Here are a couple of designs for our title design that I have been working on. The title design will be used in all of our final products; teaser trailer, film poster and website. The design will need to be suitable for the film and coincide with the other themes. Our favourite design so far is the Ivy design, connoting constriction and corruption through the references to poisonous ivy.

Nat

Paranormal Activity

Last Friday I went and saw the new realease Paranormal Activity, by watching this I was extremely inspired. Oren Peli, a completely unknown director, came literally out of nowhere. He produced, directed and edited this film himself with a budget of just $15,000. The entire film was shot in seven days, with one camera and it took Peli ten months to edit the footage. In my opinion this film wouldn't have been the success it was if they hadn't focused as much as they did on the diegetic sound. The way Peli used sound created and built tension. This is the main thing that creates scares initially. By setting this film in an average suburban home, this film has given many sleepless nights. The normal sounds you hear at night, like pipes creaking will never sound the same after watching this film.
This is definately a film to be inspired by, taking into consideration the use of sound on such a low budget.

Filming at the lake

As was said in an earlier post, we had to find a new location due to the weather being unsuitable in Hastings. We brainstormed a few ideas and we came up with:

• Under a motorway bridge at dusk- Fitted with the urban idea as well as very isolating
• At a swimming pool- We have access to an outdoor pool and the idea of using water was one we liked
• Empty field- Playing on the idea of loneliness and referencing previous areas of our film

Thinking about what would suit our film best led to the realisation that none of these locations were what we were looking for. Alice, one of the girls that we filmed with, offered us the use of a lake at her farm. When we went to look at the location we quickly came to the conclusion that it would work perfectly. This is because it was very isolated as it was very big and would convey a typical horror scene. This hopefully will create tension as it will juxtapose against the fast moving scenes beforehand.

When we filmed, we filmed extra scenes to take full advantage of our surroundings and a member of the group will upload some of the footage onto our YouTube channel to get peoples' opinions on it.

Helena

More potential poster ideas

Here a few ideas that the rest of the group helped me to come up with. Many apologies for the drawing but hopefully the basic ideas are clear.

The idea I think we are most likely to go with currently is idea number one, as Jack posted our prototype photographs on here.

Stef

Post it!

Stef and I were researching film poster and websites and we came across the poster for the new "Nightmare on Elm Street" film. We really liked this poster and thought it was a good campaign image, however, we found ourselves asking would this poster work if we weren't already aware of Freddy Krueger and the first "Nightmare on Elm Street" film? Is it just the legacy that makes us instantly aware of what this film is about, rather than the actual poster? With our film we obviously don't have the history and following of "Nightmare on Elm Street", so we wondered would this style of poster suit our film?

Nightmare on Elm Street website

Creepy background music

I approached a member of YouTube.com about using an portion of the audio of their video within our teaser trailer.

Hello,

I am a representative from a group of A-Level media students creating a horror teaser trailer. We would like to use a section of the audio from your creepy music box video. Is the audio copyrighted? Would you be happy with allow us to use it within our short production?

Thank you,
Jack.

We were informed that the music was not copyrighted.

This is extremely fortunate and we are all happy that we can use the music within the teaser trailer. The music is creepy and very stereotypical of the horror genre. The music itself builds tension and is fitting with our storyboard.

 Jack

Up, up and away!

On Sunday we continued filming, due to severe weather, we have decided that filming down in Hastings will be extremely difficult, impractical, and may put Alice at risk. So at the moment we are discussing alternative ideas to replace this scene. A possible option is at another location, on a lake, where we may be able to gain access to a jetty and a boat.

At the moment we are continuing editing our footage, and today we finished editing the swing scene.

Natalie

That darn weather

On Sunday, we were meant to film our beach scene in Hastings but sadly the weather was against as there were predictions for torrential rain for the whole day! We did, however, decide to use the time with the actresses anyway and re-film some of the scenes that we had previously filmed that were not of the high quality we want for our trailer.

Stef

Questionnaire Feedback

This is a copy of a document that I created which reflects a sample of our audience feedback.

http://www.bindingfilm.info/Questionnaire%20Feedback.pdf

We will consider this information when creating our teaser trailer.

Target Audience

The target audience for our teaser trailer will be 15+. As a psychological horror, our research showed that older teenagers would be the most appropriate audience for the film. Our film will have an audience rating of 15 as it deals with challenging friendship issues that teenagers experience with scenes that will - meeting the conventions of the horror genre - attempt to scare the audience, this would be inappropriate for a younger audience.

Sing a song

Music is very important to us in our group and I have had a look around to try and find some appropriate music I found two songs that we drew inspiration from, The Who - Behind Blue Eyes and Gary Jules and Michael Andrews - Mad World. We are now in the process of creating a piece of music, with music student Emily Melville. We were drawn to the emotion she conveyed in her compositions, which we felt would complement our teaser trailer.

Nat

Blog updates

I have made a few modifications to our blog which will help us with keeping track of time and gaining feedback from readers to benefit our project.

After recommending to the rest of the team to add labels to their posts, we now have a label cloud on the left of the blog where readers can chose to organise by labels.


Another module I have added is the subscription box which will allow our readers to subscribe to our posts and comments. This will be important to use the blog as a way of gaining feedback from audiences, specifically our target audience who will follow our production if the genre interests them.

I also edited the width of the blogger theme. Helena came up with the idea that we should have a countdown on the sidebar of the blog to remind us how long is left until the filming deadline is reached. She tried using the blogger modules available however they either did not work or did not record the time. So, I googled for a javascript countdown and after modifications I have created a custom section.

Jack.