Possible Characters in Thriller trailer

There are lots of different characters that could be in a thriller film these could be, mum, dad, teacher, son, daughter, police, old person etc. There could be any character in a thriller film, for example the police man doesn't have to be an actual police man in a thriller film he could be just an everyday man but his job might be a police officer but during the time of the film he could be off duty therefore the audience wouldn't actually know that he works for the police. Many thriller films for example 'The Last House on the Left' have a mum or dad with a son or daughter. This is probably a common convention as lots of thriller films are based on everyday life of a family, couples or a group of things etc.

Technology

There is a lot of technology involved when making a film trailer. The different things I will be using to make this successful are iMac, iMovie, final cut express, video camera, iPad, Microsoft word, YouTube and garage band.

The first thing I needed to start even making the film was a video camera. This was the main thing because we needed it to even start recording the film. We used a video camera for every filming session as it was the best thing to use when filming for our film trailer. Another thing we need to use to create our film trailer is Final Cut Express and iMovie. These are important because you have to upload the recorded pieces onto iMovie and then import them into Final Cut Express and start editing the trailer and putting it all together. These are both important because you need to cut bits out and edit parts of the film when you're putting it together to make it into a trailer. The other thing we use is the iMacs, these are important as they are what we use to do all our work on, we use them for blogging, editing etc. Another thing we used was YouTube to look at film trailers that already exist from our genre. This was useful because we could see what thriller films that normally exist contain. Also we need to use Garage Band on the iMacs to be able to make music for our film trailer. This was really important as we cant use songs that already exist so we need Garage Band to create our own thriller style music to edit onto our trailer. Another thing that I used was my iPad, this was to get ideas from other thriller trailers via YouTube. I also use my iPad to blog when I am at home etc.

Conventions of Genres

Each film fits in to a different category called a genre. There are different genres, they are horror, thriller, comedy, romance, and action etc, each of these different genres have different conventions.
The conventions of a horror film are blood/gore, killing, male being the killer, dark settings, guns etc. These are typical conventions of a horror film, this means this is what normally happens in a horror film and its what people expect to see. As soon as you recognise one of these conventions in a film you would know straight away that its a horror film.
The conventions of a thriller film are dark settings, weapons, chases etc. These are the typical things you would expect to see in a thriller film. Normally in a thriller you wouldn't see any blood or gore that's normally how you can tell that its a horror, they normally just try to kill people but don't normally show the blood/gory parts. Some people might prefer to watch a thriller film if they aren't into seeing blood etc.
The conventions of a comedy film are normal everyday setting, number of different characters etc. When watching a comedy film you can normally tell straight away that's its comedy as you would normally find most things that happen or are said funny. The setting would normally light and in an everyday setting and there would normally be an average looking person. Comedy
films are easy to establish and they are popular.
The conventions of a romance film are couples, cute settings such as house/hotel/beach, red or white colours etc. It is normally quite easy to tell if a film is a romantic film because you would normally expect there to be a couple in it and they would normally set the film in a house or a calm area.
The conventions of an action film are, car chase, weapons, city setting etc. Most action films normally have a antagonist and a protagonist, its normally a male who is the chaser and they sometimes have females in. Car chases are really popular and common in an action film as they normally chase one another and use cars etc. They normally carry lots of weapons in actual films such as guns, bombs etc.


Each genre contains different conventions some are similar and some are nothing alike. From researching all the different genres I think that the best one to create a film trailer for would be a thriller because it leaves you with a lot of ideas of what you can do. For example you could have your film as someone being stalked/followed etc.

Film Poster Draft/Template

As well as making a film trailer we also have to make a film poster and magazine front cover. Above is a drawing draft of our film poster. As you can see from the template that the main background of the poster will be images, half of it will be of the main character. The title will be the main thing at the top of the page and this will be in big bold red writing. Also from the title we will add an effect on Photoshop where it looks like there is blood dripping from the title to add effect. On the left hand side of the poster we will have a big picture of the main character. This will take up the majority of the poster because we want this to stand out as she is the main character in the film. This picture will be edited as well on Photoshop to make her look scary etc. At the bottom on the right side we will have a tag line and the release date which will also be in red writing. The background of the poster will be just plain white as we thought this would make everything else on the poster stand out to the audience. At the centre at the side of the main image we will have a picture of the other characters that are seen in our film trailer, this will also take up more room. The drawing of the poster is just a draft so the real thing might end up looking a little different.

Evaluation of the lesson

The first part of the lesson I decided to look through my blog posts I had already made and see what I can add or what needs changing. After that me and Lauren decided that we needed to go film some extra bits with Emily as we had enough time. We filmed a few short clips of Emily which we will add into our trailer when we put it all together. I think the filming went well as what we filmed went really well and we are definitely adding it into our trailer. The things I would change would be that I think we could of filmed in a few more locations so the trailer looks like its over a period of time. Also my blog I think I should evaluate on each post better.

Character Pinterest

We have decided to make a character Pinterest for our main character. The main character in our film is a girl called Jess who is played by Darianne. We chose to make a character Pinterest for our main character because we had to make our own we thought it would be a good idea to make a character one as if it was a real film. 

Target Audience

We had to decide on a target audience for our film so we know who we are aiming our film at. We decided that we are aiming our film at ....... year olds. This is because we thought they would be the suitable age group to watch our film. Once we had decided the age group we are aiming our film at we then had more ideas of what we could put in our film.

Character List

Main Characters
Jess Collins (Darianne Kanda)
Chloe Robinson (Yasmin Hemans-Davis)
Hollie Brooks (Rebecca Rahman)
Katie James (Jess Lever)

Other Characters
Jasmine Evans (Megan Peltell)
Emily Johnson (Lauren Wantling)

Costumes and Props

The costumes that our characters will be wearing are casual everyday clothes. This is because the story line for our film is about a group of friends who go out into the woods camping.


The main character will be wearing jeans and a jumper.The other character that is seen will be wearing boots, jeans and a navy blue coat. Other characters in the trailer will also be in casual clothing as they are a group of girls going out together.


Props is what is used in the film for example one of the props in our film trailer is the car, this is the main thing as one of the girls is able to drive and drives them to the woods. Other things include phones, keys etc.

Animatic

Storyboard

This is our story board that we created to give us an idea of the events that are going to happen in  our film trailer. These were useful because when we start to film we can use this as a guideline so we know what we need to film. Also this is a useful thing because we now need to enlarge the images so that we can create our animatic. That is where the pictures will be made into a video so we can see what it would look like when it's filmed  and edited together. This will be helpful as we know we won't go wrong with filming because we have planned ahead everything we need to film. I think if I was to do this again I would add a lot more drawings to make it longer and draw them with more detail, however I think this went well because it will help us have a rough idea of what we are going to do.  

Script

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual discovery tool that people use to collect ideas for their different projects and interests. People create and share collections of visual bookmarks that they use to do things like plan trips and projects, organize events or save articles and recipes. To help with the planning on my blog I used this website. This was useful as I was able to save lots of different images to do with the genre we are doing for our film trailer. For example from the picture above I pinned a few different films such as Harpers Island and Scream. This was useful as it helped us plan for our own filming for the trailer as it gave us inspiration from other films so we could make our own trailer as realistic as possible. If I was to use Pinterest again I think I would add a lot more pins and maybe create my own pins to add to my page to help me with more planning. The useful thing about using this was that it did give us a lot more ideas because you could easily search a word such as 'thriller' and it would bring up lots of different thriller films that already exist.

Film/age Certificates

Film ratings are decided by the British Board of Film Classification and they have been since 1912. Before this there were no agreed rating standards and local councils came up with their own. For cinema releases the British board of film classification have no legal power and the council decide who should be admired to a certain film. Each film has a film certificate, this indicates who the film is aimed at and who is able to watch it. If a film has the certificate of U this means it's suitable for everyone to watch, from babies to old people. If the if has a certificate of PG the it means that if a child is to watch it then they should be accompanied by an adult. If a film has the certificate of 12a then this means that under 12 year olds need an adult. If the film just has a 12 then this means it's only suitable for those who are over 12 years old. If it has a 15 then you must be 15 years old or older and an 18 means you must be over the age of 18. 

Harpers Island

After doing some independent research about different films in the thriller genre I have found out that there is a film that is similar to what we are doing our film trailer on. The plot we came up with is that there are a group of girls who go camping and they all go missing one by one and it turns out that it's one of the girls who is killing/kidnapping them all. After reading the back of the film case I found out that this film is based on a group of people who go on an island for a wedding and it's an island where people had previously been killed and whilst they are on the island they go missing one by one and the person killing them turns out to be one of the men that went to the island with them and was friends with us. After realising this I decided to find the trailer to the film to give us a bit more inspiration. 

Gone Film Reviews

I decided to do some more research into thriller films and decided to look at different reviews people have left about the film over all. I thought this would be useful because then we can see what people look for in a thriller films and take on board all the criticisms people have left. Both the reviews above that I found for this film both say how good they thought that the film was. One critique that people left about the film was that it's a really simple plot and that the name of the film gives away straight away what is going to happen. Also people said how they thought it would be a better film if they thought of a better ending for it. Over all people said this film was a good film and from watching the trailer to this film I would agree with what people are saying. 

Idea for Our Opening

We have decided on an idea we think we might use for the beggining of our trailer. We have been looking at a few different trailers from the same genre we are using, thriller. We have took a few ideas from trailers that already exist and think that they would work well when we create our own trailer. The idea we have come up with is that the opening of our trailer will be a shot of the girls packing things into the boot of the car, afterwards we will see the boot slam shut and then we will introduce our instiution. We got this idea from looking at different thriller trailers as many of them do this and we thought it worked really well. An example of a trailer that does this is the trailer for the film 'Gone'. In this film they introduce the main two characters and you see them talking, then they bring in the institutions and then move on to the rest of the trailer. This was the first idea we came up with when we were storyboarding our trailer and we think we might use this when we start to make our trailer.

Locations and Characters

We came up with a few ideas where we are thinking we might locate our film trailer, these aren't for definite they are just ideas

These are:
Forest
Woof
Road
Car
Tent
House
Field
Bedroom
Living room
Park

Also we have decided that we are going to have about 4/5 characters in our trailer, 1 main character who is the killer and 3 others who will be in it.

Questionnaire results

Once we handed out our questionnaires we were able to collect them back in once been filled out and see what results we got. After they handed the questionnaires back in we made graphs of the results so that we could clearly see what people liked and didn't like. We wasn't able to create a graph for every question because some questions were open and others were closed, the closed questions were easy to be able to make a graph for. Above we have made a graph for questions 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8 and 9. The first question was a basic question asking if they were male or female, from the graph you can see that there is a bigger percentage of females who answered the questionnaire. The next question was asking which age category they fall into, this is a useful question because this way we can see who our main audience will be. From looking at the graphs you can see that the bigger amount of people were only 16-18 and then 22-25 and 26-29 had an equal amount. You can also see from that graph that there was no one over 30 who filled out a questionnaire. From seeing them results we can see that its mainly people who are aged 16-18 that will be interested in our film trailer. The next closed question that we asked our audience was if they prefer thriller or horror films, from the graph you can see that most people prefer to watch a thriller film. This could be because thriller films don't show much blood or killing etc. This was useful for us because it meant that we now know if we should make ours a thriller or a horror.

The next question we asked is who they would prefer to be the victim in a horror film, the graph we created shows that most people prefer a female to be the main victim. We thought this was strange but true because most horror films have the females as the victim which is a main convention. This was useful for us because we can then make a female in ours the victim so that it fits in with the normal conventions and its what the target audience like to see. From looking at the graph it shows that no one would like to see an old man as the victim. This is probably because its very rare you would find this happen anyway so most people wouldn't want to see this. The next question was to find out what had the best effect on the audiences emotions. From the graphs we can see that most people said it was music that effects their emotions the best. This was useful because now we know when we make the trailer that we need make the music a strong part as we know it will effect our audiences emotions best and make them carry on watching it and want to see the actual film. The next best answer was setting, this might be because most thrillers are set in a dark place such as a wood/forest, people might prefer this because they know its already a convention and would be expecting to see it anyway. From looking at the graph you can see that no one said that the narrative would effect their emotions the best, this might be because in a thriller its not normally the narrative your looking for.

Another question that we asked our audience was how often they watch films, the graph shows that most people watch them either once or twice a week. This shows that the audience are a active audience and watch films quite often. The last question was asking if they like to see blood and gore in a film, most people said yes, this shows that many people watching these films would prefer to see it in them, this is useful because when we make our trailer we know we need to add these in because this is what our target audience will be looking for.

Questionnaire

Above is a print screen of the questionnaire that we created to hand out to people to help with the planning for our trailer. We decided the questions by ourselves as we thought them particular questions would help give us some ideas on what to include in our trailer and also find out about our target audience. The second question on our questionnaire is 'What is your age group?' This question will find some things out about the person doing our questionnaire and also tell us what age would then be suitable for our film we make. We asked a range of questions, open and closed. A few of the open questions were helpful because one of them was asking what there favourite horror film was, this was useful because we was able to search some of the films people said and watch their trailer to see what ideas we could get.

We also asked people what things in films have the best effect on their emotions, this was useful because we could see if music was a main thing in films that bring out peoples emotions, if so we then knew that we should make sure the music was really good if its what people like in a film. Also we asked if people liked to see blood and gore in films, this was useful because if our target audience said that they did then we would add this into our trailer as it would then attract them more. We handed this questionnaire out to 10 different people to find out more about audiences and what they like. If I was able to make this questionnaire again I would probably add more questions and also have more closed questions because they are more useful when it comes to finding out what they prefer etc.

Possible Titles

We came up with a few titles that could be a possibility that we might use, these are:
Pitch
Pitch Pyscho
Pitch survivors 
Abandon
Hidden in the silence 

We haven't actually decided what we are going to call our trailer yet but the ideas we had we will think about and see if we are actually going to use them or if we are going to think of something completely different. We came up with the idea 'pitch' because in our trailer they are going camping and we have a tent in our film so it fits in well. 

We also thought of a slogan that we might use on our magazine cover
"The truth is hidden in the silence..."

Font Research

I decided to do some research on different fonts we could use when we think of a title for our trailer. I have found 5 different fonts, the first one is a word package font and the other four are from a website called 'da font'. I chose to have a look on there because I saw they had some really interesting fonts that would probably fit our trailer. The two I really like out of these 5 are the 3rd and 4th ones. This is because I think they are suitable for the idea we have for our trailer where as the last one probably isn't as appropriate as it would probably suit a horror trailer not a thriller which is what we are doing. The third and fourth just look really spooky and thriller like so they fit really well with out genre. The first one I think is too plain and simple and doesn't really fit in with the thriller genre we chose.

Film Trailers

Plot

A group of friends go on a road trip camping, at night they sit around the fire telling ghost stories. That same night the friends start to go missing one by one, throughout the film one friend seems different to the others like a tag along to the group they seem to go slightly mental as the film processes, this will lead the viewer to believe that this friend is the kidnapper/killer. But in fact it is someone they least expect it to be.

Inital Ideas

Above is a mind map we created to show some initial ideas for the film trailer we are going to make. We have decided to look at different genres, thriller, horror and comedy. These are the different genres that we might consider making our film trailer on. As we made a thriller film opening for our AS last year, we thought about being able to use the skills we learnt and know and develop them and apply them to the work we will produce again this year. We came up with a mind map idea as it's an easy way to plan out our ideas, we decided what we would have to consider when making the trailer, for example the different settings, we have decided we will need a lot of different settings compared to the amount we had in our film last year, also we decided we would need quite a few characters, at least 2 main characters and other ones as well. After coming up with this mind map we have decided that it's made our ideas a lot clear and we can decide from there what we are actually going to do.