Our finished Magazine cover

Below is our finished Magazine cover that we created using Photoshop, On the next post you can see how we came to make our finalised image. We are very pleased with the outcome and we both agree that it matches the style of the Little White Lies Magazine layout.

Magazine Cover- Initial Ideas 1

Here is one of our initial ideas, for our magazine cover. It is in the style of Little White Lies' magazine covers. One of the covers that inspired us to create this was for "The Skin I Live In" as you can see from the image below.

The text on the back of our image will be very subtle but noticeable enough to be read. We will blend the mask into the background which will be black in colour, therefore the text that reads "Experiment X" we are thinking about either putting in a grey colour or red so it stands out. And of course we will then have the Little White Lies company Logo situated at the top of the masks head.

Survey

Below is our final media trailer, and a survey that we would like you to complete to gain feedback on what was good and wasn't so good about our trailer. Thank you.

Research on Magazine Ideas

Now we have finished our main trailer and poster we are now beginning to create a magazine cover. To help us with ideas of what type of magazine cover to replicate I have posted below different magazine covers from 5 magazine companies which are; Empire, Total film, Sight and Sound, Little White Lies and Studio. I have also briefly discussed each one suggesting why or why not this particular design or magazine layout would be good for our particular genre.


Empire 

Empires magazine layout is a possibility considering it is the worlds No.1 film magazine. This would allow our film to get as much distribution possible and allow many people to know about our trailer. Our idea at the beginning of making the trailer for our target audience was to try and make it as mainstream as possible by having it appeal to both male and female audiences. We also liked the way that some issues used main characters from the films they are advertising such as this one of 'Bane' and some covers featured part of the set as well. This would give us some choice into the type of angle we would like to present our trailer as. The overall composition of the magazine is very busy with lots of different sized text, this could be quite tricky to replicate for a horror film unless we created it as a Halloween special. We also liked how the image overlaps the title slightly showing that the magazine must be very well known, otherwise  some people may just think its called 'EMRE' or 'EMPE' this is something we would need to be careful of if we decided to replicate this style in our own way.


Total Film

Similar to that of Empire, Total Film again is very busy in terms of composition. The genre of our trailer being a supernatural thriller we think wouldn't fit with the colourful orange handwriting, as we feel it would ruin the effect of our trailer which is to make people think its creepy and scary and want to see it for that very reason. Again as I stated with the Empire magazine the images cover part of the title, something we need to think about and can only really do if replicating an Empire or Total film magazine. So far our preference would have to be Empire, it is less cluttered and busy even though Empire magazine is quite busy, and would give us the best chance of advertising our film to a mass audience.









Sight & Sound

In our opinion we found that this magazine would not be suitable for our genre of film. This is simply to do with the fact that this certain design has a much classier feel to it and tends to feature a portrait of either the main actor of the film or the director. In our film the mask is the most symbolic thing about it, if we were to use this on a magazine like 'Sight & Sound' it may look out of place. This is because this particular magazine isn't meant to scare the audience. We also get the feeling that this magazine may be aimed at an older audience as it generally tends to feature older actors, the film 'Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy' featured on the cover of the left was also a film favoured by older people which supports this idea.










Little White Lies

At first we were not to keen on the presentation of the title used for the 'Little White Lies' magazine. However as I stated before the mask in our film is very symbolic and that is the only thing we could really use to show what our film is about. We both agree that this magazine covers composition being so simple that you only need one image and no text apart from the slight subtle text of the title printed in some artistic way is quite interesting. The overall magazine covers are quite arty and almost cartoon like. The reason we choose to present the cover for 'The Skin I live in' is is because it has a similar masked image to the one used in our film, and gives off a slightly creepy feel which is what we want our magazine to give off. This is our favourite design at the moment as it is so simple yet quite startling, which is what we are looking for.





Studio

This magazine cover is completely not suitable for our genre and style of film. The classy almost vogue like style would never in think of presenting a supernatural thriller as it's front page cover. This is very much like the magazine 'Sight & Sound' in the fact that it gives off the impression it is meant for a certain genre or audience, in this case women. The types of film you may find on the cover of this magazine would be romances, dramas and old fashioned movies that have been re-made.













To conclude from our research we are currently deciding between either Empire but maybe a simplistic version like the one below or Little White Lies.  We will post our final choice and magazine designs in a later post.

Finished Poster

Below we have posted our finished poster, we are both really pleased with the outcome and feel it fits very well with the genre of supernatural thriller. It was quite challenging in some places especially for Jessica who had never used photoshop before, but the overall outcome and look of the poster we think is pleasing. At the beginning creating the poster was quite slow because we were not really sure what type of look we were going for but after drafting up ideas presented on the previous post we then selected one that we felt included all different aspects of our film such as the camera and the mask.

Steps to making our poster

Below are a few screen grabs of how we created our poster using Photoshop. We are very pleased with the outcome of our poster which you can see on our next post.


1)

2)

3)

4)   

5)

Creating our poster consisted of a lot of use of the masking tool which enabled us to get rid of some text in the camera lens as well as the background behind the mask. We positioned the mask behind the lens which we then changed the opacity of so that it would look like a natural reflection. For text of our poster we used "Misproject" found on Dafont.com which you can see below.

Costume and Props

Below are some images of the costume and props that we used within our trailer, taken from stills within our finished trailer

Production logo

As you can see from our finished trailer, we now only have 1 production logo instead of the 3 we originally planned.This is mainly due to the fact that we were short on time after having to re-film so many times. Deciding to use one production logo to us was a good idea because, that way we could then make enough time to create a good trailer as well as one good production logo, rather than 3 slightly rushed ones.

Below is our finished production logo.

Bloopers

Below is a video montage of footage where things didn't go so well whilst we were filming.

Poster influences

Now we have completed our Teaser Trailer, we need to create a poster for it.  To get some ideas for this we have been looking at other supernatural films posters.

We liked this particular poster from The Woman in Black because of its subtlety of the face behind the two children, this makes it a fairly simple, yet highly effective horror poster. This is a big influence for us as we want to create a simple poster, but not too simple that an effect isn't given off to the viewer. Another reason why we liked this poster was because it didn't have too much text on it.  It just has a slogan related to the film and text to say when it is coming out.  This is good because it means not too much of the poster is swamped by text like some posters can have the tendency of doing.

As well as The Woman in Black poster, we liked the poster for rec.  We liked the idea of the camera and seeing a reflection in it.  For our poster we thought of the idea of having the main character, Alice, holding the camera and in the camera a reflection of the scary figure.  We felt this would be a fairly simple, but an effective poster.

Finished trailer

We are very happy to say we have finished our teaser trailer.  Even though we had many problems through
out making it we managed to complete it on time and are pleased with the final result.

Here it is

Our Titles for our Trailer

Below is a video of our titles that we have created in Live Type for our trailer. We had a few difficulties when creating them especially with the last block of titles. This is because we had so much information on one clip moving them about and making sure that they were the right size in such a small amount of space was difficult. However we have finished them and we are pleased with the final outcome. We decided to add an effect to the text that would reflect our trailer which is the white noise TV effect inside the letters. The effect is quite subtle in the sense it doesn't distract you from the actual text which is what we liked about it.

Final day of the Trailer

After many issues we faced whilst filming and editing our trailer we are relieved to say is finished. We are pleased with the final outcome considering it looked very unpromising at the beginning. We will upload the finished trailer next week.

Extra bits of filming for our trailer

Last Night, we filmed some last minute parts of our trailer as we found when editing our trailer there were not enough fast cuts. The last minute clips we filmed were that of a mirrror sequence in which words appear on a mirror after the lights go off, a clip where I am covered in blood (fake of course), the masked figure appearing behind a glass door and the word DIE appearing as individual characters on a chalk board.

We are now in the final stages of editing, which is taking quite some time but we are very hopeful and sure that we will finish for the deadline this week.

Day One of Filming our 'NEW' trailer

Today we started filming the main parts of our trailer, which went really well. Since our problem was getting the lighting right we decided to film it with all the lights on and during daytime. We have also had an idea that will enable us to use parts of the footage from the other two times we have filmed (the footage we are able to rescue). The idea is because our film is like a fiction/real life psychology experiment, we are going to include the other footage to give the idea that many experiments like this have already happened. However we will need to be careful that all the different footage doesn't look like 4 separate movies or our trailer could turn out very bad. We we will have to make sure that the order the clips are shown in reflect each other and create the suspense and tension that will make our film appeal to our target audience.

Titles for our trailer (influences)

We have been looking at different trailers for inspiration with our titles. These are from the films: The pact, The unborn, Prom night and many others. Below are the trailers for a couple of the films which we liked the titles of the most and a brief description of why we liked them.

The Unborn

We really liked this style of titles because of how there isn't really much to them except for the subtle spreading of ink from the bottom left hand corner. The fact the ink spreads across quite slow we felt created tension and suspense whilst watching the trailer as it the trailer has a few fast cuts in it.



Prom Night

We liked these titles as they are quite simple and doesn't distract the audience too much from the actual footage in the trailer. For our trailer we want to keep things quite simple and subtle to prevent from being compared to the typical horror cliche's that are used in today's films.




Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity which is a main inspiration to us in terms of our film now, has titles which we really liked. They would be very relevant to our trailer as it is based around a filmed 'real life' experiment. The camera fuzz effect relates well to the type of film it is advertising and adds tension to the trailer. We both agree that this will be the most likely option for our trailer.

Sound

Below is a prezi of the sound we plan to use for our teaser trailer.

*Sleepwalking Past Hope by HIM

Other Notes
We also want to use the song 'The Requiem' By Linkin Park at the beginning to form a slow introduction that will then be taking over by the quick cuts with the other music.

Change of plans.

We have had consistent issues with our trailer, to the point it has really given us a headache. First time we filmed it, the footage came out to light. We then re-filmed and the footage came out too dark. The footage was so dark we could barely see what was happening in the shot. We are now re-filming a third time this weekend and have changed ideas on what our trailer is about. We are now heading towards the path of a teaser trailer given we have a short amount of time to do it in, but depending on how filming goes this weekend we may still be in with a chance of producing a feature trailer. Our titles are almost finished which is a silver lining. In terms of what we are filming our trailer is now going to be based on a psychology experiment, using one actor.

A basic synopsis of this would be that the actor is sent to house said to be haunted by believed otherwise for an experiment. The experiment is to see whether your mind plays tricks on you when you are told somewhere you are is haunted. However being a horror supernatural thriller the house is actually in fact haunted.

We will keep you posted over this weekend about how filming has gone at the end of each day.

Below is our new filming schedule for filming over this weekend.

Facebook event

For the party scene in our trailer, we will be needing quite a few people so we decided to make a group on Facebook.  This means it is much easier for us to talk to all the people at once and everyone will know what is going to happening during the filming.

First day of filming

Today we filmed all of the inside shots of our trailer with Megan and Mark.  We had some problems with the lighting as we were filming during the day (as that was the only time we were all free) but our trailer needs to be in the dark.  We closed the curtains in the room and lit some candles to try and sort the problem and we thought that it was looking ok.  However, now we have watched what we filmed back we can see that some of the shots have different lighting, e.g some shots are very dark and some shots are very bright.  We have decided to re-film all of this again, but with different actors as it is hard for us to get Megan and Mark during the evening.
We are now using Alice and Ellis and are filming next week during the evening.

Below is a video of us setting up to film with Mark and Megan, as you can see by us trying to black out the windows, that we had issues with lighting from the start.

Update on today's filming

Unfortunately we were unable to film what we planned to today.  This was due to our location not being available for us today.  However, we will be filming on Monday 29th October.  We are planning to film all of the inside scenes with Jason and Ella as well as the master shots of them outside the house.  Once this has been filmed, we will only have the party scene to film and we will be ready to start editing and adding titles.
Instead of the filming today, we completed our animated storyboard and did some shot experimentation, both will be posted shortly.

Filming Can now begin!

We are now ready to start filming our feature trailer as we have completed all the planning for it, including the filming schedules which will be posted onto the blog soon.

Our first filming session will take place tomorrow, October 25th.  We will be filming the inside scenes where Jason and Ella start noticing paranormal activities. 

Shot experimentation

Below is a montage video of experimentations of the difficult shot in the bathroom that we are planning to use in our trailer. We are still not sure how we are going to master the shot, At the moment the idea is to make it 3 separate cuts. However if this becomes too difficult we may find a different way of filming this particular scene.

Storyboard

We have now completed creating our storyboard in pages.  Now we have done this, we will be animating it using iMovie and then adding an idea of sound we will use in the actual trailer. However this will not be the official soundtrack we are using in the final piece.

In our storyboard where the shots say "HOW LONG WOULD YOU LIVE?" in between each word we will have a series of fast cuts. These will be of Ella and Jason running, flicking lights, Ella being dragged along the floor and the scary figure in the garden. We have not presented these in our storyboard incase we decide to do different fast cuts. However we will update our blog with any details of changes to our storyboard.

Casting shots

We have taken casting shots of Alice (the protagonist), Kirsty, Lily, Jessie and Ellis who all play the other characters that take part in the experiment. Kirsty as well as playing that role also plays the role of the masked figure.

Alice Foster

Ellis Simmonds

Kirsty Smart

Location shots

It is very important for us to take location shots so we can clearly see if the location idea we have will work with our film idea.  Below are our location shots including a shot of the outside of the house, a shot of the main room we will be filming in and a shot of the bathroom.

Transcript

This is our final transcript for our feature trailer: 

MUSICAL SCORE FADES IN

JASON AND ELLA WALK HAND IN HAND, HUGGING

(ECHOED LAUGHTER)

FLASHBACK TO PARTY

SPIRITUAL GUY: Highcliff Manor... Stay away 

SHOT OF HOUSE APPEARS 

SPIRITUAL GUY: No one can explain what happened

QUICK SHOT OF DEAD BODIES FLASHING 

SPIRITUAL GUY: No one comes out alive 

ELLA AND JSAON OUTSIDE HIGHCLIFF MANOR 

ELLA: Bet ya £10 you can't last the night!

TEXT: SOME PLACES

JASON: Race ya!

INSIDE HIGHCLIFF MANOR

ELLA: Bathroom, be right back 

TEXT: ARE BETTER LEFT ALONE

ELLA: JASON!

JASON RUNNING TO ELLA 

ELLA CRYING : There was something there!

FLASHBACK TO ELLA SEEING SCARY FIGURE

ELLA: I saw it, I swear!

JASON: Don't be stupid it's all in your head

(TV TURNS ON)

JASON: What the..?

ELLA: It's unplugged!

(BANG FROM UPSTAIRS) 

ELLA: What's happening 

JASON: Lets get out of here 

(DOOR LOCKS) 

(LIGHTS GO OUT)

(HEAVY BREATHING AND HEARTBEAT IS HEARD) 

(LOUD FOOTSTEPS) 

(ELLA SCREAMS) 

FAST CUTS OF DIFFERENT SHOTS 

TEXT: HOW
              LONG
                 WOULD
            YOU
             LAST 

JASON: ELLA!  

JASON LIGHTS A MATCH

SCARY FIGURE APPEARS 

TEXT: WHAT LIES WITHIN

TEXT: OCTOBER 31st 

Storyboard

We will be creating our storyboard in Pages and then animating it using iMovie.   This is the first 6 shots of our trailer which include the 3 production logos we will be using.  Each including a musical score in the background.  

As you can see from this screenshot of the start of our storyboard, the second production logo is going to be animated, but the second and third will not.  

More screenshots of our storyboard in pages will be posted shortly.

Location shots and casting shots (plan)

Location shots 
We are currently trying to sort out where the location of our trailer is going to be.  We did have this planned out, but we found out last minute that we were unable to use this location.  We are now trying to find a different location that will work for our trailer.  We are hoping to have it organised this week and once we have, we will upload the pictures.

Casting shots
As we have many people in our trailer we have not yet finished taking all of the casting shots.  However, we are in the process of taking them now and should be finished soon.  Once we are, the pictures will be uploaded and we will explain why we have chosen that person to act in our trailer.

Creating our production logo for I-STUDIOS

We created our final production logo in Photoshop CS5, and are now in the stages of putting it together in iMovie. We are having a few issues in iMovie with regards to our production logo not looking realistic. We are animating the eye so it looks as if it is blinking, however this is proving to be difficult as the single images stop and start between each transition and not making it a continuous scene. Below are the separate images for the 3 stages in our production logo as well as the editing techniques we used in Photoshop.

Channel mixer:

Red: +40

Green: +40

Blue: +20

Brightness: -4

Contrast: 40

Exposure: -0.31

Offset: 0.0079

Gamma Correction: 1.0

Canvas size: Height- 59.83

                     Width- 100.47

Green Rating Card

Whilst looking at different Trailers for our influences, we noticed that on most of the trailers there was a green screen telling us that the trailer was suitable for all audiences. We didn't really know much about the background of this and if there were other rating certificates that could come up so we have researched into it and this post is about what we found out from our research.

There are three colours you might see before most movie trailers, red, yellow, and green. The most commonly seen one is the green rating card. Before April of 2009, a green background meant that the preview was approved for all audiences.  Since April of 2009, the MPAA now states that the green card is for “appropriate audiences”. This means it is appropriate for all audiences to watch.

A yellow rating card indicates the preview is for age-appropriate Internet viewers.  This yellow rating card is only used on the Internet though, not in cinemas.

The red rating card indicates that content in the preview is only appropriate for certain audiences, such as older teenagers, 18+.  These previews can only be shown in the cinema if the whole audience is of the appropriate age.

We were not sure which rating card we were going to use. We were debating between either the green or red, as we felt that some aspects of our trailer would not be suitable for all audiences.  However, we have decided to use the green rating card as our target audience is males and females under 25. There is no gore, swearing or anything similar shown in our film, the only scary features will be the innuendos that something gory or bad has happened to leave the audience in suspense. The green card will be shown at the start of the trailer for approximately 4 seconds.

Target Audience

After deciding that our film would be a Supernatural Thriller, we then had to decide what target audience would be best for our film. The genre of supernatural thriller is widely used in film today, over the last couple of years since 'Paranormal Activity' many other films have come out based around the idea of poltergeists and unusual phenomena  As well as 'Paranormal Activity' becoming a series of films with the follow on of 2,3 and 4 due to be released October this year, there have also been other films such as 'The Devil Inside', 'The Pact' and 'Insidious'. However as there are so many of these films around and being released prior to Halloween we may find it difficult in releasing our film to a mainstream audience and therefore need to take this into account. Below we have presented what target audiences and why would be best for our film in a mind map.

Influences

Below is our Prezi of our main influences for our trailer that we will be making.  For influences based on sound we chose Devil. In terms of structure we looked at the Trailer for War of the Worlds however the trailer for Devil also fits with the type of structure we want as it starts off calm and slow and then builds up finishing with fast cuts as well as a scary figure appearing at the end. Therefore we will be looking at both when structuring our trailer. In terms of micro and visual aspects we looked at 1408 we were originally going to look at Paranormal Activity but the film is shot with a handheld camera, something that we want to try and avoid. Many of the film trailers we looked at were based on the genre of a supernatural thriller, except for War of the Worlds which is a sci-fi film. We tried to not stick to one particular genre area when writing about are influences so that we could make comparisons and contrasts between the two styles. However this is difficult as many comedies, romances etc. do not share the same qualities and styles as that of a thriller.

 

Production Company Logo

These are our ideas for our production logo. We wanted to have a production logo that reflected on our genre of film which is Supernatural Thriller and came up with the following ideas.  Production logo 1 will be an eye looking through a key hole and the key creating the letter K for the name 'Key Productions'.  The 2nd production logo will be an eye which blinks and when it opens again the letter 'I' will be in the pupil of the eye and our production name will be 'I studios'.  Our 3rd logo idea is fairly simple, as you can see from the picture above, it is just the letters 'L' and 'J' back to back and our production name will be LJ studios as an abbreviation of our names Lily and Jessica.  The 4th idea is to be called 'Paranormal Productions' and the logo will be a child who appears on the screen and then quickly vanishes, with the text for 'Paranormal Productions' flickering on the screen.  The 5th and final idea is to have 'Paranormal studios' on a TV, which has a fuzzy grey screen, the TV would then turn off by gradually turning into a small pinhole.

After asking different peoples opinions on which production logo is the best, we have chosen ideas 4 & 2 to take forward as our production logo.  We have chosen these two production logo ideas as we feel that they both fit the genre of our trailer.  As well as these 2 we are including another one which is going to be the Paramount production logo, as we want our film to be a mainstream film.

Synopsis

This is a video of us discussing how we got to our final synopsis for our Feature Trailer.

No one can explain the events in Highcliff Manor, that lead to a double murder.  When teenage heart throbs Jason and Ella return from a party drunk they make a bet with each other they could last the night in the house.  After a couple of hours snooping in draws, Ella goes to the bathroom whilst looking in the mirror a figure appears behind her, when Ella turns around the figure is gone.  Ella goes to find Jason but he doesn't believe her and says she's just drunk.  Soon after more strange things happen, TVs turn on, even though it's unplugged, curtains move and footsteps are heard from above.  After 2 hours of the strange events Jason sees something, he then becomes possessed and commits suicide.  Ella finds Jason and collapses next to him, only to end up with the same fate.

NEW- 25 Word Pitch

After having a discussion together, we have decided that our initial idea for our 25 word pitch will not work. This is because we would be using teenage actors playing adult characters, we thought this would not be very believable and could take away the atmosphere of a Supernatural Thriller instead we have decided to change the two main characters that were adults, to teenagers. Below we have posted our new 25 word pitch and feel this will work better and make more available to a wider audience.

Teenage couple stay in a house, recently deserted for a double murder. 2 hours later they wish they hadn't. Some place are better left alone.

(25 words)

Mood Board

Below is my Mood Board of ideas for what we will include in our trailer. We have decided to head down the path towards creating a sci-fi, supernatural thriller.

Mood board

As we our planning on making a supernatural thriller Trailer, I have created a mood board of different things that may influence us with more ideas for out trailer.  I have looked at lighting and generally ideas and aspects to do with Thrillers.

25 Word Pitch

To help us come up with a synopsis we firstly created a 25 word pitch of a summary of what type of film we wanted to make our trailer for. Using our ideas page on the previous post, we drafted up 4 pitches and finally choose our favourite. 

Here is a clearer version of our 25 word pitch;

Supernaturally obsessed couple move to a new home, said to be haunted. In 48 hours they're dead. Some places are better left alone.

Ideas for Trailer

To help us come up with ideas on what type of things we could include in our 25 word pitch, synopsis and Trailer in general, we drafted up some ideas. Below is a screenshot of our drafted ideas. We started by looking at different aspects of sci-fi films and we wanted to do something that was supernatural. We have listed films that have a thriller, sci-fi, supernatural genre and ticked the ones that we see relevent to our ideas. In the box are the different types of events that could take part in the plot this is so that we have a rough idea of what our plot will entail, so we are abled to write a detailed synopsis in which will aid us when drafting up a storyboard.

Initial Ideas prezi

This is a Prezi of our intial ideas. The words in bold represent the main path we are heading towards. At the moment we are looking to work towards making a feature trailer for a supernatural thriller.

What is a Trailer? What is a Teaser Trailer? (part 3)

The Master

This Teaser Trailer firstly begins with the 'Appropriate Audiences' certificate, however it does say that the film is rated R (restricted) and ages 17+ should only be accompanied by an adult. This shows the film is not suitable for all and instead of being a mainstream film, could infact be an Arthouse film.Soon after the 'Appropriate Audiences' certificate the production logos then flash up for TWC and Annapurna Pictures.

These productions logos flash up in time with a loud banging sound effect created by a man banging his fists against the table shown in the first clip of the teaser trailer. This banging sound than contunues througout the whole trailer and blends in slowly into a quiet musical score. The banging also increases in tempo as the trailer goes on which creates rising tension along with the clips seen in the trailer.

From the type of things that happen in the clip and the diologue used which is 'old' in the sense that the actors speak in well spoken English Grammar suggests that the genre of the film is a Drama. Many of the scenes shown in the trailer such is fighting and suggestions of intimate scenes between couples may be seen as unsuitable for all audiences again suggesting the film may be an Arthouse film. Another suggestion that the film is Arthouse is at the end when the Title of the film is shown and the actors names that are in it, the Director's and Writer's names are also shown at the end of the film, this is something not normally shown on a mainstream film, instead it reminded me a bit like credits for a film.  

Robocop