We started researching into different genres by watching a broad range of film trailers and briefly analysing them. After we had looked at a good amount of trailers from each genre as a group we had a vote on which genre we would most like to do. All three of us decided on different genres so we researched further into each one that was picked (action, comedy and horror). We decided that the best way to choose whose genre we would go with was for each of us to pick a trailer, that best favoured our genre, and analyse it in our group to see which bits we could use and develop for our production.
Although the action trailer looked visually impressive and made me want to see the film we realised that there would have been a huge budget set aside for some of the scenes and a lot of computer generated imagery had been used. Because we had a very limited budget, whatever me and my two other group members put in, and no access to use CGI we came to the decision that action would not be the best genre for us to do. The next genre of trailer to analyse was horror. This looked more promising from the start as the first clip didn't use CGI or look very expensive to produce. We liked the way that the music and editing was linked so that the trailer built up tension through out. Our final genre of film trailer we were going to analyse was comedy. I was sceptical about this genre from the off set as it takes incredibly clever scripting to make a comedy sucsessful and especially in the trailer as usually the funniest parts are shown. However it was only fair that we looked at the trailer as we had done for the other two genres. Although the trailer did make me want to watch the film, I think it was because of the green light actors that were starring and the hilarious script. One of the other awkward factors that we found when analysing this trailer was that there were quite a lot of characters. If we were to have done a comedy it would have meant that we would need to rely on lots of our friends to be around when we wanted to film. The one plus side to making out production a comedy was the cost, however we decided to go with horror.
Once we had decided to go with horror we again started to analyse trailers. This time the analysis was to find out key factors that horror trailers included, location, camera angles that are commenly used, editing, props and costumes. The most helpful trailer that we analysed was "The Blair Witch Project" as this was filmed using a low budget.
By researching into audience it helped us know who our target market would be and also what age certificate to give our trailer. We knew from researching horror films that it was very rare to get a film with a classification below the age rating 15. We wanted to inlude violence and strong language to give a stronger effect to our production. However we did not want it to get a certificate of 18 as this would limit the size of our target audience. To make sure a classification on 15 was not to low or high we went on the BBFC's web site (http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines) and read through the guidelines used to classify films. Through using secondary research gathered from the internet I saw that people from age 16 to 24 are most likely to watch horror trailers. This meant that if we were to advertise our trailer comercially we would know the key places to do so. Because I and many of my friends are in that age group I know that "facebook" "e4" and "mtv" would be prime places for advertising our film. However because of the small budget, setting up a film fan page on "facebook" would be a more realistic approach.
Before we shot our trailer we used a set of planning techniques that would make our production more successful and make us more organised when filming. The first method of planning we used was analysing horror trailers. We looked out for the locations they were set, The camera angles they had chosen, what type of editing had been used, the props that they included and the costumes that the characters wore. Some of the key things we had picked up from analysing the trailer for "The Blair Witch Project" were: A lot of hand held point of view shots had been used, the characters were younger rather than older, they were lost in a wood where there were lots of unusual things e.g. hanging stick men. When planning out our plot we drew a spider diagram and tried to include some of these ideas, however being careful not to make the plot too similar, as we knew if we included some of these plot characteristics then our production was more likely to be successful.
The next stage of planning was making a story board. This showed the possible stages that could take place in our film. Once we were happy with the stages we could decided on which camera angle to use for each shot. By doing this it meant when we came to film we would be more organised. I think we rushed the inital story board as we were excited to get out and film. This is why after filming the shots from our first story board and watching them back we were not one hundred percent satisfied with all of them so we created another story board this time thinking more carefully about the stages in the trailer and the camera angles used to create scarier shots.
The last planning technique we used was our animatic. This was basically a slide show of images taken from the locations we were going to set our production in and using some of the props to briefly show what our scenes would look like. This helped so we could see what our trailer would look like in picture form and also allowed us to get feedback from other members of the class about the locations and props we used.
General discussion in our group was used throughout our planning phase. This helped us to take each idea and together develop them resulting in a stronger film trailer.
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