Final Film Trailer

This is the final version of our film trailer, we had to change the order of some of our shots as one of the conventions of a film trailer is that it isn’t in a linear order and to begin with, our trailer was in chronological order. We also added more transitions during the running scenes to increase the tension and to make our trailer more exciting and added a voice over at the beginning to tell a bit more of the story. Overall, I am pleased with the end result as I think that it would encourage our target audience to view our film and I think that it represents the genre of Horror/Thriller really well.

Age Rating Screen

This is the age rating screen I made to go at the beginning of our trailer, it is important as it shows what age group our film is aimed at – late teens and adults. I created this image on ‘Microsoft Word’ by changing the background to green and inserting a table. I then merged some of the columns in the table and typed the text, using an American version as inspiration although instead of putting ‘By the Motion Picture Association of America’ I instead put ‘By the British Board of Film Classification’ as this is more relevant to our trailer. Finally, I got an image of the ‘15’ off of the internet and the logo used in the American version.

Tagline Ideas and Title Ideas

Tagline Ideas

We had a lot of ideas for our tagline because we wanted to use a line or a couple of lines from the rhyme, this meant that there were a lot of lines to chose from. We looked at different lines and analysed them in relation to the conventions of a film tagline:

• Relevance to the film
• Relevance to the genre
• Whether or not it is memorable and catchy

In the end we decided on "If you go down to the woods today, you'd better not go alone..." because we felt that this was the best tagline as it links to the trailer really well and it almost sounds like a warning.

Title Ideas

We had problems with the title for our film as we had two ideas – ‘Beneath the Trees’ and ‘The Picnic’. Both of these titles link to the rhyme and would work well with our film, however, we found it hard to pick between them. We did a small survey by asking different people with title they thought was best but found that they were both fairly popular. We eventually decided on ‘The Picnic’ as we felt that‘Beneath the Trees’ was a bit too wordy and didn’t sound as ominous and ‘The Picnic’ did. Also, using the word ‘The’ in front of it shows that there is something important about this picnic and that it is not just your average day out. I also thought that ‘Beneath the Trees’ was too close to the rhyme and that ‘The Picnic’ was slightly more subtle but still with a link.

Filming and Editing images

This is a screen grab from iMovie showing part of the editing process - this image shows the preview screen, the editing section and all of the film clips we have..

This screen grab shows all of the film clips we have filmed and gone through to find the parts we needed for our trailer.

This screen grab shows all of the clips we selected and edited, along with the music and titles. It also shows the transitions we used and how many different sounds clips we had to overlay in our trailer so that the music and the story can be heard clearly all the way through.

This is an image showing me filming the part of the trailer right at the beginning where the characters are walking down the stairs and entering the woods.

Production Company Logo

I made our production company logo on Macromedia Fireworks because we wanted it to be animated. I made it by firstly changing the background colour to black; I then found an interesting font that seemed creepy and suited the genre of our trailer. Next I changed the text colour to red to make it seem like the name was being written in blood. Then I began writing the text, I did it bit by bit, creating a new layer after every part so that when it is played at normal speed it looks as if the title is writing itself in blood. Finally, I added the red dots that go across the screen from right to left to give the impression of blood splattering across the screen. I liked this effect as our production company name is ‘HCS Horror’ so it makes sense to have a logo that reflects the horror genre.

Trailer Music

This is a very basic version of the music we are going to use in our trailer. The tune is from the rhyme the Teddy Bear's Picnic, it was made using Garage Band so that it could be altered and edited to fit in with the different parts of the trailer. For example, when there is more tension and suspense in the trailer, the music will be faster and higher pitched to help to exaggerate this and to make the audience feel the tension. Also, when the story is being told by Claire, the volume of the music will be lower so that the audience can hear everything she is saying. We did consider leaving the music out of this part completely but music is very important in a trailer and we decided that it was better to have the constant reference to the Teddy Bear's Picnic all the way through the trailer.

Sheet Music

This is an image of the sheet music for the Teddy Bears Picnic rhyme, the highlighted parts of the tune are the bits we used in our trailer. The music had to be recorded in sections as Garage Band would only allow so many piano keys on the screen at a time. After all three of the sections were recorded, they were edited together in Garage Band to create the full tune.