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.
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