Video Evaluation

Evaluation - Part 4

Media Technologies and Shots.

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Evaluation - Part 3

Audience Feedback.

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Evaluation - Part 2

Ancillary Tasks.

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Evaluation - Part 1

Codes and Conventions.

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Audience Feedback

This is the audience analysis for our trailer. This was a good method of finding out what people thought of the trailer and what they would change if given the opportunity. We also got to observe their reactions as they watched the trailer helping us find out what parts had the right effect we were aiming for. the only problem we might have had is not always getting honest answers as they wouldn't want to look bad in the video.

Silent Night Poster and magazine cover

This is the poster that Sameena created for our film. it uses a shot from our trailer which represents our film well. it is a shot looking out of my window and shows that the film is set in an urban area and shows the figure of Santa in a mysterious and scary manner.

This is our front cover for a movie magazine which was also created by Sameena. With this we chose a different image from the trailer as the research we did told us that one of the main characters is shown on the front but not much else.The image was also edited to have a white background to emphasise Christmas and we brightened the red and darkened my face to emphasise horror. in an earlier version of the magazine (below) we used the same picture as the poster. this image did not fit well onto a front cover and we decided against it. there ware also smaller tweaks to the layout and content to the text on the magazine cover to make it more relevant to the latest horror films.

Reference

http://www.empireonline.com/magazine/

Silent night trailer

This is the final cut of our horror trailer, a great deal of time and effort went in to creating this and I hope you enjoy it.

Editing Log

I have recently finished the editing of our trailer.  i think we have produced a professional looking trailer and I am proud of our work. We used final cut pro again for the editing which gave us the freedom ot edit our footage however we wanted.

The editing process took a long time, partly because we wanted it to be as good as possible and also because we had made mistakes when filming. Many of our shots had to be re-filmed as we had gotten the lighting wrong. with some clips I was able to filter out the light and darken the clips but this only worked for some. Another problem we had was finding the music that fit the piece and editing that to our footage, in the end I am happy with what we created but it took much longer than it should have.

Filming Log

The filming of our production took a long time and we have recently finished it. Overall i am happy with what we have done but i think we could have planned it much better and been more time efficient.

We filmed in several areas around Birmingham: at my house, in a park and in a tunnel under a railway track.

Most of the scenes in our film trailer were shot in my house. We used it as it offered realism to our trailer and was the perfect size and shape for the various shots we planned to use.

We also used a tunnel for some shots, not all were included in the trailer but it was very dark and claustrophobic which helped us with the horror aspects of the trailer. The problems we had there was that it was small so  some shots were difficult.

We also filmed in a park, we had most of our action scenes there. it was a woody area and we had loads of opportunity for various shots and angles. The first problem we had here was that we filmed in a more open area the first time and it was during the day so our footage was way too light to fit into a horror film. when we filmed again we used an area with more trees on a cloudy day.

Props and costume also required lots of thought our characters needed to look realistic, for Santa I managed to get a costume for the role easily so we dint have any problems there and the rest of the character just wore their own clothes. the difficult part was making the fake blood which Levinia and Sameena set out to do. The pictures below are from levinia showing how she made it.

Final Decisions - Setting and lighting

The setting our our production will at my house. We chose this location as most of the trailer takes place in a bedroom and out of my group, my room was the best shape to get different camera angles and shots in. it also offers a good view over the road for the shot of the killer watching the house.Different shots we be set at different times of the day so we will use natural lighting when needed and for the night time shots the lights in my room should suffice. When filming we need to make sure that we film the shots that need natural light first as we will quickly lose this as it is getting dark quickly in the winter.


Refrences

http://www.videomaker.com/article/8946/ Accessed (19/01/12)

Final decisions - Costume

The costume is one of the most important parts of our film, generally in horrors the villain will have one so we are combining Christmas and horror by having the killer dressed as Santa Claus. This is a good combination as Santa is one of the key figures of Christmas and twisting him into something evil is rarely seen. his costume is red which links to horror as that is a key element of a horror film.

These two pictures show very contrasting Santa's. On the left we have the traditional Santa Claus that everyone knows but then on the right we have someone that looks very evil and demonic in the same costume. This has a similar effect to what we want to achieve but we are doing this in a much more subtle manner.

Final Decisions - Props

The props are a key element of any film and trailer. it is important that  in the trailer that we show the most important ones, the ones that have the biggest effect on the storyline.

The first shot of the trailer is of a christmas tree. this is an important shot as it sets the scene and when the film is set.

There mother character will read from a storybook throughout the trailer, this is very important as it is a nice story and the story the brother tells is scary. It is important that she holds a book as it helps show that this it is just a traditional christmas even though things soon change.

The knife is another important prop as it will be the weapon that the killer uses throughout the film as his signature weapon. this is a key concept of all horror films and is one we are sticking with. The blood links to this as you would never associate this with christmas and is something you see in all horror films.

The scrabble board is another useful prop as we will use it to start twisting christmas into horror. The name santa will be spelt out on the board but the killer will change it to satan as it is an anagram of the word.

Blog Update - nearing the end

We are nearing the end of our pre-production work. We have created a new storyboard and had many discussions about filming techniques, lighting and have decided on a script. I have finished creating the flim logo and animatic for our trailer which has enabled us to envision what we will soon create. we are starting work on the production schedule next and we plan to film the majority of shots very quickly. As most of our trailer will take place in one location we will not have to waste time travelling between places.To make our film varied we are filming each part of the trailer many times, from different angles and looking at different characters. This will make sure that we are well prepared for editing our trailer and have plenty of choice with what we want to include.

Final Animatic

This is the final version of our animatic. We have recently re done all of the storyboards for our trailer so we needed to make another animatic, a task I decided I wanted to do. It is very simply edited with them all following on from one another but this time i have left more time for each picture to be shown so the viewer can absorb more information. I have also added in the "Santa clause is coming to town" song  played slowly on the keyboard without singing. This is because it is a key element of our film.

Though creating the animatic was fairly simple i used software I have not tried out before. I used adobe premier elements 9 which I had bought along with Photoshop. It took some getting used to but it was much more user friendly that final cut pro, the software that we will use for our main production. I felt it was more user friendly as it was made for people with little experience making home movies of your holidays. There were tutorials on how to use each feature and step by step guides to make a simple short film but it lacked the effects available on final cut pro.


References

FInal Decisions - The Logo

This is the new logo for our film silent night. As a group we have looked at the various versions I have created and ended up with a hybrid of our favourite ideas. all of these logos were created on Photoshop elements 9. this is a slightly simpler version of Photoshop used mainly for editing photos but i managed to use it to create the logos to a good standard. Using Photoshop allowed for some good effects like the backgrounds in the later versions of the title.
Creating tinsel was a challenge and I used a tutorial from the internet which helped a lot, a problem I encountered was that the tutorial was for the professional version of Photoshop, not elements so some parts of it were not the same and I had to work my way around them to create the tinsel.

In the first version (pictured above) I created I tried to have text that looked handwritten but quite sinister, as a group we all agreed this was a good feature and one we kept through all versions of the logo. With the name I put a Christmas tree in, this helped link the film to a Christmas film. to twist this slightly I blurred the tree to create a distorted effect to shown that it may not be as normal as you think. The background to the logo was a dark red colour but slowly faded to grey towards the middle, with this effect I hoped to mix the colour red associated with Christmas with the darkness of a horror film. As a group we later came back to the logo to decided whether or not this was to be the final logo or if we could change it in ways. When originally creating a mood-board for our film we used tinsel around the words silent night instead of a tree so we decided we wanted to see what the same logo would look like swapping the Christmas tree with tinsel.

When I created these two versions I added the tinsel to the title and removed the tree. I also made changes to background. With the first one I just made the darker middle even more obvious and in the second one I made all of it darker. out of the two I preferred the second and thought that the title looked better darker.

When showing these to the group and some family members the all agreed that the second one was the best logo so far but all preferred the Christmas tree to the tinsel.

This was when I went back to create our final logo. (Pictured again below) With this one I brought back the Christmas tree and removed the tinsel, but the decided to change the background a little more, I liked the big focus on the darkness but I felt it lost connection to Christmas too much so I added a snow effect to it. this effect worked well and all of the features mix together well.



Below are more versions of the logo which were not as good and did not contribute many ideas for the final version:

Refrences

http://humbuggraphicsgalore.blogspot.com/2009/11/tinsel-in-photoshop.html 

Storyboard

This is the new and final version of the storyboard for our film trailer. We felt that the last one did not follow the conventions of a trailer and didn't build up suspense enough. As a group we sat down and decided to write the script and what images we would show with it, this led to us all being able to picture what we wanted to see and then put that into the storyboard. We are much happier with this storyboard and are much more confident that we will make a great trailer.

These first few shots are very similar to what we originally planned. This time we made them much clearer and showed more detail and planned them along with the script so that we had a timeline to work with.

Here is where there are more changes compared to our other storyboard. When we looked at our other one i realised that it didn't show what we wanted to film very well. this time we made sure every shot was included and recognisable.

In this part we wanted to build up the tension so we needed to show the back and forth between the mother and brother and how the boy is reacting to all he is hearing. We also wanted to introduce the killer in a more mysterious manner by never having a shot of his full face.

At the end of the trailer we will break the tension with the film logo appearing as well as production information like a release date and who's making and starring in it. We will then create more mystery and interest by flashing back to the brother character with him delivering one final line.

blog update

As a group we have look at our storyboard and animatic and have came to the conclusion that it is not good enough. though many of our ideas were good, the storyboard did not make them fit into a trailer. we are re doing the storyboard and animatic to put us in a better position to start filming. This time we are going to make sure everything is clearly shown. when we show someone the animatic we want them to understand what is happening with little help.

Once we have finished these we can create a produciton schendule and begin filming.

Location scouting

In the film we have shots of the killer from the window, this view is from my window at home and gives us a wide space to shoot various angles from. This is a key shot as it is the first time the killer is seen in full wearing the Santa costume.

This photo is of a tunnel, it is dark enough to be intimidating but light enough to film in. this would be a good place for many shots of the kill as the trailer picks up the pace. though this is a very good location for a shot it does not fit well into our new storyboard, if we find a way to incorporate it we will but it is likely that it wont be needed.

This is next to the tunnel i photographed. im not sure if we can film there yet but we could get good shots there. Both this and the tunnel are very typical of a horror film and would no doubt be used if we made a full film but in what we are including in the trailer they wont be needed.

This is an alleyway that could be used for many shots, at night any shots here would be very good at adding fear to the trailer as well as suspense and mystery.

Christmas holiday update

Over the last week I have visited various locations that may be useful for filming silent night. i have also begun work on updating the films logo. the pictures of location will be uploaded in the next post.

Over the next week I plan on finishing the logo and updating the blog, adding more articles and more information on what inspired our film.