In what ways
does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real
media products?
Characters, Actors and Costume
The characters we’ve chosen in our film use
the conventions of a horror film almost exactly. In most horror films there are
archetypal characters, for instance the pretty girl who needs saving, which in
our film is Kate played by Teresa. An example of a character in a film much
like Kate is Dana in The Cabin in the Woods. There’s also the hero character
who saves the day and is usually handsome and strong, which in our film is
Darius played by Conor. We based Darius on a few different characters from
films, Ed Warren in The Conjuring and Curt Vaughan in The Cabin in the Woods. There’s
also various other stereotypical characters in horror films but these are our
main characters and so we have really tried to highlight their characters more
than the rest of them. Our other actors are almost seen as extras, whilst still
trying to adhere to the conventions of horrors by having them all the same age,
and for instance the guys always taking care and comforting the girls. One
horror film that shows these archetypal characters really well is The Cabin in
the Woods, which even talks explicitly about the stereotypes of the characters
in the movie. The way in which we picked our actors was very limited in the
sense that we only had people we knew or were friends with at our disposal.
However we’ve used both of our main actors, Conor and Teresa, as a selling
point to our film. We’ve done this by having their names in the graphics of our
film, saying “Starring Teresa Rendell” and giving a sense that they’ve
performed in other films. The costumes we used for our actors were meant to be
simplistic and relatable. This is because most of them are teenagers in the
film and teenage actors so wearing their own clothes looked the most natural.
The costume of Kate was fairly simple in that she just wore her own clothes
that she’d usually wear, as in horror films it’s usually a lot like this, for
instance Grace Andrews in The Hitcher, which we did base Kate’s costume on. Darius
however is meant to look slightly older than the teenagers and the fact that he
has a job in the police department meant we had to costume him slightly
differently. We dressed him smart casual in a suit with no tie and a smart
coat. We based this characters costume on John Hartigan from Sin City. The
character himself is very different to Darius but the costume, being a suit and
a leather coat was almost exactly what I wanted Darius to look like. However I
had to slightly change it to make him look younger and fit in more with the
teenager group.
Location
The location we chose was extremely typical
of our genre. We’ve seen many films with the location of woods in the film. These
include The Cabin in the Woods, The Woods Have Eyes and The Blaire Witch
Project. We chose the woods we did because they were very close to school and
they had massive variation in the different parts of the woods, giving us lots
of places in which to film. We however tried not to let their only be one
location as we looked at a few films that only had one location, like
Paranormal Activity, and it did look like the trailer got a bit repetitive and
boring. So we tried to challenge this in a small way by having a scene at the
police office between Darius and a policeman.
We think this fit quite well with the trailer, giving variation in
location, and it looks like one extra location was all we needed because of the
difference in lighting and surroundings in the actual woods.
Narrative
Creating a clear narrative was something we
found quite difficult in the making of our film. We chose a fairly typical
horror narrative, a few teenagers going into the woods, disappearing and then a
ghost hunter character comes and saves the day. This took us a while to come up
with as most of the horror trailers we watched the story proved very difficult
to copy or adapt to make our own. One of the things we found most difficult
with our trailer was making the deaths obvious, as any death that was on screen
looked too student-like. As well as this we noticed that most of the trailers
didn’t make the story entirely clear. There was always a sense of mystery
involved in the trailer and so when we put together our trailer we decided not
to show the entire story and to leave some of it a bit confusing and not clear
what was happening, making the audience want to know more about the film and
story. The good horror trailers we looked at followed the same technique we
used, by making it not very clear what the “evil presence” was, or what was
happening. A trailer that has a narrative that’s not very clear is Grave
Encounters, because you know something’s there and making people disappear but
you don’t know why or what it is etc. One trailer that we noticed didn’t use
this was Insidious, which even has the catchline as “It’s not the house that’s
haunted”, which gives away the entire plotline almost immediately, which seemed
boring and we lost interest after we knew what was happening, so we decided to
try and challenge this concept. The structure of the trailer also came into
account in the making of our film. We noticed that in the majority of the
horror trailers we watched there was a 3 act structure to them. The first part
would build a bit of tension but mostly set up the backstory and give you a
sense of what the film is about and the genre of it. The next part would build
a lot of tension and have a lot of weird things happenings to let you know
there’s not something quite right, and the final part would be the climax, with
perhaps a montage containing jump scares etc. There are a load of trailers that
follow this 3 act structure but a few we looked closely at where The Conjuring,
Insidious and The Cabin in the Woods. I tried to apply this to the construction
of my trailer as closely as possible and we think we did it quite well, having
the jogger and policeman as part of the first act, setting up backstory. The
kids going to the woods and building tension for the second act and then after
the big crash and everyone running away from each other the third act comes
into play for the rest of the trailer.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack, in a very similar way to
the trailer itself, goes through a 3 act structure. It’s also very similar in the
content of these acts, for instance the first act is quite calm to give the
trailer a chance to tell the backstory, then it’s tension building, and finally
climatic. We very much conformed to this 3 act structure, mainly because we’d
done it so much in our Narrative that it fit so well to do the soundtrack in
the same way. However in this 3 act structure we tried to almost challenge a
convention of all horror soundtracks being scary by having very calm reversed
guitar chords playing in the first bit, to give the audience a sense of safety,
which we would later take away from them. The second and third acts of the
soundtrack however did conform to the general horror soundtrack by being eery
and tension building, then fast paced and climatic.
Genre
There aren’t many variations of horror and
so most horror films are put into one of two categories, psychological or
thriller. There are also some smaller subgenres of horror but they’re rarely
used. Our trailer fits into the thriller subgenre. A thriller/horror film will
usually be fast paced, have jump scares and a lot of archetypal exciting
characters. Our horror film sticks to archetypal characters of “good”, the
ghost hunter and the girl, and “evil”, the monster. We have fast paced montage
scenes like many of the other horror trailers and also try to jumpscare the
audience, which proved very difficult to do. The aesthetics of a horror usually
has a dark colour pallet and includes a lot of red in the colour. The horror
genre is very stylized and there’s not much variation in the aesthetics. Our
film’s colour pallet is very dark, taking place mainly at night time and in the
woods so the colours are mostly green and dark. We also use red a lot in our
film during the graphics.
Sound
Sound is used a lot in the horror genre. Most
horror trailers have a lot of voice over and some small one-line dialogues. For
instance in The Conjuring “There’s something horrible happening in my house”,
“Something awful happened here Ed”, “What is it”. In our trailer we’ve tried to
use these one liners as much as we can by having “What is that thing”, “We
gotta get out of here” and “Is anyone there?”, as well as a few others. We also
have some fairly simple dialogue between the policeman and ghost hunter at the
start, voiced over some shots and then matching with one as well. This also
happens a lot in generic horror trailer for instance the cabin in the woods
there’s some back and forth dialogue voiced over some shots and then matching
some as well. There’s also a lot of soundbites like bangs, crashes and wooshes
etc. that are used in horror trailers. We downloaded a lot of different sound
effects like these and layered a few of them on top of each other, which added
a lot to our film and even made the visual shots look better. Our sound uses
the conventions of real media products a lot and doesn’t challenge the forms at
all.
Studio
Big Hollywood studio companies made most
horror film trailers we studied, for instance Lionsgate or Warner Bros who
usually have a huge budget and are generally mainstream and stick to typical
horror conventions. There are a few indie film companies that make horror films
but generally they’re a lot less successful and less unknown. Our horror flim’s
studio is meant to be an indie film company called “Fairly Frightening Films”
with a fairly small budget. However we’ve still embraced most of the horror
film conventions and make it look as much like a Hollywood film as possible as
these are the ones that do the best.
Graphics
Graphics in a horror trailer are very
important and used in almost every trailer I’ve watched. They have narrative
graphics as well as graphics saying who’s starring in it or other films the
director made. They all usually use the colour red, to associate it with blood
or anger/fear. They also usually have some sort of movement for instance
sliding or fading, as well as some sort of sound usually a boom. Taking all of
this into account our graphics turned out to be white, sliding in from the
right, with blood dripping in the background and a boom sound effect. We didn’t
use any narrative graphics as we found it very difficult to write something
that didn’t look really cliché however we did have the “Starring Conor
Tottenham”, etc. type of graphics and also “From the director of Game Plan”.
Title
The title is a very main aspect in
trailers. The title is usually at the end of the video, with graphics and some
sound as well. The actual words of the title all go on a similar basis as well.
A lot of horror films have one word titles for instance “Insidious” or “Creep”. Some others have a few more words but
usually have only two important ones, for instance in “The Cabin in the Woods”,
the only words that mean something are “Cabin” and “Woods”. We decided to not
stick to a one word title and call ours “The Devil’s Footsteps”, which develops
the conventions as it has more than one important word but sticks to horror
type words like Devil and Footsteps, which are in a lot of horror films for
instance “The Devil’s Backbone”.
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