contains the names of the actors in the movie. Its simple and effective but most importantly it helps to catch the eye of its audience.

The next image of from the movie "Hannibal"  which is another example where  they use the close up of the villian, whilst adding clever little effects like making Hannibals eyes red. This is a very clever effect because they have matched the red eye with the red wirting of the title of the movie, which a good way of using colours.

Dialogue

Before writing my script I decided not to have any dialogue in the trailer. I did this because I thought that it would make it more interesting and unique. Another reason was because in the first half of the trailer where the first victim is being killed you hear her scream and I will accompany this with a loud screeching music, and hopefully the result of this will be that it scares the viewer of the trailer more. Additionally it will help to not have too much of the story revealed which is one the main purposes of horror trailers.

One of the best examples of this is the new trailer for "Prometheus". Which contains almost not dialogue, apart from screaming and shouting. And this allows the music to build and build and thus the intensity of the trailer is much higher.

Editing- Outlining the story

Considering the fact that my story takes place over a period of time, especially in the second half of the trailer it was important that in my second draft I made it clear  that the trailer takes place over a couple of weeks and that the main reason why the second victim is not wearing the same clothing as the trailer progresses. This is because when I was editing it I showed a rough cut to  one of my friends and she did't understand why the character was  not wearing different cltohing in different scenes, when this was my intention to highlight that the creeper had been stalker her continually.

I choose the character to wear different clothing whenever the trailer changed setting and her are the reasons why:

 I wanted the character hear to wear black so that it when you first see her her the viewer wouldn't take much notice of her, and that when the camera pans outwards and reveals the villain it has much more impact.






I wanted the character to wear red here because red in horror movies usually signifies danger. Also it helps to foreshadow what is going to happen to her because the color red also represents blood.

Here when she's running towards the creepers trap I wanted her to wear white clothing so that it matched with the clothing that the first victim was wearing.

Update: What improvements did I make to my second draft?

• Some of the improvements I made were that I have added more superimposes. For example "There will be Nowhere to run" etc. It helped build up tension and it worked well with the music.
• I added most of my footage. So unlike the first trailer which really comprised of one scene, by adding the rest of my work it helps to show that there is actually a story behind it.
• I tried to shorten the timing of the establishing shots. This was because before it was too long and was slowing down the pace of the trailer too much.
• The stutter effect that I used in the first draft I increased the pace of it. This helped to make it have more of an impact.

The creeper trailer (second draft)

Editing update:Stutter effect

I used YouTube tutorials as a way of finding cool visual techniques and effects that would make the trailer more conventional to the horror genre. One of the best techniques that I found was the flicker effect. Here is the video:

The reason I chose this effect to use whilst editing my trailer is it would firstly show a profound image, which in my trailer is the image of the creepers first victim, and then it will flicker extremely quickly therefore preventing the viewer from be able to let the image sink in. Why was this effective? It was effective because it would encourage my target audience to watch the trailer more than once. And secondly because it foreshadows what left to come in the trailer. As as the trailer progresses I would finally reveal the full scene.

Here is an example of one of the first images I applied the flicker effect on.

How did I achieve this?

Well it involved me getting a scene and then using the cut tool to split the scenes into individual parts several times. Once I had done this I would then take the cut scenes and space them one after another along the time line, but making sure they are still extremely  close together. What this meant was that by creating a space it would mean the screen would go black, and thus creating the flickering effect.

This links well with the technique used in the saw franchise and in particular there trailers. Where they the flicker effect to disorientate the viewer, because its makes it incredible difficult to grasp the imagery, and as a result it makes it that much scarier.