Research Development

Whilst researching horror/slasher movies with teenage stars I come across a cult film from the 90's. 'I know what you did last summer' was seen as a stereotypical view at a accident out of control that changes the group of teenagers lives forever, forcing an urban legend come true to track down the teenagers who left him for dead and take a vendetta. I chose to post about this film as I felt it was very similar to our storyline and there are elements that could help us when producing our trailers, posters and magazine covers. There are use of stereotypical male and female characters such as The Jock, The Beauty Queen, The Timid Nerd etc. The poster is character driven which is why I chose to look at it as we decided that we would make our posters character driven and analysing this poster could help ours represent a professional one. -Clark Warburton

As a group we also discussed the idea of featuring handheld/home video style shots throughout our trailer, in that of the style of films like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. We liked the idea of how this technique really adds a sense of realism to a film, and makes you feel more connected to the characters. This causes the audience to feel a much larger sense of fear and upset when the characters are captured or killed, which is ideal when trying to create effective products. We initially considered creating the full trailer using this handheld camera technique, however we then considered the fact that this would mean not creating some of the shots we have already briefly discussed, for example a shot of a character looking in a bathroom mirror, with a brief glimpse of the antagonist moving past behind her, or a shot of the antagonist moving through some trees, watching the group of teenagers camping. We are also aware that the use of this technique throughout the full trailer could possibly simply make our full product look unprofessional, which is something we don't want to happen. However, now that we have a better idea of the storyline of our film, it is possible to compromise with our plans on camera technique, and we could possibly use a combination of home video style shots and average film shots. If, like we plan to, we begin our trailer with shots of a group of teenagers camping in some woods, where something creepy happens and they are chased by some kind of masked man, it could look really effective if we created some of these shots in the home video style, then inserting some intertitles, and then using normal shots throughout the rest of the trailer, to ensure we can involve some of our planned shots and illustrate our camera skills. We will create some test shots of this type of camera technique before coming to any firm decisions.

If we do decide to feature this camera technique in our trailer, this would have an impact on our film poster image. We could still create a posed shot of the film characters, or we could however create a shot of a character as if it is caught from a video someone is filming of themself, similar to The Blair Witch Project film poster. This communicated to the audience what they can expect from the film, and this is something which really appeals to a considerable amount of people, as demonstrated by the enthusiasm for films like the recently released Paranormal Activity. - Rebecca Hart