Final Cut - North Chamber Trailer

This is the final cut to our trailer for North Chamber.

Ancillary Task: Website

We created a website as a means of promotion for North Chamber, it can be viewed by following this link: http://redherringproducti.wix.com/northchamber

Ancillary Task: Poster

This is the final poster that was created to promote the film 'North Chamber'

Evaluation Task 4: Who were your audience and what did you learn from them?

Evaluation task 4 from rlabrgs

To complete this task I created a power point presentation with pictures and graphs to help promote my ideas. 

I Looked back at the research we had undertaken before creating out product to help me establish how I had learned from the audience to make my product more appealing to a wider audience. 

I also conducted post-production research to find out how well the product appeared to our target audience. 

Evaluation Task 3: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We intended to create a promotional package for a new film called North Chamber, to achieve this we created a website, designed a poster and most importantly we filmed a trailer. Through this we aimed to entertain and entice young audience of 16-21 with the hope that they would want to watch our full film in the cinemas. 

We had decided on the horror genre and and therefore conducted lots of primary research such as questionnaires and secondary research for example looking up IMDb statistics or BFI case studies. We had enough evidence to follow up common conventions of a horror genre film directed towards young adults (16-21). 

Further research involved looking up the conventions used within similar media texts. For example, I analysed the film trailer for ‘Carrie’ and I researched the conventions of a poster specifically horrors such as Insidious and Final destination. Finishing up with research about website convention using ‘Annabelle’ as an example. 

A lot of work went into the design of the ancillary tasks and the titles within the trailer this included genres, target audiences, storyline and also post-production issues such as fonts, titles and colours. 

A main theme throughout the trailer is the red ribbon in which the antagonist wears. We even emphasised this by only using 80% of the monochrome filter in the scenes set in the past and therefore the colour of the ribbon was visible. We decided to use a monochrome filter to make it clear to the audience that those scenes were set in the past and the coloured scenes were set in the future.We continued this red ribbon theme across all our platforms, in the poster for example we decreased the saturation to -100 which made the image black and white and we then painted back the ribbon in red. 

This picture resembles what is seen in the trailer and therefore whenever the audience sees the poster they will think back to the trailer and connect the two together. 

Following the theme of red we decided to use the colour red for the titles within the trailer on a black background, the black not only connotes death but also provides an ominous background and we continued the theme of red writing on black backgrounds across all the promotional items so that they are all in sync and look professional and sophisticated. For example, the website, poster and trailer all have the same title for, ‘North Chamber’ using the same font and colours.

The website further enhances  this theme by having a plain black background and all the sub-headings are written in red whilst the content is written in white to connote the binary opposition theme of good vs evil. Especially because within our film’s storyline the conventions of good vs evil are challenged when the protagonist becomes the antagonist. 

Costume was an extremely important aspect of the film in order for the audience to establish the difference between the modern day and the past. A lot of research and effort went in to getting a war-time look, not only within what the actors were wearing but also through mise-en-scene where no modern day objects could be seen within the shot and therefore we had to pick out specific rooms where the furniture was wooden for example. Props also required a lot of detail, for instance the diary that Cassandra writes in must be old-fashioned and written in using ink. 

Within the two ancillary tasks we wished to further promote our film on platforms in which moving images cannot be displayed. 

Overall I feel that the combination of the ancillary tasks and our main product work very effectively to promote the film North chamber. Similar themes follow throughout each product to ensure that the audience are aware of the genre and features of the film. I believe that if our film was real then we would have been able successfully sell the film through what we have created due to each section following common conventions closely which have proven to work. I do also believe however that simply through lack of experience our products to come off as quite amateur however this is due to us not being able to use professional equipment or graphic design softwares. 

Evaluation Task 2: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the production I used various technologies to help me complete my work and I am going to evaluate these and how I used them to complete my whole production including the trailer, poster and website. 

To begin with we had to conduct lots of research and pre-production planning. I used the website blogger to document everything that I did and I now have developed a detailed blog which demonstrates what I did and why, this includes changes that were made to improve the production and also research that I did to ensure that my production was a correct as possible. I am very familiar with this site having used it last year and therefore found it very easy to navigate around. I could very easily add a new blog post, view it and edit it if I wished to do so. I find the idea that I can edit my posts very useful because it means that I can either add content that I didn’t think of at the time of writing the post, but it also means I can change the layout etc if I wished to do so.

A feature which I found very handy this year but didn’t use last year was the draft feature, sometimes I would have left an important picture on my home computer so the draft feature meant that I could write up the rest of the post and save it as a draft so that when I was at home I knew that it needed completing. Furthermore I believe that I used the blog in a lot more detail than last year. This year I kept up to date with everything I did and I would document everything on the blog which proved extremely useful to refer back to during evaluation tasks or simply to find out what I had done on a certain day. 

In order to present information on my blog in more interesting ways than simply writing up many blogposts I used features such as Slideshare and Scribd to add more of a variety to the blog. It also allowed me to present information in it's original format such as a powerpoint presentation or a word document. 

I personally prefer the look of Scribd on my blog over Slideshare’s display. I feel as though the scroll system is more sophisticated and easier to use as well. Scribd was compatible with more formats of work which was better because I didn’t have to worry anymore about displaying my work onto the blog.

Further organisation technologies used at the beginning of our production was that my team and I created a joint dropbox account so that we could all gain access to shared data about the up and coming production and so on. An example is that after the call sheets were written up they would be uploaded to dropbox so that we all had a copy and this also meant that I could forward them to the actors.

When it came to planning the production there were a number of useful software's that we used, for example we wrote up the script on Celtx, it allowed us to create professional looking scripts which we could use ourselves as crew members but also send off to our actors who perhaps felt more like they were helping with a professional production than simply a friend’s student production.

It is very important that the actors felt that our production was properly organised and I believe that sending them a professional looking script along with a detailed call sheet provided the desired effect. I also hadn’t used Celtx last year which I believe was a big mistake, the script was done on Microsoft word and simply looked unprofessional and slightly confusing for not only the actors to understand but also for the crew to figure out what shot was next and so on.

After we had filmed the production we had to think about creating our 3 items of the promotional package. First of all we edited the trailer together, for this we used the editing software Pinnicle 15

I was already used to this software because we had used it last year during our AS Production so that was a definite benefit because we didn’t have to spend extra time learning how things worked.

This Software enabled us to add titles and logos to our trailer to make it look more official and professional. I've put in some screenshots to use as an example. It also allowed us to use a mix of both diegetic and non-diegetic music and sounds to really bring the trailer to life and make it seem believable.

However this software is also very old and therefore this restricted us on various occasions, for instance glitches would occur and we’d have to re-do certain sections and also sometimes there would be issues with saving where the programme would freeze and therefore we lost a days work and would have to re-do this.

Along with Pinnicle We used the software Audacity to add effects to particular sounds to give them more emphasis, for instance I added a number of different tracks together to help build the tension. Also we added various effects to a simple scream to create a harrowing and nightmarish noise.

To create the poster we used the editing software 'Photoshop' myself and the director are both Photography students and therefore this process was very simple because we were used to the software.

After these had been created we then though about how to distribute each section. We created a website on Wix as this is a website which allows us the create our own website and publish it as an official website. 

We also decided to create a number of social networking accounts to promote our work because we are aware of the rise in social networking and how it would be very easy for us to market our work to an audience of peers.

We used the social networking site Twitter to promote our trailer before and during release.   This was a very useful site because it allowed not only my friends and other general public to keep up to date with the film trailer but it was also a great place for cast and crew members to keep in touch with what was going on.

We also uploaded various behind the scenes and extra videos onto our vimeo accounts. I really like this site as it is fairly easy to use and navigate around. However it does take a very long time to process and upload videos which can be quite irritating and as we do not pay for our accounts we are restricted in some ways.

We decided to use Youtube to upload our final trailer onto because this is a much easier site that we are all more familiar with holding accounts of our own. Also using youtube we could create a professional looking ‘Red Herring Production’ account and upload our trailer onto that instead of simply using one of our own accounts.

Youtube was also an important part in our research phase because it enabled us to watch similar trailers with similar conventions to ours. I could then screenshot features and convert them to a PDF picture to help display research on my blog.

Overall I found the use of technology extremely important especially in comparison to last year, mainly because I had a lot more experience with the different softwares but also because I was a lot more adventurous and experimented with more softwares for example using Celtx to write up the script instead of a simple word document.

Evaluation Task 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Directors commentary from Rebecca Ainsworth on Vimeo.
I have recorded a Directors commentary to answer this evaluation task question. Here is the transcript:

After much debate we decided to call our trailer North Chamber, this was perhaps one of the most difficult decisions we had to make. In the end we entitled our product North Chamber due to this being the section of the school in which the main events and hauntings occur.

The first important decision we had to make as a group was which genre we wanted our piece to be, we made a unanimous decision to make a horror film not only because we believed that this would be fun to produce but also because we all love watching horror films too. Further ideas that provoked the horror genre was when we realised we would not be able to get the actors for say a romance or a chick flick. 

After we had decided on a horror genre before we could begin writing the story line we wanted to research into similar products and other horror trailers to look up common conventions. Not only this but we conducted a lot of primary research such as questionnaires and secondary research for instance looking at box office statistics on IMDb in order to find out who to market our trailer too and what the audience would like to see within a horror trailer in order to get them to watch the actual movie in the cinemas.

We decided to do so much research about the horror genre due to genres being so important in the film industry. John Fiske defines genres as ‘attempts to structure some order into the wide range of texts and meanings that circulate in our culture for the convenience of both producers and audience’. This implies that not only is genre important for the viewers to make an educated decision as to whether or not they will enjoy the movie but it is just as important for the producers and filmmakers to produce a movie with common conventions of the said genre it is in a sense a template for what they make and we can therefore make assumptions as to who the audience is and what they will or will not enjoy.

Through looking at horror genre conventions and also trailer conventions of similar products we found a number of important factors in which we incorporated into our own trailer. An example is the use of an isolated location. We found out that many horror movies are situated far away from the rest of the world and so we decided to choose a school building situated at the top of a hill in a small village.

Another example is that we decided during script writing that we would incorporate a monologue into the trailer; this is a common convention of a trailer and is not usually found in an actual movie. We decided to write a monologue to make sure our product didn't fall into becoming a short film.

Our main character Cassandra begins as a conventional Proppian character of being a female victim however she later challenges these conventions when she becomes the villain and haunts the others. She was played by a young girl named Kaitlyn and in fact all our characters were played by young children this proved to be a bigger challenge than we had expected for a number of reasons. Perhaps most noticeable by myself as the producer was the issue of arranging a time everyone could meet. I had to email parents back and forth and it became quite difficult for me, it would have been a lot easier if everyone was around our own age and therefore were on Facebook which would have enabled us to create a group chat however all our actors were too young for such events.

Despite having held auditions for our actors I found that many of them were not so good at fulfilling their intended roles. Perhaps this was because this was their first experience in front of a camera so probably felt more shy than usual.

However, overall I believe that the trailer was a success and this is proven by the very pleasing feedback we received from our audience who not only enjoyed the trailer but they understood certain conventional aspects such as the genre being a horror and period drama.

Focus group feedback

North Chamber Focus Group from Rebecca Ainsworth on Vimeo.

We got together a group of peers to create a focus group to answer a couple of our questions so that we could get better feedback than we could from the questionnaires. It was quite pleasing to find they they all enjoyed and understood the trailer.

We produced a mind map of all the answers to the questions so we could get a better view of the reaction to the trailer.

Music

Music is a very important feature within trailers because not only can it help to establish genres and storylines but it can be used to make the audience feel a certain way, for this reason music is essential for horror trailers to build up tension felt by the audience and it can be used to scare them too.


Within our trailer we started off with a slow piano song which helps the audience feel sympathy towards Cassandra. For this we used a track called 'Mary' by Taylor Heyward.


For added effects within the trailer to help build tension we used a website called Incompetech and found a number of tracks on there called, Unlight, Red Letter and Awkward Meeting. We also used sound effects for example 'Spooky drone' which we found on a website called soundbible.

Fonts and logo design

Red Herring Productions

Creating the logo for the production company was a very important process, we used the name from our team member Sam's AS media production name and then updated the logo.

We chose a black background because it is in my opinion the most simplistic and professional background colour to use and also allows us to use a variety of other colours for the writing and pictures as they will not clash with the background.

We then had to choose the colour of the writing, usually for a horror genre related item a binary opposition colour of white is usually used however we decided on red because that gave an undertone of danger and death. 

We chose red and white for the fish because they are common colours used within horror related genres. 

On the trailer we decided to animate the logo slightly by fading in each fish one at a time and then the production name, it is a very simple yet effective animation. 

Ghost House Pictures



We chose to 'work together' with Ghost House Pictures because they are a company who produce horror films and therefore fitted perfectly with our film.

Looking at the films they produce, 'Poltergeist', 'Zombie Roadkill' and 'Evil Dead' it is made evident that they usually work with ghost or monster-type films.

We also chose to use Ghost House Pictures because their logo animation is very professional and we thought that this would make a great first impression on our trailer.

We did however cut off the beginning section of the animation simply to shorten down the opening sequence as we decided that it was a bit long and possibly boring.
North Chamber

For our title 'North Chamber' we decided to use red writing on a black background, we originally went for white writing to conform to the theory of binary oppositions with black vs white, good vs evil however we decided that it just looked like no thought or effort had gone into the title.

We then took a look at some recent horror film titles and found the film 'Annabelle', there title looked very sophisticated with the red writing and this also connoted ideas of death and danger.

At this point however, we had been using a font from a website named 'dafont' however when it was added to the trailer it looked very amateur and pixelated so in the end we decided to simply use 'New Times Roman' from the drop down list on Pinnacle. 

Ancillary Task: Website - Design Process

For one of our auxiliary tasks we decided to create a website as a form of promotion for our trailer ‘North Chamber’. It was created by Hannah Boardman, Sam Duxbury and Rebecca Ainsworth.

We used a website called Wix to help create our website because it allows us to use a template which is very useful especially because none of the production team are web designers and therefore using wix was simple to use and allowed us to easily create a professional looking website.

Once we had chosen the template we then needed to decide how we wanted our website to look, we decided that it would be more professional to have the website in-keeping with the colour schemes used for the logo, billing block and titles in the trailer and therefore changed the writing of the navigation toolbars to red and changed the background colour from a musky grey to black.

This black and red colour scheme keeps the website within the horror genre, you would not find a romance or comedy using these ominous colours and therefore when the audience opens the website they instantly get a scary and mysterious atmosphere.

We then had to choose which sub-heading to have in order to write detailed yet interesting pages for the viewers to read through.  To do this we drew out our options on a large piece of A3 paper. At first we wrote down all the possible pages that are usually found on a website but we then had to look at these ideas realistically, for instance we do not have the knowledge or equipment to create an interactive game.

Looking back at the common conventions of a website we had researched earlier we decided to use our production logo ‘Red Herring Productions’ as the header. This not only gives credit to the production company but also allows the audience to know that what they are viewing is official and professional.

This will be the header for every page. Along the top right there are links to Twitter and Facebook in which the viewer can get involved with our online presence.

We then needed to look at the footer of the website. Once again we looked back at our research and decided that the best items to put on the footer of the website we further links to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ along with our created hashtag ‘#NorthChamber’ so that the audience know that they can search the hashtag to keep up to date with the trailer and the film.

We also wrote a little credit sentence to promote Red Herring Productions and also to thank Wix for helping with the website.

In a website for a real movie you would usually find awards and ratings here too however we have not received any awards because our movie is not real.

Once we had decided on our sub-headings, header and footer we then had to look in detail at each page. Firstly we looked at the home page. This had to be eye-catching and appealing for the audience because this would be there first opinions of the website and perhaps the production as a whole.

Therefore we chose to display the trailer on this page as the viewer can watch this as soon as they open the website and hopefully become excited about the movie and wish to explore the rest of the website. 

We then realised however that the homepage doesn’t promote the actual film because the movie title is nowhere to be seen. 

I personally think that this looks much better now and more professional.

The next page is the ‘story’ page, here the viewer can read a little about what the movie is but without giving away any secrets or endings. For this page we used the synopsis that we had written prior to filming. 

We also used a picture from the journal that is featured in the trailer as through we are reading from this journal.

Originally we entitled this heading ‘Synopsis’ but we later decided that to an audience who do not use film terminology they would not know what this means and therefore perhaps not click on the page.

We then decided to write up a ‘cast and crew’ page, it is always exciting to be able to read about the actors and other people involved in the film and the audience might also feel a connection with the film more. 

We then added a gallery page in which the viewer can see film stills, behind the scenes photos and other exciting images and a behind the scenes page which show behind the scenes videos that we have filmed. 

For the reviews page we have asked friends and family to watch the trailer and send us a short sentence or paragraph about what they thought it was like and whether or not they enjoyed it and for what reasons. 

For an actual movie you would probably find that these reviews would be from newspapers or critics and would probably include ratings and/or awards.

Finally we decided that everyone loves a good competition, for this they simply had to share the website online on Twitter or Facebook and one person would get picked for the prize, this is a very good competition because it involves giving our film more promotion online. 

After having designed the website we then went on to look at the website on a mobile platform because we know that mobile devices are being a much larger platform for viewing on the internet and therefore the website should be compatible for mobile devices.

Overall I am very pleased with the website I think it looks quite professional and we have used a number of common website conventions in order to create a website which is fun and interesting as well as being informative and simple to use. 

Ancillary Task: Poster - Design Process

After completing the trailer we decided to design the poster, due to having already done the trailer we had a good idea about the colour schemes that we wanted. We already had a PDF copy of the title 'North Chamber' in red and the billing block which helped us create the rest of the poster to fit in with these colour schemes.

We screen-shotted the process during the creation of the poster and produced a powerpoint to explain what we did and why.

Creation of North Chamber Poster from hannahboardman

Ancillary Task: Poster DRAFT

This is the first version of the poster that was created by Hannah Boardman and Rebecca Ainsworth to help promote our new film, North Chamber.

Bullying scenes outtakes

We created an outtakes video for the cast members who were part of the bullying scenes so that they could see everything they filmed including clips that didn't make the final cut and also funny moments that were caught on camera. I personally think that this acts as a little thank you to the actors.

Online Promotion

The most effective way of advertising a movie is by using social media to promote the trailer and/or movie. Having thought about this Red Herring Productions decided to create a Twitter page to interact with our peers and promote our trailer @redherringfilms:

We created the hashtag #NorthChamber in order for our peers to keep up to date with our trailer and we can promote this hashtag for instance on the billing block on our poster or even at the end of the trailer. 

Soon we began to get noticed and our friends became interested in the page, especially loving the behind the scenes photos. They began to 'favourite' and 're-tweet' our tweets which further increases the promotion of the trailer as people who follow them will now also see our tweets. 

Creating the air raid siren

A main feature of our trailer is that the movie is based around events that happened during the evacuation time of the war. As another way to connote the wartime we decided to incorporate the sound of an air raid siren when we see the ghost of Cassandra walking towards the camera. This reminds the audience again about Cassandras past. 

First of all we found some tense music on soundbible.com that sounded like an air siren that would go off in the wartime. We then cut this track down to the length of the clip that we wanted to add the music to and pasted this onto a separate track layer. 

We then used the dropdown tool to add another track onto audacity. This track added a deep bass note to the air siren and gave the sound some more volume and therefore would hopefully cause more of an effect within the audience.  

Finally, to blend the two sounds together we added a small fade in for the siren noise and we also decided to fade in the beginning of the track because of how loud this noise was and we didn't want it to sound too manic because this would add an element of unprofessional-ism which we didn't want.

Creating the Scream

At the end of the trailer we want to make the audience jump by having the ghost scream. Naturally just a small recorded scream would not achieve the desired effect and therefore we used audacity to enhance the scream and add various effects to enable the scream to sound horrific. 

First of all we added an echo sound effect to enhance the scream and try to leave a spine'chilling sound ringing in the ears of the audience

However, the echo was not enough so we added a paulstretch effect which stretched out the scream and this is what turned the scream into quite a horrific noise. Although this had worked great it meant that the scream was now too long and we wanted it to be shorter so we cut it down and now we have a scary noise which will hopefully make the audience jump.