Final Trailer JB/EA

Above is the final cut of The Devil's Footsteps

Magazine Cover EA/JB

Final Draft Magazine Cover:

This is our final magazine cover that I have produced for our media studies project, as you can see we have only added a few things from the second version, however the final additions are crucial, I added the banner and the puff which makes it seem more like a magazine. I added a small contrast change to make Conor's face look brighter, there is also an extra tagline introducing Conor as a USP. One of the simple but crucial last changes was the addition of a price tag and website at the top of the magazine.

Second Draft Magazine Cover:

There is a huge change from the first to the second draft of the magazine cover, there are four main changes; the addition of the image of Conor who takes up the majority of the page, then the addition of the title of our trailer, tag lines and finally the I did not want a blank black background because it made the poster look too simple moreover other magazines tend to not have a blank background. A small change I made was adding a little piece of film reel behind the word film in the title of the magazine "FILMSPOT".

First Draft Magazine Cover:

This is the first draft of the magazine cover, as you can see there is no background, or tag lines. I had decided on the layout and the colour scheme early on by looking at other Empire and Sight and sound magazines. All the drafts of the magazine cover have been made in photoshop.

Alternative Magazine Draft:

This is a version of the magazine cover which we scrutinised and took constructive criticism from, we decided that the colour scheme did not suit the horror genre and that it was too bland as a magazine cover. Obviously we were not finished however this was the point of major change in our poster leading to the majority of the final touches.

Poster EA/JB

Poster Final Draft:

There is quite a lot of change from the second draft to the last, this is because I re-edited most of the text I had already put in. By this I mean I resized the title and added coloured blocks behind it, this is why it stays vastly the same colour throughout however it still has some of the colour burn from the image behind. I added a tagline for dramatic effect, resized and recoloured the actors names to be larger and more attention grabbing. The billing block was also resized to make it bigger as most posters have a large billing block that takes up the width of the poster. I have also changed the release date to 'OUT NOW' because we do not want it to be a promotion poster we want to advertise the fact that it is already out. Personally I really like the little facebook links to our real websites we created at the lower end of our poster, finally I placed an age certification for legal purposes. 

Poster Draft 2:

In the second draft I was content with the picture, so from there I wanted to add the textual information. I started with the title which is in the font '28 days later' and has a colour burn and black outer shading, this is what gives the effect of it being branded onto her. I also added the names of our key actors as the unique selling point, the billing block and finally the release date.

Poster Draft 1:

This is the first draft of our poster for our film trailer. This is a picture of our heroine with another picture inside. This was also made in photoshop just like our magazine cover. In this picture you can see that I have cut out a picture of the evil entity against an iconic location in our film and made it fit directly in her eye. I have also applied multiple effects, mainly I have tampered with the levels of contrast and applied a 'yellowy/grey' filter which makes it look bleak.

Alternative Draft:

Here is a draft that we did not particularly like, the reasons we did not like it is because we had no filters on it which made it look very student made/fake and the blood looked way too over the top, moreover we did not have the skills to make it look professional. Although we did not like this we did use it as a base for creating the rest of our poster and took constructive criticism to move forward.

Evaluation 4 EA

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

Evaluation 3 JB

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Focus Group / Screening Survey

The below questions where taken and analysed from our focus group survey in which we screened our trailer to 14 individuals. Below is also a copy of one completed survey.

Gender?

The majority being male, as is typical with every horror film, and is our main target gender.

Age?

The majority being 17/18 which is right in the middle of our target age. This is good as we can get feedback primarily from our target audience and then a few extra parts of research from our niche audience.

Which genres do you like?

Comedy – 10

Thriller – 8

Action – 7

Sci-Fi – 6

Documentary – 5

Horror – 4

Drama – 2

Romance – 1

Animated – 1

The most popular genre in our focus group was comedy, with 10 people saying comedy. Horror was fairly far down on our list, with only 4 people saying they liked to watch them. However it as still above a few other genres, for example romance and drama. We think we can put this down to the fact that Horror is a fairly strange genre in that you watch it because it makes you nervous and gives you thrills, not because you enjoy it, and possibly because of the open ended nature of the question they might not have thought to write down Horror.

Which types of films interest you most?

Big budget – 10

Low budget/Indie – 6

No preference – 1

The majority of our focus group were interested in big budget films, with a fair few also interested in indie/low budget films and one person having no preference. This works well for us as our film would have aspects of a big budget Hollywood film, like famous actors and glossy special effects. It also has aspects of low budget/indie films as it’s all shot in one location, the woods, and obviously looks low budget as we had no money to work with.

What influences you to see a film the most?

Trailer – 12

Actors – 6

Reviews – 5

Poster – 4

Directors – 3

Awards – 2

Friend’s recommendation – 2

Everyone agreed that the most important marketing aspect of a film is the trailer. This is perfect as our main task is our trailer. We were however surprised to see that a poster was so far down on the list, under actors and reviews. This isn’t too big an issue because we have showcased our actors massively, in the trailer graphics and the poster, as well as having our magazine cover focus solely on the main actor. It’s also not a problem having reviews be more important than the poster as our magazine would have reviews in it. We were also glad to see that awards were far down on the list and not many people let that influence them to see a film as it’s not typical of horror films to even have awards and we hadn’t included any in any of our products.

What genre do you think our film was?

Horror (undefined) – 8

Horror (Thriller) – 4

Horror (Psychological) – 2

Horror (Slasher) – 1

Everyone answered that our film was of the Horror genre which was perfect as we know for sure that we conveyed the genre perfectly. However the subgenre of our film was a little bit less stated. The majority of the people didn’t even state a subgenre, perhaps for lack of knowledge of the horror subgenres. However of the people who did state a subgenre, Horror (Thriller) was the most popular, which is great as this is the exact subgenre we were going for. We could put the fact that 3 other people put subgenres that weren’t our own down to the fact they couldn’t differentiate between the Horror subgenres.

Was the narrative clear?

All but two people in this question stated that the narrative was clear. One of the people who said that it wasn’t clear was confused as to whether anyone died or not, which isn’t really a problem with the narrative as it’s typical with horror trailers not to actually show any death and to leave some mystery about it. Another one was asking what they were running from, which again is fine because it leaves a sense of mystery and you weren’t meant to know what was in the woods. They did also however ask whether our main actor, the ghost hunter, was a teacher or a cop. This is a slight problem as we thought it would be clear he was a ghost hunter and the hero, however it was only one person who was confused so it should be okay to discount it.

What aspects of the trailer persuade you to watch the film?

Camerawork – 9

Sound effects – 7

Soundtrack – 4

Location – 2

Actors/Characters – 2

The highest rated aspect of my film was the camerawork. This is typical in most horror films to have interesting/different camerawork that draws viewers in. The second and third most commonly said answers where sound effects and soundtrack. This is very typical of horror films in that what makes it a horror film is usually the sound effects and the soundtrack so this is perfect that our sound aspects have created such a positive impact on the audience.

If you could change the film what aspects of it would you change?

The majority of our focus group didn’t actually answer this question, which we are going to take as a good sign in that they didn’t think anything needed to be changed. A couple of people mentioned the voice over sound needed to be better quality which we already knew was a problem in our editing and despite putting a few effects on the audio and changing the background noise etc. it still didn’t sound perfect. A few other people were asking about the romantic relationship between the two main characters and why that was an aspect as they’ve only just met. This may not have been too clear for the audience but in our heads the almost kiss shot at the end was fairly far through the film and in that case they wouldn’t have only just met and it would have made more sense so we think this isn’t a huge problem in the actual film, just maybe slightly in the trailer.

Online Survey

As well as doing this survey for our focus group we also had an online survey for anyone to complete. We advertised this on our film's Facebook page as well as both of our own.

The online survey had very similar questions to the focus group survey however with slight differences such as the online survey had less open ended questions.
Below is a screen capture of how one could fill in the survey.

Gender

We had 9 females and 7 males fill our the online survey this time, which gave us better indication of our female side of the audience, as our focus group was focused mainly on the male side.

Age

We had 7 15-17 year olds and 9 18-24 year olds. This was perfect as this is exactly the age group we were aiming for.

What genre films do you like the most?

The most popular genre of films were comedy and thriller, with half the people who took the survey saying they liked them. The horror genre wasn't that far down the list, with one quarter of people who took the survey saying they liked horror films, and it being the fourth most popular genre of 8. As in our focus group survey we can say this is because of horror being a strange genre to like as it makes you nervous and gives you thrills so people may not say they prefer it but would still enjoy watching it. It could also be due to the fact that more females answered our survey than males, as in our audience research we found horror to be much widely preferred by males.

What influences you to see a film the most?

The most popular ranking of the possible influences was:

1. Trailer
2. Poster
3. Magazine Reviews
4. Awards
5. Actors
6. Directors/Producers
7. Website reviews/Awards

The most popular number one influence was trailer, which is perfect considering our main task is the trailer. We were less surprised with this ranking than with our focus group as we thought that poster would be in the second spot, unlike in the focus group. The only concern with this post is the fact that awards is fairly high up on the list as we didn't include any awards in our trailer or either of our ancillary tasks. This was due to the fact the majority of the horror films we researched never had any awards and most horror films generally don't get awards. However it's still below our main and ancillary tasks so we don't need to take into account too much.

Which types of films interest you the most?

Independent/Arthouse - 10
Hollywood - 8
British - 5
Foreign/Subtitled Films - 4

One person also said they didn't mind where it came from. We are very pleased with these results for this question as our trailer was made with no budget and so must have aspects of indie/arthouse films, as well as trying to give off a Hollywood film, which are our two most popular options. It's also obviously British, letting us reach more of our niche audience.

What genre do you think my film was?

Everyone answered either Horror (Psychological) or Horror (Thriller), with 9 stating the thriller sub genre and 8 stating the psychological sub genre. This was great as we know we portrayed the genre well. The sub genre for our film was a little bit harder for most people to define. As in the focus group, we can put this down to either lack of knowledge of horror sub genres or the lack of ability to differentiate between them.

Was the narrative clear?

Everyone answered yes to this question which was very good feedback, with one respondent even saying "The narrative was very clear but with enough tension and changing of scene within the trailer to intrigue you and not ruin the whole story." which we were very happy to receive and find out that what we were aiming for was reached.

What aspects of my trailer would persuade you to watch the film?

Actors - 8
Camerawork - 7
Lighting - 5
Directors - 4
Editing - 4
Characters - 3
Graphics - 2
Genre - 2

Actors being the highest up this list is perfect for us as we have showcased our actors massively on both the graphics of our trailer and the poster, as well as having our main actor, Conor, on the magazine cover just as himself not as the character he plays in the film, suggesting he's already a famous actor, with the words "Conor Tottenham is back". Camerawork was then second on our list followed by lighting, which confirmed the fact that the stereotypical camerawork/lighting used in most horror films worked in ours. Directors was also fairly high up on the list which is good as we showcased them as well in our trailer and poster, although nowhere near as much.


Magazine and Poster interviews/vox pops

Below is a video in which we interviewed several different people who were in our target audience about our poster and magazine cover. They stated what they liked and disliked as well as saying what worked well and what didn't. We noticed that several of them liked the tagline of the poster, which we added at a very late draft of our poster and so we're glad we included that. We also noticed that they liked the fact the same font was used throughout for our title, which we purposefully decided to do and already thought would work well. We also received positive feedback on the image in the middle of the eye of the poster as well as the blood splatter font of the names at the bottom. There was hardly any negative feedback on the poster and we think the poster went down perfectly. For the magazine a couple of points were made about the main image used, it not being a high enough quality, or not the right picture of the actor. One of them also said they didn't like the use of the gold font but another stated they liked the contrast from black background to the gold font so there were mixed reviews. One person even said if they were to buy a magazine that would be the kind they would buy, which is very good feedback.

Evaluation 2 JB/EA

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation 1 JB/EA

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”.