Finished Horror Trailer

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 4

The Crazies Full Analysis

The Crazies full film analysis

The crazies is a film about an accidental toxin spill in a small towns lake (Ogden Marsh, Iowa) and it slowly spreads around the town leaving the citizens infected which turn them into zombie like creature who have no self-control over themselves and are psychological turned into brutal killers who target normal living things in this case the surviving people. The film was originally written by George A. Romero in the 70’s as the original film was released in 1973. However the screenplay writers for the 2010 version were Scott Kosar and Ray Wright. It was directed by Breck Eisner who has directed a current 10 titles some of which being TV shows. The main stars in the were Timothy Olyphant who played David the sheriff, then there was his pregnant wife Radha Mitchell known as Judy, alongside them was his Deputy Russell Clank played by Joe Anderson. Later on in the film you meet the last main character who is Becca played by Danielle Farnum, these are the four main characters that fight for their survival.

The narrative structure that the film follows is Todorovs narrative structure, it follows the 5 stages he came up with which a horror film follows. At the start they are in a calm state of equilibrium all in a happy society where it looks like nothing could touch them and they all get along very well. The second phase of his theory is the disruption by an action, this is when they are at the baseball game and the man walks out with a gun and disrupts the peace and shocks everyone. They don’t fully understand what is happening just yet they notice strange things are happening but until the first sighting of a psychotic person it doesn’t fully sink in. The 3 of them investigate into what has happened to work out more; they discover it was the toxin spill in the lake that caused the disruption of the equilibrium. They then recognise something isn’t right and look further into it, and come across many boundaries on the way. They come across a camp where the government who are trying to cure the infected this is the attempt to repair the disruption but it gets over run by a walker which upsets the equilibrium again. Then finally they get away and slowly you see the equilibrium being reinstated.

This horror thriller mystery genre sticks with most of the conventions of a horror film. You could say the costumes worn by the characters go with the stereotypical horror theme. Especially the American sheriff (main character) straight away by what he is wearing you can tell he is the main protagonist and throughout the film he is going to lead a big part within it. He always keeps the costume on and is always in the leading role. He stinks to his policing instincts to get the group through the terror and hurdles they come across. The other characters are just normal civilians in normal attire so you can’t really see if they are important or not. The setting of the film is in an old remote American Hillbilly town; straight away any viewer knows something weird or bad always happens to a town like this, from the chainsaw massacre to Jason Voorhees. When the horror starts to kick in the setting just enhances the horror behind it because you know they are alone and the nearest city and normal civilisation seems miles away from them. They don’t really leave this area throughout the film they just go through different locations within the setting.  The décor of the setting is all quite old and out of place décor not something you would see in the next city. the general outlook of the place is outdated that why the psychotic killers goes so well with the setting because it just makes the whole film a lot more creepier for the viewer. You don’t really get much music within the film. There is more silence to create the tense feeling for the audience. The villains aren’t  don’t actually know what they are doing so I wouldn’t class them as villains or bad people because they have just suffered from a government toxin spill which has caused there psychotic ways it’s just unfortunate they go for other humans.

In summary I believe this film goes with Todorovs theory and conventions. It sticks to all 5 of the criteria throughout the film. The film outdone itself profit wise and all in all was a great success. 

Audience Research Independent

Audience Research Independent

When coming to the final conclusion of what our horror trailer was going to entail and how we were going to go about doing it, was partly influenced by the research we done. We put together a few ideas and sent them out on questionnaires and the feedback we got back was all very positive towards the idea we wanted to go with. Which was the modern social network killer, We researched into how many people aged 16-19 used social networking sites and out of the questionnaires I got back I discovered 95% used them.  We also asked about random event invites or random adds and how they felt towards them if it was spam we told them to leave it but if it wasn’t we wanted to get a general outlook on whether it did make people curious as to whether they could be on the bad side of life. Only a small 12% reported back they’ve ever thought this. So we went for our idea to put it into perspective for the people viewing it.

Filming Schedule

Filming schedule

We made a filming schedule time table at the start of the process to help organise when and where we were filming and the time frames in which we were going to do it. We done all the filming in a certain order to make the editing easier for ourselves instead of filming bits and bots from each scene then putting it all together at the end. We got our basis and then worked around it. 
This was our schedule:

17/12/12- We began to film the college shots, we done them in the afternoon so it gave off a more relaxed and normal college feel to it as if we'd done it in the morning we would of came across quite tired and not as relaxed towards the acting of the shot

18/12/12- We finished all the college shots and uploaded them on to our system to get the starting shots in order.

28/12/12- When we came back from the Christmas holidays we got straight back into filming and this is the date we filmed our computer shots where the group is made, we went to one of our teams house to film this shot as we needed a dark room with a computer to give it the night time effect we went for.

5/1/13- This day we filmed our alleyway shots of the killer running down it and the three friends walking up it we filmed them both at the same time as we wanted to give them the same time of day affect to the sot to make the viewer question if the killer is just behind them. We chose to do this shot around midday as no one would of been walking around at that time and we had it private to get the shots we needed with enough time to focus on getting them accurate

7/1/13- Filmed our crucial shots which gave our trailer the religious factor. This was when we filmed the church and graveyard shots, we done this early so not many people saw what we were doing and we did get the church's permission before we filmed so they gave us all the time we needed to get the shots just right.

20/1/13- We filmed our final shot and this was the chase scene where we went to Caister beach and used the empty dunes to give the effect of loneliness and no escape from the killer. With no one to hear you and see what's happening  

Full Film Idea

Full Film Idea

Our movie trailer is called ‘.Com’ we came up with this name because it revolves around the dangers and potential threats of social networking in this day and age, we made a trailer to portray one of the worst scenarios from the social networking world.

Our trailer is based around the idea of a person signing his group of friends up to a what seems to be harmless website called ‘how you will die’. Having this sort of thing on a social network you wouldn't usually think anything of it but throughout or trailer you see not to always trust what you think is just a bit of harmless fun between you and your friends. We came up with the idea to get one person to sign his friends up as a bit of fun but little do they know on the other side of the website is actually a killer waiting for innocent naive students/people to sign up to it. and little does Chris (character signing them up) know that the killer will try kill them off one by one exactly how he’s told them on the website.

We decided to make the killer highly religious to put that religious twist on the trailer to show there is a reason for killing the people on the website and it’s not just random killing. The story behind the religious part is we went for the message from God idea telling him to kill people who have sinned and to do it he has to set up the website to pin point the sinners amongst the area he is in. By doing this we challenged the whole idea of God sending a message down to Jesus to sacrifice himself to save us as we done the opposite God sent down a message to our killer to kill the people to save them. We believed this gave our trailer a bit more of a gripping deeper story line and would test people’s beliefs in good and evil.

We all agreed our target audience was mainly the male gender aged around 16-20 because it’s based around college students and based in a college setting so many people this age can relate to the surroundings and the characters involved. We came to the conclusion our film would come under the sub-genre under horror as a religious slasher. We have similar aspects to ‘final destination’ where the students are toying with death and trying to dodge faith after seeing how they are going die. Also we followed the brutal and bloody deaths.

Our trailer contained binary opposition, as it had the idea of good vs evil in the killers mind. He believed that he was doing good by listening to God, when in reality all the viewers and people in society know he was going against all forms of social norms. 

Movie Poster

 

With my movie poster i went for the minimilistic look to keep it basic and straight to the point. i got my final idea from the scream 4 poster. you can see the way i have used this poster to base mine on, by the way the poster is set out 

 

 

My Poster

 

 

 

Poster i used as a guide

Recce Report

General Audience Research

General Audience Research

The general people to watch horror films are either people who get a thrill out of a scare and enjoy watching graphic, gory scenes of violence for their own pleasure. Or people who are just looking for a fright once and a while.  Horror films have been attracting people since the start of cinema, psychiatrists have found horror films have been found to spark certain emotions of fear and dread in almost everyone who watches them. Throughout most people’s lives we have been left with a mental image or thought from watching a horror film/s this is the sort of adrenaline people look for when watching horror films.

People have found the main motives to watching horror films are finding the need for excitement, the desire to feel intense emotions and to get away from everyday problems. Many horror films go against the everyday social norms in society, many films give the viewer a buzz mentally but horror films give off a different kind of buzz for the viewer, ass it’s not every day you get to see a violent murder or a sadistic killer on the loose brutally hurting or doing things to people. The main viewer found to enjoy horror films are the male gender age 16 and up usually single or in groups of males. They seem to look for ‘sensation-seeking’ this is a form of pleasure they get from watching horror films, especially in groups of people mainly woman as it can show off their ‘masculine’ side proving they can watch horror films and brave through all they throw at you

Generally the viewers will either watch a horror film in a safe surrounding so they don’t feel threatened by what happening around them and their anxiety levels won’t get to the point of paranoid.  The horror films that scare and attract people the most are the ones proven to be a real life story (remake of what happened) these draw people to think and question about their everyday life and the things going on around you because you will always have it playing on your mind, this is one form of pleasure people get from it knowing that it could be happening around you. The genre has been around for ages and will always be there but the ideas are running out but the fright factor people go for will always be there. 

Shot List

These are the shot lists our group came up with before shooting our trailer throughout the filming we came up with new ideas and changed some of the original ideas, we wrote the changes and new format of the trailer on the page at the bottom right on the photo 

Original Brainstormed Ideas

Finished Horror Magazine

Poster Draft

Magazine Draft

Props and Costume

Props and costumes

Props:

The props we used within our trailer went with the stereotypical horror props usually used by most films.

• knife 
• car
• cricket bat 
• crucifix 
• fake blood

Costume:

we didn't really venture into costumes we just used normal clothing, so it gave off the impression that anyone could be a killer

Friendship group:

• normal everyday clothing

Killer:

• denim jacket
• jeans
• wellies 

Role of Production

The role of the production company

The production company can be looked at as the heart of the film because the production company takes care of almost everything from advertising to budgeting, the main thing they do is promote the movie by any means possible. They basically take care of the whole development of a film, they only take charge once the final script is write up read over and approved.

What they do after that is they go into what’s called the pre-production stage this is where they production team will come together to find the location, sets props look at the financial figures needed and find the suitable actors for the roles in the film the people in charge of picking these things and people are the producer, director and casting director. Once it’s past all this they enter the filming stage after this not many films are cancelled unless major problems like financial issue etc. Once filmed the footage is then passed onto the post production which is handled by a different team within the production company if it’s a big company if not it’s then passed to another production company to finish it off, this entails any editing, re-filming,  visual effects, dialogue and so on.

The marketing is also launched when the post production is being done, the production company also take care of this. Within this it involves recording, releasing  and funding the trailer and getting it seen by the national viewers. Also they make posters and get them up in the best places they can. If it’s a big production company like Warner Brothers they normally deal with big productions and when they are dealing with it you know from their reputation it’s going to be a big and good film. With a production company like this they keep everything under one name and do everything themselves. What I mean by this is they have enough financial backing from the other media conglomerates going in and out of the company to financially back everything from their own source of money.

There are two different types of production company, I've already used one, Warner Brothers but the other type is one that deals with the pre-production then pass it on to the post production team.  So they have sister or parent companies that deals with all the rest of the forming of the film such as the advertising etc. a company that deals like this is Paramount Pictures, as they let their sister company deal with the advertising front. 

Magazine Analyses

History of Horror Character

History of Horror Character

Jason Voorhees

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S8YFTcEDME

            

Jason Voorhees was born in 1969 he was first seen in the film as a young deformed boy who was brought to crystal lake camp by his mother but due to his deformed condition he was neglected by the camps counsellors and was led to believed he drowned in the lake. His mother (Pamela Voorhees) found out about this and went on a killing spree (1980) but the last counsellor managed to fight back against his mother and beheaded her and Jason saw this event happen and was then hearing voices telling him to avenge himself and his mother. So throughout each remake he is this psychologically messed up creature haunting the Crystal Lake. He goes about each film brutally killing people and constantly seeking revenge for him and his mother.

His appearance in each film has changed throughout each ‘Friday the 13^th’ film, his clothes are always dated to the film, and he’s always given the rough dirty hermit look. The clothes he wears suit the living conditions they portray him to have. The one thing that has always stayed the same is he wears an iconic mask throughout the films apart from the first one when he was first seen where he put a sack over his head and looked like a scarecrow. The iconic mask is the dirty blood stained hockey mask.

The Friday the 13^th series has become that big to the point where it’s a franchise film brand. From the original film in 1980 they branched off a part 2 &3 then a final chapter all in all in 4 years then in 1985 they had the rebirth of Jason and from this they went on to part 6, 7 and 8 but in 8 they made it more real by changing the location the Manhattan, bringing him into the real world, this was in 1989. The next film we see him is 1993 where he is still on the rampage. He then meets Freddie Krueger (nightmare on Elm Street’s killer) where Freddie manipulates Jason from his hell and sends him to do his dirty work. Jason catches on and they find a way to get him back to Crystal Lake. The latest Friday the 13^th film to date is the remake of the first Friday the 13^th this was released in 2009. They have written up the part 2 to this and it’s hopefully going to be released in 2013.