Final Trailer

As we have now finished editing and adding the sound to our trailer we now have the final product finished, I will now need to upload the trailer to my vimeo account and upload it onto my blog. Below is the finished trailer;





This is what our final trailer looks like after cutting clips, adding new clips, adding transitions and sound. Overall I am pleased with the final trailer and the progress that we have made from our first draft. 
In the very first clip we see Scarlet walking into the mental home - her walk if unusual and her posture is crooked making her seem odd to the viewers, the voice over is heard over this scene as Scarlet explains what is happening - the first line needed to be descriptive so that viewers could understand what is going on. Purposely the voice is quiet and soft to make Scarlet seem innocent and childlike to the viewers, next we hear the sound of a soft piano which was created on garage band in the media suite, this soundtrack is continuous through most of the trailer, it has a very soft dramatic sound which we all liked and thought it related to the sad vibe that the trailer has due to the sadness of Scarlets innocent persona. 

We then see Scarlet turn around to have her photo taken and then a 'camera flash' and the production company is introduced - for the production company title we wanted to make it look more interesting and professional that just using a plain background with text so we used the effects on Premier Pro to create a strip of negatives as the background we also added a small red box with a yellow and black rectangle in as our logo. Then the piano continues as we hear a voice over of the 'doctor' who is observing Scarlet, I was not entirely sure about this voice over as it sounded quite comical, but my team members did like the voice and it does sound quite effective still. Next we see a sequence of scenes where Scarlet is sitting in her cell alone and rocking herself - we chose for her to do this as it would make her seem vulnerable and childlike, this clip is interfered by a flashback from Scarlets childhood, these flashbacks were made in black and white so that viewers could differentiate from past and present, the use of black and white gave the clip and older authentic look and this was my favourite part of the trailer as I thought it was extremely effective, over the flashbacks we hear the nursery rhyme 'ring a ring a roses' in the background, the song reflects the childhood memories that appear on screen and they fit in with the flashbacks well, the song stops when the flashback of Scarlets sister being murdered begins to as it would contrast with the sinister scene that is being shown to the viewers too much. At the end of the clip the song stops abruptly and we see Scarlet screaming as she jolts awake, the piano song continues softly in the background after this when we see the empty chair clip which symbolises Scarlet's escape also over this clip is is the 'doctor' voice over which says 'now she has escaped. no one is safe' the voice then continues on until we see Scarlet running into her old house, this scene is more about Scarlets past life and emotions towards her family who have seemingly vanished, it does make the viewer think about the situation, at the beginning of the trailer Scarlet says 'My whole life was taken from me...' the word taken could hint that her whole family were killed therefore they were 'taken' out of her life. But this is not the case as Scarlet and the viewer themselves do not know that Scarlet had murdered her sister devastating her family. We do not reveal this in the trailer but Scarlet killed her sister because her and her family had lied to her by telling Scarlet she was adopted and is not really a member of the family, to Scarlet she feels betrayed and that she does not belong which is why she murdered her sister, which would reveal the horrible effect that lies can have on peoples lives.

The scene that shows Scarlet in her home is very long, and as the true meaning of the scene is not revealed to the viewer within the clip, this may make them lose attention.
The following clip, which is in the same location Scarlet looks into a mirror that she remembers from her childhood, she gazes into the mirror and sees her sisters reflection behind her Scarlet then turns around , the way Scarlet's sister looks at her can give hints to the viewer - if Scarlets sister was murdered then why would she be glaring angrily at Scarlet? It suggests to the viewers that Scarlet may have had some responsibility for her sisters death, this is when the trailer turns and starts to portray Scarlet in a different light.


Snapshot taken during 'The Bridge Scene'



Next we see Scarlet looking less innocent and more aggressive, we see her ripping down posters from the wall and then throwing them aggressively, this makes the viewer curious as to what is making her so angry, this is soon revealed to viewers when the camera zooms in on the poster which shows a photo of Scarlet and her description, the text also reads 'if you see this girl do not approach her. Contact the authorities immediately.' This reveals to the viewers that Scarlet was never as innocent as she had appeared, this makes the viewers question who Scarlet really is. After the zoom on the poster we see the transition (gradient wipe) which was added using Adobe Premiere Pro the use of this transition shows the change of character, as now the rest of the trailer focuses on Scarlets evil persona - she is introduced to the viewer properly as she walks across the bridge and towards the camera the in the scene we hear a large gust of wind as Scarlet walk towards the camera carrying the 'murder weapon' which viewers had already saw in the 'innocent' Scarlets nightmare. The way that the evil Scarlet storms toward the camera will increase tension for the viewers and will leave them curious as they cannot see the girl's face as it is covered with her hair, leaving the true identity of the murderer a mystery.

The next scene is pivotal to the audience as the murders face is revealed - the viewers are brought back to the murder scene but this time they see what really happened - we see the estranged woman walking towards the young girl on the swing, slowly with the crowbar in her hand, she then moves closer, lifts her hair from her face and we see that the murderer was in fact Scarlet all along. The title is then introduced with the sound of a voice humming ' ring a ring a roses' in the background this leaves an eerie impact to the trailer and the title still sticks to our continuous colour scheme of red, white and black. The viewer would think that the trailer is over but to surprise or shock them we added the final scene after the title. In this scene we see a slow pan of an empty field and then we hear the tag line 'Don't look into the mist...She will come for you...'. For the tag line we had different voices say each word of the first half, I feel that this worked quite well and acted as a 'warning' to viewers, we then hear the slow eerie whisper which ways 'she will come for you..' we then see Scarlet pop up from nowhere to the front of the camera and lets out a loud and sinister scream - this will make the viewers jump as it is unexpected.

After this we see the release date of the film and then the continuous humming of the nursery rhyme, by doing this we made the sound continuous throughout the trailer to symbolise innocence and the eerie haunting sound of the hum symbolises Scarlets evil nature.

Overall I am pleased with the final trailer as I think it is effective and would interest our target audience as it is scary and thought provoking. I think our trailer came together well in the end and it all flows quite nicely.

I think that the trailer is much better than our first attempt as we were able to use a new range of software in the media suite and we used a much wider range of costumes make up and locations which gave our final trailer a more authentic look.

 (First Draft of trailer 'Who Am I?')

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge form and conventions of real media products?

These conventions played a strong part in our choice of actress we needed someone female, young looking with striking eyes and long hair. This had a great influence on our choice as we picked an actress who fit this description exactly, however our choice of actress did challenge horror film conventions as typically the villain or ghost will have dark black hair to contrast with her pale skin, however the actress we chose was blond as we wanted to put an emphasis on her innocence so the viewer would be shocked that the childlike innocent looking girl who is seen at the start of our trailer is actually the villain.

For this piece of coursework we were assigned to create a promotional package which would consist of a film magazine cover, a film poster and a movie trailer. To put this together I had to do a lot of research into existing products and how they promoted their product (the film). Before my research was conducted, I had to discuss with my group what the chosen genre of our film trailer was going to be. The genre horror has always been of a particular interest to me as I find that they are the most gripping genre of film that really make the viewers think. As a group we all agreed that the genre of horror would allow us to create a trailer that would be dramatic and captivating. The genre itself can intrigue a viewer and gives them the feeling of fear due to the disturbing reality of the film, it will put a viewer on edge making them fear that the event in this film could actually happen to anyone, I feel that by choosing the horror genre we could create a product that would captivate, disturb and make the viewers jump with fear.

After we had decided on the chosen genre we would have to carry out research and look at existing media products that focused in this genre. The first thing that I began to look at were horror film trailers, I looked at many trailers and was instantly drawn to those that used dramatic conventions to give the films a scary impact, among those trailers were 'The Ring' and 'The Grudge'. I particularly liked how these trailers used costumes to make the ghosts in their films look strikingly realistic, in both trailers I noticed that they had started off quite slow and then gradually got faster increasing tension and putting viewers on edge. From looking at this I knew that I wanted the trailer that me and my group would produce to have the same effect on the viewers. From analysing these trailers I also noticed that original horror film conventions were repeatedly used to create an effective trailer such as the movie's villain, would usually be a ghost or demon, and would commonly be female, in both 'The grudge', 'The Ring' and 'The Amityville Horror' the ghosts in the films would be young women, sometimes children with pale skin, piercing eyes and long, dark hair and their costumes would be white dresses which suggested innocence, purity which would contrast with the personalities of the cruel brutal characters.                         

The Ring Trailer - inspired many conventions for our trailer particularly with the image of our main character



'The Ring''s Samara



Our Actress

 

On the left is a picture of our actress, Shona and on the right is the villain from 'The Ring' Samara, from watching this film and the trailer we agreed that her look was both scary and striking, so we based our actress Shona's look on Samara's look.

For the villains second persona we made her look drastic and rather ostentation's, this challenged existing horror films as the villain would look like an everyday person. However we wanted both persona's to look completely different so what inspired me for her make up was looking at the poster for psychological thriller 'Black Swan' although this film isn't from our chosen genre, I found the make up sticking and surreal and I thought that this would relate to the eccentric and crazed personality of the second character, so I experimented with different make up style on myself and took photos to show my group, we agreed on the most bold, striking and haunting make up look, giving us a characters dramatic look.

 This image on the left is actress Shona in her make-up, and on the right is what inspired me to create her make up look, from seeing this poster I also wanted to create a bold, unusual but dramatic effect when thinking of Scarlet's make-up.



Actress Shona in full costume
and make up to play Scarlet's
innocent side.



The costumes that our main characters would wear was also a crucial convention, the appearance of a character can reveal a lot about them and their personalities we wanted the costume to be symbolic and reveal subtle hints about the characters true nature. We put an extreme amount of thought into the characters looks, we wanted to present one side of Scarlet (the main character) as an innocent, sweet young girl so that the viewer would not suspect that she is in fact evil, so to do this we created colour symbolism with the costumes – we chose a plain white dress for Scarlet's seemingly innocent side – this itself would symbolise  the simplistic, innocent nature of Scarlet's good side, which would ultimately contrast with how Scarlet's 'evil' side would be presented we chose the colour black for her costume – symbolising darkness, mystery and despair, we opted for a lace dress which was worn underneath a netted skirt – the lace would show her eccentric side and the black lace would contrast greatly with the actresses pale skin, making her appear more striking a ghost like. The netted skirt gave the costume a witch like vibe and created an old fashioned, slightly deranged look as it was very over the top, making her character seem quite grand the black lace suggested sophistication and make the persona seem older, which is exactly what we wanted.

These images are of both characters in full costume and make up as you can see contrasting looks were created for both character to make them look extremely different.

Editing
In our final trailer we looked closely and existing media products to decide how our trailer would be presented we decided that our trailer would be shown in chronological order to give the readers a feel for the story, we had decided that we should show the trailer in order but have interferences that would act as the characters flashbacks of her childhood. As our chosen genre was psychological horror and our storyline itself was quite confusing, we dis not want to confuse the viewers too much, but show them enough to make them curious and intrigued – as that is how a successful trailer should leave its viewers feeling. Having the trailer in chronological order gives the viewer a feel for the story but at the same time does not give to much away, the idea to show the trailer in chronological order came from watching the trailer of existing media product 'Dread' which was also a psychological horror – I found the trailer captivating and scary and it told the story of the actual film but still provided the shock factor that a viewer wouldn't expect in the whole film – which is exactly the effect I wanted our trailer to create. Also in 'Dread' the trailer was shown in chronological order, but it would have regular interferences and flashes either to the past or future – this is similar to what we have done in our own trailer as we also have interferences which are presented as flashbacks throughout the trailer. Another feature we added while editing the trailer on Adobe Premiere Pro was transitions such as fade to white which was a very strong effect where the clip would flash to white creating a ghostly effect. We also added the transition 'gradient wipe' which create a slow creeping vanishing effect which would start for the corner and travel to the end of the screen - the image would not vanish but be covered in a black gradient which created a foggy, misty effect.  

Props

Throughout the trailer many props were used to create a realistic effect throughout the scenes, we had to think carefully about what we could use as the murder weapon. We would need to use a weapon that would be realistic and easily accessible for the murderer Scarlet, as she is a young woman and the storyline is based on her living in a happy family home we needed something that could be found in a family home – we chose to use a crowbar as this would typically be found in a garage which would be more believable then an axe or any other weapon. Our choice of murder weapon did challenge typical film conventions as usually the choice of murder weapon is much more dramatic for example, commonly used murder weapons are an axe or a chainsaw, however with our target audience in mind and the rating of our film (15+) we did not want to make the film too violent and also it would have been very difficult to create realistic gory scenes. Other props that we had to create for filming were wanted posters – which we made ourselves on Photo Shop, we felt that they needed to look authentic and convincing to the viewer so we had decided to stain the sheets of paper with teabags to make the posters look old and more authentic.

Pace

This is the trailer for 'The Grugde' like ours tells a story to the viewer, however our trailer goes in chronological order, but this one does not however it starts off by telling a story and explaining to the viewer what is going on, which I feel gives the trailer for 'The Grudge' a frightening reality.
From watching trailers like 'The Grudge', 'The Ring' and 'The Strangers' it was clear to see that the existing trailers that had the most extreme impact on the viewers all started off quite slow paced and were informing the viewer of the situation, then, gradually the trailer began to get more and more fast paced – with images flashing before the viewers eyes causing them to pay close attention to what was being shown – I also found from my analysis that the more fast paced the trailer became the more tension it would create for the viewer. The pace of the trailer has an extreme importance with the effect that it will create on the viewers – if the trailer run far too slow then this will lead to the viewers losing interest – which is something that we definitely did not want, so in order to keep the viewers on edge and constantly interested we had made the option to start off the trailer in a slow pace, so that the viewers can take in what is going on, and then, gradually it will get more and more fast paced to increase tension.
Text
When creating the trailer existing media products were considered when making the decision to use text. As we were putting the trailer together we agreed that the trailer must be informative as well as visually appealing so we have a lot of text within the trailer, from my research I have looked at the effects that text can create and what impression they give a viewer, one trailer that I had found used text effectively was 'The Amityville Horror' from analysing this I have found that the use of text can also increase a viewers interest in the product. From this information we had decided to use text in our trailer, at the end we plan to show the name of the film 'Who Am I' in bold and we will also feature the name of the actress, release date and the production company to inform the viewer. This is because the film trailers that I had analysed this was commonly done to be descriptive, however the trailer for 'Amityville Horror' was based on a true story so the text shown in the trailer were 'facts' from the original story, but our plot is not fact based so we will not need to much text.

Also we used text in our trailer when we introduce the production company as this is an important part of the trailer as the viewers need to know who produced the film. Our production company is called 'Scarlet Screen Productions' I had came up with this name from thinking words associated with film - silver screen is a name commonly associated with films so I changed the word 'silver' to 'scarlet' as the colour Scarlet relates to the horror genre as it insinuates blood and gore.

Sound

The sound was an incredibly important factor in creating a successful trailer, from analysing existing horror film trailers I knew that sound was a crucial part. I has observed that in horror film trailers the natural sounds were enhanced to make them sound eerie and disturbing, for example the sound of of a swing would be enhanced to sound sharper and at a much higher pitch to suggest pain or screeching. So for the sound in the trailer I had come up with a lot of ideas – the main sound would be natural, in the flashbacks we would hear the girls giggling and the sound of the swings in the park, however a voice over will be used over this natural sound – the voice will be explaining the story as this would be much more gripping and effective than just using text. Also at the end of the trailer we used the tag-line on the movie poster which was created by myself and a team member, I had came up with the idea of having different voices saying each word of the tag-line and then the final words of the tag-line are said with a whisper, I had came up with this as featuring different voices the viewer would become confused and the use of different voiced questions the identity of the main character also linking perfectly with the film title, the tag-line is heard at the end of our trailer to gibe the viewers something to think about, which I found existed in most existing media products, in the trailer 'Dread' the final line was haunting and sent a chill down the viewers spine; the final line really challenged the viewers mind a stuck in their thoughts, this effect had such an impact that I felt it was necessary to include a haunting final line in our own trailer, to get the same reaction from viewers . There is also a soundtrack in the trailer, this idea used existing media products as it was inspired by the trailer I had analysed 'A nightmare on Elm Street' in which the soundtrack consisted of a soft nursery rhyme being sang  by little girls, however the words had been changed to deliver a sinister message to its unsuspecting viewers, I found this extremely effective so in the trailer we had produced we have used children singing a nursery rhyme slowly to make the scene have more of an eerie, haunting impact.

This is the official trailer for 'Dread' a trailer that I had researched as part of my research, in this trailer I found the sound extremely effective and intriguing. This trailer was a psychological horror, the same as our chosen genre, I thought that this trailer would help give us a guideline for what our trailer should be like. The trailer goes in chronological order of the actual film - this was effective as it told a story to the viewers however there would be regular interferences of the main characters past, and the 'future' which is what would happen later on in the film - this would intrigue the viewers into wanting to see the film. This trailer inspired our own trailer as we also decided to show the trailer in chronological order with interferences which we would show as 'flashbacks' similar to Dread as the interferences in the Dread trailer are mostly the main characters flashbacks.
The sound and dialogue used in 'Dread' had inspired me with the ideas for sound

Magazine
 

Final magazine front cover



For our magazine we tried to use every visual aspect of the front cover produced to link to the film and to the genre of horror, we chose a variety of fonts which we could manipulate using Adobe Photo shop, we created our magazine by selecting the best parts of each members individual final product, we chose my image as we felt that it had the most striking impact, throughout my research I had looked at many different magazine front covers – I has found that not many magazines focused on the genre horror and only very popular high budget film's were advertised on the cover, however I found Empire's cover promoting 'The Dark Knight' extremely eye catching and effective, they had used a close up shot of the joker – his eyes were staring straight up at the viewer and it was quite frighting but incredibly effective. This reflected the choice to use a close up this created a haunting realistic vibe – we wanted viewers to feel like the character on the cover was glaring right at them, it is important that the character looks striking and dramatic so that the reader would be drawn to purchase the magazine, we wanted every aspect of our promotional package to bethought provoking so the readers would not be able to get the image/trailer/text out of their heads – this would make them curious to come and see the film. The text that we had used on the cover was all related to the genre of horror, we did not want to make the magazine genre specific as we wanted to attract a wider audience, so we made a special edition issue we created a 'horror film special' this was my idea as we had created separate magazine and used my text as well as we felt that it was more knowledgeable about the horror genre, I had also used a rhetorical question when writing about the film as I had seen this in my research on many covers, but the dark knight issue in particular – the question really makes the reader think and wonder what the film is about, I like how the use of a rhetorical question can play on a readers mind which increases their curiosity making them even more intrigued to purchase the product being advertised. We used a colour scheme for the magazine of red, purple, black and white – these colours relate to our genre as they are all symbolic the black represents darkness, unknown and mystery – it also matches the cover stars black lace costume this reflects the continuous link of colours, similarly the white symbolises Scarlet's innocent character, it also gave the text a ghost -like, misty look which adds to the horror theme. The red links into the genre as it insinuates blood and gore – the purple was used as it reflects the cover stars make up and it is another dark and mysterious colour. 

Empire's 'The Dark Knight' cover.

 
 This is Empire's cover promoting 'The Dark Knight' this magazine over was extremely haunting and effective due to the use of a close up. This influenced my own decision to use a close up for my main image, I felt that this close up was strong, scary and dramatic nd I like the realistic effect that was created by having the joker glare up at the camera, as it makes a viewer feel that the character is looking straight at them - an effect I tried to create when choosing and editing my own image.







Poster 

 Our poster was a crucial part of our promotional package as in the audience research that we had conducted we had found that the poster had rated the highest in the component that attracted the viewer the most to go and see a film. The poster could be seen before the trailer and it would have to reflect the story well enough to convince a viewer to go and see the film. For the poster we used my image as the group agreed that the image I had created promoted the film the best – my image was split, showing the two different personalities of the main character Scarlet – her evil and more innocent side were combined in my image to suggest the link between them to the viewer. I wanted the image to make the viewer intrigued and they would be encouraged to watch the film, so by showing both persona's of the main character this could be done. I created effects on both sides – the side with Scarlet's evil side was manipulated by changing the colour to negative and adding textural effects to make it look like the was an image from an old newspaper, I had made the opposite side much brighter by raising the exposure levels to 75%, there was a strong amount of lighting on her face because of this which could suggest that she is under a spotlight or being interrogated. The image itself challenged conventions of existing media products as using a half and half image is not usually done, for me the poster image was a crucial part in creating an effective poster and I had analysed existing posters in great depth, but in none of the had I seen a half and half image, so I thought that this would be something unique, new and effective. However we did use existing media products as an influence for other components of the poster such as the billing block – we chose to have it at the bottom of the page so that it would still be a main focus but it would not distract the eye from the image, we noticed that the billing block was put at the bottom for most posters to we decided to also do this.                                                            

We also used a title that we thought would best reflect our title – we voted on the best masthead which was my team member Amy's, she had made a bold striking title that appeared eerie and ghost like – this would reflect the scary sinister turn that our film has and the foggy effects suggest the unknown putting the viewer on edge. The title really stood out against the image as it was bold white and had a heavenly vibe to it; this could suggest death as the bright light could be symbolic of heaven.    

 We had chosen to also use Amy's idea to feature the actors names above the title this has used existing media products as in many posters such as 'The Dark Knight' feature the actors names to highlight their importance, also if a viewer is a fan of the particular actor/actress they may be encouraged to see the film, we felt we needed to do whatever we could to make the film appeal to a wide target audience.

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

Our poster and magazine
had to link together through
the use of colour scheme
to show that both were
promoting the same film

 Our promotional package has effectively been linked together so that the poster, trailer and magazine front cover all link together, by doing this we created our own 'house-style' as we kept the same style flowing through our film trailer , magazine and poster. We wanted our product to have its own unique, individual style so we opted to use similar colours for text in every aspect of our promotional package we used black, white and red for the text in our magazine poster and the text on the trailer – this gave use a very unique house-style as the black and the white are quite plain and gloomy on their own but when used together they compliment each other well as the contrast and create a bold dramatic effect, the red was used to give the text its sinister vibe, also we did not want to make the colour scheme to boring so the use of red gave it a much more lively impact. We needed to be careful when selecting colours as we wanted it to reflect our genre, this meant that we did not use colours like pink, yellow or green as they were to bright and did not really relate to the scary dramatic horror genre, so for us we did not consider using bright colours as they would confuse a viewer as they would not link to the images used.

In our trailer it we only had one main character so we had to use the same actress throughout, this was so the viewers could familiarise themselves with the character – if we used different actresses for the trailer the viewers would become confused and they would not grasp the meaning of the story. However as we were using the same actress to play two seemingly different characters the costume was an important factor – we wanted our two characters to have two different trademark looks, but the two characters had to have the same costumes throughout as they had to link to their character. So for Scarlet's innocent persona we dressed her in white to show the regimental uniform in the mental home, which would suggest she is trapped, the white also reflected her innocence, the mental home persona also had blunt-straight hair so every time we filmed a scene with this person we had to continuously recreate her signature look. Again the second persona also had a continuous signature look – the evil persona wore a black lace dress and netted skirt – she had big, messy tangled hair and over the top unusual make up to make her seem deranged and slightly unhinged, it was difficult for me to try and keep the make up the same every time we filmed, however I had got used to drawing the eye make up so I was able to stick to her signature make up look. We had to keep the looks for both characters the same throughout the trailer, in order for readers to be able to differentiate between the two different persona's.

 What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Before we made our promotional package we made sure that we had asked our target audience a variety of question so that our finished product could meet their needs, we did this through the use of questionnaires, our results proved to be very useful as we found that the main aspect of a promotional package that viewers say most persuades them to go and see a film was in fact the poster, this is why I worked very hard on my poster image as I wanted it to attract the viewers and also be thought provoking and scary so that it could give the viewer subtle hints about the nature of the film.

Our results helped us meet the needs of our target audience of 15+ as we found out alot about their likes and dislikes and why they feel makes a trailer effective, in our results we found that they thought was effective in a film trailer - our target audience said that showing some clips in black and white had positive visual impact so we decided to change some of our clips to black and white which suited the flashbacks in our trailer extremely well.
From the audience feedback I have learnt alot about our target audiences needs, as our trailer was aimed at those aged 15 and over we showed the trailer to classmates and listened to their feedback, the response from our target audience was good and they thought that the trailer was effective and convincing and they liked the flashbacks in black and white, they also thought that the trailer reflected the genre of psychological horror very well, especially through the use of costume, location and sound. We found that our target audience liked the poster and magazine cover, and said that all three products linked well together, they particularly liked the poster and thought that the imaged used was interesting and very different to other posters
If we were to do the trailer again we I think that we would have made it more fast paced and possibly we would have added more text to be descriptive - are audience did like the trailer but felt that it would have been more scary if the story was true, so if like in ' The Amityville Horror' we had written some 'facts' the viewers would have been more scared and it would have increased tension and fear, now that I have also watched the trailer a numerous amount of times I do agree that fact based horror films give a frightening sense of reality, however I am pleased with the final trailer but this constructive criticism from our audience will help us to improve in the future.
Also when using the software again I think that we would have added more complex effects, I think that the title, date and production company looks quite basic compared to the rest of the trailer I think that it did look very simple but in future we would make it look more professional by adding a range of effects.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

  Throughout the process of creating the promotional package I have been challenged with using new software, in my AS coursework I feel that I did not have the same ability to criticise my own work and understand the importance of detail, so I feel that my technology skills have improved greatly since then.

In my A2 coursework I have developed by technological skills by using my blog daily to record work and progress, I tried to update my blog whenever possible to record and reflect on my findings and gradual developments. I found the blog was a useful way of recording information so I wrote my analysis of posters, trailers and film magazines on my blog. The use of Web 2.0 has allowed me to use new media to look for trailers on You Tube and upload them to my blog in order to present my findings.  

                                             

I also used Adobe Photo shop to create the magazine and poster for the promotional package, I felt that I have developer my skills using the software since last year and I chose to use Photo shop because it allowed me to use a range of different effects to make the poster more unique and effective. We needed these effects on our poster to relate to the genre of horror, this is because on most horror film poster effects are used to make the poster look much more sinister and intriguing, so I felt that it was necessary to make our poster link to the horror theme however possible so that viewers could look at the poster and be aware of the genre. The tools that I used to manipulate the image on Photo shop were the dodge tool, to help me make the actress's skin a ghostly white, to make her look unusual and inhuman. I used the contrast adjustments to make one half of the image bright creating a gloomy, glowing effect. I used a film grain effect on the other half of the image to give it a dark, old newspaper style making it look dark and mysterious – along with this I changed the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation of the image to change the image from colour to black and white making it look scarier.
I have also used new media when using the Apple Mac's in the media suite, by using these computers I have had access to using a variety of new software such as Movie Maker, Final Cut and Adobe Premiere Pro.



Movie Maker has allowed me to learn a variety of new skills when using technology, when creating the trailer we first transferred our clips to movie maker and we were able to put them in order and cut them shorter as most of them were far too long. Using this software we were also able to change some clip in the trailer to black and white by selecting the clip and changing the contrast, hue/ saturation and exposure. I liked using movie maker as it was an effective way to give the trailer some professional touches and it was an excellent way for us to get our trailer organised and without the software our trailer would not look as effective and it would have taken us much longer to get our trailer organised.

We were also able to use Final Cut for a short time, we first exported the second draft of the trailer from movie maker to Final Cut, so that we could begin editing - we cut the clips using the 'in' and 'out' icons near the screen showing the clips and we were then able to crop our clips further, we were able to look at a variety of effects such as wipe and dissolve, however we decided to then use Adobe Premier Pro, which was another new piece of software that we were able to experiment with, when creating our final trailer we then used Premier pro to add and manipulate sounds and even effects such as fade to white and gradient dissolve. Through using Adobe Premiere Pro we were able to experiment with the software and create our final trailer, the majority of the editing was done on premier pro, when importing the trailer onto Premier Pro we watched it back and knew that it was much too long so we used the 'in' and 'out' icons next to the screen to cut clips and drag them onto our work area so that we could put them in order and edit them, using premiere pro we were able to organise our trailer add on pre recorded sound and even edit the sounds by changing the speed and duration to make them sound slower, deeper or higher pitched. By using Premiere Pro we were able to add the finalise the trailer and make it look much more professional by adding the production company logo and using the effects to make it look like a strip of negatives this effect made the trailer look much more authentic and professional. Overall I liked using the software as it was new to use but allowed us to create effects that we before did not know how to do, I think that using the software has enabled me to see how to structure and produce an effective film trailer.





                                      Final Trailer





Final editing session for trailer

     On Wednesday 14th December we edited our trailer in the media suite for the final time, as in tomorrow's lesson we will burn the very final copy onto a disk. 


Example of adding
gradient wipe to the
trailer.



We had alot to do in the lesson as we had not yet added all of the sounds, transitions and we wanted to change the production company name and logo and we needed to shorten clips further. 

First we looked at the trailer and played it thought all together, taking turns to listen to it. We did this to see what the trailer was lacking, we found that the trailer was quite slow and longer and some sounds were much more dominant that others and some were quite over bearing. We also knew that to make the trailer look more interesting and effective we needed to have some more transitions, aside from the 'camera flash', so we decided to add a gradient wipe, which Amy adjusted to make it feature on the screen slower so it would look more creeping and created more tension also Amy altered the softness of the gradient wipe to make it appear much heavier (40%) this make the black gradient look much thicker. I am pleased with the look of the transition as it gives are trailer a scarier impact and makes it look much more interesting and intriguing.



Example of changing speed/duration



Next we added the rest of the sounds and listened them back, some of the sounds sounded quite strange, I think the 'ring a ring a roses' song was too high pitched and did not relate to the genre or the trailer - in the clip of the two sisters they are aged around 9-10, but the voices in the recorded sound are far too young and squeaky so me and Amy thought that it would be better to reduce the speed/duration of the song to 85, this sounded more eerie and by manipulating the sound the voices sounded older, relating more to the vibe of the trailer, the genre and the clip.

We also needed to merge the clips together as we were working on each clip separately so we had all of the clips very spaced out, we then merged them together and watched the trailer again - there was still something missing for use - we had to make some adjustments with the sound as when I had listened to it again some of it was drowned out by the natural sounds in the scene, for example in the first line was drowned out by Shona's footsteps as she was stamping quite loudly in the scene, so we had to mute the audio on the scene so that the voice over could be herd much clearer.

We also made sure that all the sounds were cut and changed to be shorter if needed as when we merged the clips we found that the sound clips had moved.
We also decided to change our production company title as we felt that it was very basic, this took a while as we could not decide what effect we wanted to use, we opted for a simple looking background for our production company and used an image of an old strip of negatives to write the name of the company on. This looked much more authentic and professional so we attached the clip showing 'Scarlet Screen Productions' with its new background. Next lesson we will just need to add a few final touches and we will then burn the trailer onto disks.

Adding final touches

On Thursday 15th December we had to add the final touches to our trailer as it was the final lesson we had to edit, we decided to make a few changes to the trailer we wanted the final scene to be after the title as this would add an element of surprise to the trailer as the viewers would expect the trailer to end once they see the title but the next clip would scare the viewers as it is when Scarlet screams into the camera. We also needed to merge all of the clips together so that there were no pauses between the clips, we also had to check over the sound as we were unsure about how the tag line sounded, as we had recorded each member of the group saying each word of the tag line we found that they all flowed nicely except for the word 'into' which was unusually high pitched and squeaky and it did not fit in with the rest of the tag line as it all sounded gloomy and spooky except for the one word. We tried to alter the sound as best we could by changing the speed and duration of the sound, this made the voices sound deeper which sounded much more sinister but the word 'into' is still much louder. We then made sure that the rest of the sound flowed nicely - we shortened some of the sound clips so that they fit in with the clip that we paired the with, watched the trailer once more and then began to export the clip onto i-dvd so that we could begin burning the three disks.

Burning the disk

On Thursday 15th December, once we completed the trailer, added the final touches like the title date and finalised the sound, we were then able to burn the trailer onto a disc. To do this we had to open i-DVD and select a theme for the opening of the trailer we chose the theme 'Revolution' which looks like the example,left. We thought this theme would be appropriate because it showed the clips in a revolving motion which we all thought looked very professional and effective. Before we burned the disk we needed to save our ancillary texts, which were our magazine and our poster. 

Final Poster which
we attatched to i-dvd

The magazine and poster saved so that we could show our promotional package all together. Overall I am very pleased with our final promotional package as we had developed our own house style so when the products were put together they all linked well together. 


Final Magazine attached
to i-dvd



Once we had attached our final magazine and poster which we have saved in a folder labeled 'ancillary texts'. We then imported our trailer onto i-dvd and began to burn the disk, as the first disk took quite a long time to burn we were only able to get the trailer burned onto one disk, so we will burn the trailer and ancillary texts onto two more disks next lesson.

Editing in the media suite and recording the tagline

On Monday 12th December we continued to edit our final trailer, again we used Adobe Premiere Pro, last lesson we had some trouble putting the sound that I had recorded on to the trailer as it was saved as an amr file, so I had sent them to Shona so she could save them on her i-tunes library, we then were able to add the sound onto the trailer, we knew that when we put the sound on our trailer we would have to cut them to fit the clip where we wanted to feature them as they ran too long. However for some we did not want to cut the voice out of them as this would mean cutting the sentence short so we selected the sound clip, pressed left click and changed the speed/duration of the audio to 130 to make it slower. This made the voice last the duration of the clip so it was long enough to have a lingering effect for the viewer.

The first sound that we decided to add was at the beginning of our trailer as we were going to add the sound in the order that it will be heard - the voice I had recorded could now be put on the trailer, we found that it lasted as long as the clip, we found that it now sounded much quieter, but we want Scarlets voice to sound muffled and almost like a whisper to make the viewers concentrate and to reflect Scarlets shy, quite personalty.
Also last lesson Shona and Amy had said that they did not like the voice clips that I had recorded for the doctor as the voice I had used did not sound clear enough to be a doctor, so we decided to use someone with a deeper voice, we used a family member of Shona's for this and we listened back to the clip the voice was much clearer however the voice does not sound very scary or much like a doctor as there is a very strong accent to the voice but it still does fit in with the clip and we decided to use it as we wanted a voice that was distinctively different from Scarlet's. Next we had to add the sound for the flashbacks this was the 'ring around the roses' song, the song is very loud compared to the rest of the soft sounds in the trailer but it does relate to Scarlet's childlike nature and her past. We also decided to add in the sound of blowing wind which I hand recorded myself by blowing into the phone speaker and adding an echo onto it, this was not planned initially but when recording the sound I had thought that it was a good way to add an eerie ghostlike impact to the trailer and we have a lot of silence in the trailer so by using this sound we could keep the interested and engaged throughout the entire trailer, we added this to the scene where Shona (Scarlet) is walking across the bridge as this scene is silent but is one of the most tense scenes as it is the first time the villain is revealed to the audience, so this scene needed some form of audio, to make the recorded wind noise sound dramatic we turned of the audio that was already on the scene (the natural sounds of cars, talking etc) . This made the wind sound louder and much more dramatic and it fitted in with the scene very well.
We next added the soft whispering that I had recorded which would be shown during the murder scene, this was done when I recorded myself whispering 'she's behind you...' repeatedly, I felt that this would create tension for the viewer as they would see Scarlet's sister seemingly unaware of what is behind her. As this recording was intentionally quiet we needed to mute the natural audio on this scene too, we did this by selecting the clip and clicking the mini speaker sign next to the clip - this turned the natural sound of people talking, shouting and footsteps away to enable the viewer to hear what is being whispered which sound much more dramatic.
We then added the sound at the end of the trailer which was the humming that I had recorded last week, we wanted to leave the reader with a chilling eerie sound so I had hummed the start of the nursery rhyme 'ring a ring a roses' which I was quite pleased with as it sounded eerie and sinister and it related to the start of the trailer where the children would sing.

Finally to create a more professional finish we added a piano song which was created      on Adobe Garage Band, the song will be used to reflect the sad, gloomy tone. We all liked the effect the piano created as it made the trailer seem much more professional edge to the trailer we used the piano song in the clips where there was complete silence before to keep our viewers interested and engaged, now all we will need to do is add some of the doctors dialogue and the tag line, we also plan to add the final touches on the trailer before burning the disk.

 After the lesson on Monday we decided to record the tag line together, previously I had come up with the idea to have a different person day each word of ' Don't look into the mist...' this would show the question for identity that our main character had throughout the trailer and the different voices used would be very thought provoking for the viewers. So as Shona's Ipod was the only available recording device we decided to record the sounds on it and put in on Adobe Premiere pro in the next lesson as we will be adding the final touches to our trailer them, we took turns to say each word, we did this a few times to ensure that it sounded effective and there was no interference, we chose our final sound and I am overall pleased with how it sounds. For the end of the tag line I thought that it would be best if Shona whispered the end line as she did play the main character and although she does not speak in the trailer it would have relevance to her character in the rest of the film.

Editing in the media suite and discussing sound

On Thursday 8th December we continued to edit our final footage, on Mondays lesson we put all of the final footage on movie maker and had to cut the clips shorter as our trailer was still too long, we had alot of difficulty choosing which parts to cut shorter as we did not want to lose to much footage. Once this was done we saved our third draft and tried opening final cut, we found that none of us were able to open up final cut and chose to use Movie Premiere Pro instead, by using this we were then able to put the final touches on our trailer, we decided that the trailer was still much too long, so we cut the clips even more, we were happy with shortening the trailer as when we watched it back we agreed that it looked much better once it was cut as it was more interesting and gave the viewers enough information about the main idea of the film. We cut the trailer on Premier Pro using the 'in' icon to select the start of the clip, and the 'out' button to mark the end of the clip this allowed us to only add the sections of the clips that we wanted to add and it helped us cut our clips shorter as we would not select the footage that we did not want anymore, Amy cut the clips as she knew what to do right away and she was very good at carefully cutting the clips, I helped her by discussing what we should cut out.
Once we had cut the trailer shorter we then looked at effects that we could use in our trailer both myself and any agreed that we should have some transitions, but after looking at the transitions such as wipe and dissolve we felt that they may effect the authenticity of the trailer. So we are yet to think of possible transitions - I liked the idea of having a fuzzy TV screen effect interfering with the footage as this would look very scary and effective, however I would need to film this first to show my group.

We then added sounds to our trailer - Shona had recorded some of her young neighbours singing ring around the roses which she wanted to do by herself, we listened to the sound that she had recorded, Amy and Shona were pleased with the sound however there were quite a few interferences like children chatting and a door slam, I feel that the it sounds very high pitched and a little to 'happy' to fit in with the gloomy mood of the trailer as I had initially thought that the children would be singing much softer and slower, however the sound does still have the childlike, innocent impact that we needed.
We then listened to the sounds that I had recorded myself, I had to record all of the voice over except for the tag line which we will do together as a group as we had already agreed on my idea to have the first part of the tag line spoken by different people to highlight Scarlets question for identity.
I had recorded 14 different voice recordings which we listened to during the lesson, in the end Amy and Shona did not like most of them as they thought that they sounded fake and unrealistic, we agreed on four that we did like which were:
- The opening line where Scarlet enters the home and informs the viewer on where she is going, for this voice Scarlet had to sound innocent and childlike.
 - Soft humming which will be featured at the end of the trailer.
- Slow whispers which will be added to the murder scene to give it a more dramatic impact.
- The noise of wind blowing, this noice was not planned as part of the script but I thought that it sounded eerie and mysterious so we would be able to slot it in a silent part of the trailer so that it would also have more of a dramatic impact.
As for the rest of the sound we will re record it and and add it to the trailer when it is done.