Evaluation question 4

Evaluation question 4 – planning.

Planning of our teaser trailer.

When planning our production we had to go into great lengths of planning. Firstly we all had to decide on what genre we wanted our production to be part of; we decided we wanted our media production to be part of the thriller genre. We decided to make the story boards for the trailer, first as that would require more time and attention. We all came up with separate ideas on what we wanted in our trailers, we was very diplomatic and decided on the best story board out of all of our ideas.

We thought it would be a good idea, to all make another separate story board for the final ideas, so we could photocopy each storyboard, and then cut them up and incorporate all of ideas as one. Once we had finished our story board we moved on to the planning of the poster and magazine.

Once our story boards where finished, we decided to create a script as this is the general thing to when producing a film, we also had to do this, so the actors where aware of what they needed to do.

We also had a group discussion and we listed all the qualities and attributes that we need for the character roles in the trailer. We decided to go for the conventional Caucasian male to play the victim as we did not want to break this convention, as we wanted it to fit in with other films in the horror genre. we also decided to use a male model who looked younger as this would emit his innocence and convey the more evil qualities of ‘Satan’s Mistress’ even thought they are already shown in the trailer, this would heighten the hysteria for the audience as they would pity the actor as he looks young and innocent.

We attempted to watch various movies with female killers in, but the choice of films were very vague, we wanted to get an idea on how she might act or how she might walk and certain qualities the ‘creepy’ killer in movies normally have. For instant, in ‘Halloween’ the killer walks very slow, and this is something we wanted to use, in Halloween, the killer walks really slow, although he still manages to catch up with the victim and end up killing them. This shows their almost subhuman nature and adds an effect and tension for the audience; the audience are aware that the victim is going to get killed, even though the killer is walking really slowly.

The costume

At first we wanted to use contact lenses for the killer to wear. We wanted to use white ones to create an inhuman character; however we thought that this may lead the audience astray when they saw our poster/magazine or trailer, as they would have thought there was a different kind of supernatural power that the killer had, and it would divert the attention away from the plot of the film. The lexis ‘mistress’ suggests that there is a sexualised and secretive relationship between the two. This is why we wanted the actress to wear very promiscuous clothing, because she was a teacher, this would break the stereotype of all teachers being ‘unfashionable’ and ‘old’. We wanted the character to wear black and red, which is the connotation of evil and darkness. The red also connotes love and also blood. All these things are actually linked into our trailer and the theme of the plot. We decided on a black blouse which was unbuttoned a bit, with a red bra which you could see through the blouse. We also decided on a black body con skirt, which had a sip down the middle. This connoted the teacher’s promiscuousness as the skirt is easily undone and we wanted to also show the naive attribute she has, as she has let the Devil seduce her very easily.

The costume was the only real thing in which took the most planning.


 In the planning stage we practiced taking different shots on the Canon Eos 400D camera.

In the planning stage we practiced taking different shots on the Canon Eos 400D camera.

Follow this link to show the research and planning. http://thedarkroomproductions.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-and-planning.html We used various internet sites to research the forms and conventions which where used in horror films, and how we were going to use them, whether we was going to develop theses conventions or challenge them. One of the most useful resources we used was Blockbuster as we could choose so many different horror films from different sub genres. We sometimes watched these as a group, or we watched them individually and talked about them in our meetings.
We were familiar with the equipment, so we didn’t take too long setting up, the only real problem was getting the lighting correct.

Other media technologies we used include the website surveymonkey.com. With this website we were able to discover what elements we were going to include by surveying people on their preferences.
 we used computer scanners to upload our story board ideas to blogger. Using blogger allowed us to have a shared network, as we could save drafts and were all able to edit them when ever we liked.

Another technology we used was Microsoft Word, we used this program to write much of our drafts before copying them onto blogger, and this was very efficient.

 

We had some huge problems, and this shows that we may not have planned our teaser trailer properly, we all knew how we wanted our trailer to be’ however there were some huge problems which we had to overcome. Our original idea was to have a demonic teacher, and by doing this the audience would find the idea of a teacher harming children more thrilling as it was more realistic, instead of someone coming back from the dead. As a group we had to think of horror movies which were set in England. We could not think of any films which were set in schools and where not set in America. The only things we could think of which were set in England where mainly horror comedy movies. So we had to think of another idea quickly. We decided on still having a demonic teacher as the main character, but we decided to leave more to the imagination, as when we were filming the scenes that involved a classroom it looked very professional as we had huge problems with the lighting where it was reflecting of the boards and windows. The new scenes which we filmed only took us a week to film, instead of the months in which we took to take the shots in the classroom.

We thought about creating a new story board, but we thought this would be time consuming as the second time we knew exactly how we wanted it to be. We had a lot of pressure on our hands as the release date for the teaser trailer had to conform to the same date around the time where the posters where coming out, so people could relate to them. The new shots which we took worked really well, much better that the previous ones we made. Another reason why we had to change our ideas, is because some of our work went missing and we would of had to take the same shots again and these where time consuming in themselves.

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

Here is a sound recording of me talking about the research in the project. Research was an important part of the project and needed to be done carefully. In the recording I talk about some of the technologies we used to do our research.