Researching our area of horror trailers

After looking at the typical horror trailers, I have noticed that they come into one of two categories:-

• a short, usually lasting about 1 minute, advert not telling the audience much about the film, yet just enough to grab their attention which is usually shown on the small screen, films such as 'Awake' and 'Paranormal Activity'.
• a longer, usually lasting about 2-3 minute, advert which goes into more depth of what the film is about, such as 'The Human Centedpede' and 'Vacancy', involving enigma codes and other enticing conventions such as the unique selling point such as the director's name. A typical example of this is Wes Craven, director of the famous 'Nightmare on Elm Street' is featured in the advert for 'Scream' therefore showing the audience the standard at which it should be.

The film trailers usually have about 100 shots. A typical use of this is very fast paced movement from shot to shot, incorporating the horror and action involved in the film in a short space of time. This is usually accompanied by a 'growing in intensity' style of music before it suddenly dies down and the titles appear. This would be a good route to follow as it is very conventional and would be entertaining for the audience and in particularly our selves producing the film. The trailers usually do not give away the ending as it would be pointless in seeing the film afterwards, so the trailer is a small glimpse of what it will be like. Most include titles at some point whether it be at the end, and it's a quick flash of the main cast and production staff or in between shots are the cast etc, and the title is shown dramatically at the end.

Research

I have watched a variety of horror trailers to give me an idea of the typical, conventional style of trailer we would need to produce.

I watched many trailers such as

• The Human Centipede
• 28 Days Later
• The Eye
• Shutter
• One Hour Photo
• Creep
• Misery
• One Missed Call
• The Uninvited
• The Hills Have Eyes
• Vacancy
• Hostel
• House of 1000 corpses
• Awake
• Paranormal activity

and many more.

This has given us a real idea of what we can achieve as we have a variety of old, new, gorey and thriller.

Gorezone

Here is the link to GoreZone's website where we have found most of our research from.

http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1nfuy/GorezoneAPRIL/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F150286%2FGorezone-APRIL

Carly and myself have found this very helpful and will be future inspiration for our preliminary task, including a poster

My Proposal

So, we have finally decided to produce a promotional package for a new film. We will make a trailer for possibly a horror/thriller film, a poster advertisement for the film and a magazine front cover to promote the new and upcoming film.

We produced a horror film beginning in AS and therefore we have a wide knowledge of producing horror films and therefore a wise choice is to produce a similar theme for next year as we enjoyed working within this genre last year.

We decided to produce a poster and a magazine front cover from inspiration by GOREZONE's Andy Mcquade. He came in to talk to us primarily about the marketing, production and editing. This was insightful as it gave us a real idea about the real world of media and we are putting our skills to the test by trying to out-do our previous horror moving image. We did some research into the magazine GOREZONE by looking at the articles and up-coming films including reviews. Our process of making this trailer, the poster and the magazine cover will include a lot of research and in depth analysis of similar trailers and other media styles.

By doing a similar thing in AS, we have learnt how to avoid certain mistakes and such as weather issues and organisation a key issue. We will make this process as smooth as possible as we are more knowledgeable in this area now.

We will pick out locations, props and costumes at an early stage and be confident from when we choose it as we have learnt to do this from AS

Where to start?

Right, after last year, I have decided that Carly and myself work well together and therefore have decided to work together again for our A2 coursework.

We have looked through the syllabus and we have compared the different options. We have decided against the ideas of generating the first level of a computer game and producing the first 2 pages of a new local newspaper. We find other ideas such as a short film or teaser trailer more appealing as it involves actual film making rather than the majority being 'print' rather than 'moving images'.

We are more swayed towards the trailer idea as we actually wanted to do this in the first place whilst producing our moving image for AS so had a few good ideas we have kept until now.

We are very excited to be working together again and can't wait to get the camera rolling.