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. 

Recording background noise

As we are completing our film trailer we need to start looking in detail at certain aspects such as diegetic and non diegetic sounds.

We realised that during the store cupboard scene with Scarlett, whilst she is in the cupboard our camera has picked up noises from various people walking down the corridor outside the room and this effects the reality of the film because Scarlett is supposed to be in a forbidden room.

So to solve this issue we deleted any sound from the scene and then recorded an empty room where there were no sounds from other people. In this recording you can gently here a slight background noise such as the buzz from a computer.

This really helps the scene because there is no awkwardness due to no sound at all which would have been very noticeable and there is also no distractions with other people talking.

Ancillary Task: Website - Planning

Before we can begin creating the website we decided to jot down some ideas onto a mind-map. We looked back at the common conventions we had researched during our planning period and then wrote down ideas for each section.

First of all we looked up different pages that are usually available on websites however we only looked into detail at the pages possible for us to create, for example we do not have to expertise to create a game.  

Ancillary Task: Poster - Planning

Before we create the poster we decided to think about some ideas that we would like to incorporate into the poster.

First of all we looked back at our original research when we looked at common conventions of a film poster and we continued to look at similar film posters from films such as, 'Dark Touch', 'Terror in the Aisles' and 'The Conjuring'.

We then thought about the main design of the poster, possibly the most important aspect of the poster will be the main image. We have chosen two ideas that we like the best and drawn a doodle of what they will look like, one idea is to use a close-up of Cassandra which we took inspiration from the Dark Touch poster and the other idea we've had is to get a picture of a tree with a noose around it, this idea has been inspired by The Conjuring poster that we looked at.

Further design ideas include the background, fonts and colour schemes.

We also thought up some ideas for a tagline as we found out that taglines were a common convention of movie posters. Furthermore we looked at the information which should be provided on the poster including what should be written on the billing block, date for release and ratings. We wrote down all the research onto a mind-map.