Better Editing

After some more editing, I managed to create a fairly real-looking pool of blood.
I tweaked and tweaked and got the right colour, along with a 'diffuse glow' effect in Photoshop.
Below is the final edit of the photo.

I am happy with how I have made the puddle look like blood, I now just need to add the appropriate text and captions to the poster, along with a final bit of editing, and I will have a film poster!

No Luck...

I looked everywhere and couldn't find a broken camcorder anywhere. For this reason I had to settle for a fully functional one rented from school, which meant I had to keep the liquid separate from it. I rented out a camera from school and took it home to take a picture of it.

When I got home, I kept in mind that the floor in my toilet downstairs gave water a red tint to it in the blood shot of my trailer, so I decided to use it again. Below is the original picture taken:

Now obviously, the water doesn't look like blood, so I had a quick go at editing it red in Photoshop. While doing this I also had a go at editing it so that it looked like the water/blood was oozing out of the camera, like my original idea portrayed. Below, sadly, is the result.

I could see from this that, with a bit of editing time, I could make this water look a lot more like blood after I had found the right colour. But as you can see,  it doesn't look like it came from the camera.
Because of this, I scrapped that idea and decided to leave it as a puddle of blood next to the camera.

Ancillary Poster - The Beginning

I started thinking of some ideas for the film poster now and I had a pretty good one.
The idea was to have the focal point of the picture being a smashed and broken camcorder on the floor with blood spilling from it. So my next job was to now look for a broken camcorder to borrow.

In terms of the idea fitting in with the teaser trailer and creating a three piece promotional package (with the teaser trailer, the poster and the magazine when it is made), the camera, broken on the floor next to a puddle of blood represents death. The fact that the blood is on the floor next to the camera, but with no other people around poses the question that the blood may have come from the camera itself and that the camera is alive. This would then pose the question that the camera may have killed the characters. I wanted my teaser trailer to leave a lot of questions in the audiences head.
At the end of my teaser trailer I am thinking about putting a shot showing the camera on the floor, either been dropped or placed there (probably dropped), with a grainy effect on it showing a puddle of blood growing towards the lens. This would then be almost a direct follow-on to the poster as the picture of the camera on the floor next to the blood could be what the camera has seen last. This would then make these two products link together.

The Bloody Shirt!

Here are a series of pictures showing the ingredients of the blood I used, and the shirt after it had been 'blooded'.

Firstly, here are the ingredients of my blood. I was originally going to use water, but that wouldn't have given the right kind of texture. So I thought of something with a thicker consistency, and Fairy Liquid seemed the best option. I put this in a bowl and added some red food colouring (this is starting to sound like a terrible recipe book). I also added some flour, after I took this picture to get a slightly dryer and thicker texture. The next picture will be of the bowl of blood.

I didn't make much of the blood, although this picture was taken after I had used it, and this is what was left over. As you can see, it actually looks quite believable!

Finally, here is what the shirt looked like. I put a bit more on after and filled in some of the gaps.
This is the shirt that Lewy wore when in the background and the shirt that my brother wore when standing and hitting the camera (in one of the quicker shots in the teaser.

A Presentation of Organisation

Yes, this powerpoint should have been put up somewhere earlier in the blog, but I though I better put it up now as opposed to not at all.
This, as the title says, is a short powerpoint to show my organisation. My thoughts on locations, props, costumes and other things along those lines:

Organisation presentation

View more presentations from Tom.

The Final Cut Arrange Window

As the title suggests, here is a screenshot of the arrange window in my Final Cut document.
I had too many regions to fit in one window, so I had to photoshop two pictures together. Below is the result:

As you can see the window is very busy, but it shows how my skills have developed and how I went from knowing literally nothing about Final Cut to being able to work with this many sounds and video regions.

While completing my coursework tasks this year I have learnt a lot about visual editing with the arrange window. Visual editing is when things you change can be watched as you change them, as opposed to having to export the product first. As my knowledge of visual editing and Final Cut in general grew, I could start to work with more and more clips of sound and video, hence the size of the arrange page above...

The Soundtrack

One of the other courses I take is music technology. Within this subject we use a piece of software called Logic Pro 9. It is a music editing software and it is how I made my soundtrack.
Most of the little sounds and ambient noises are loops from the loops library, but I made some of the music myself using my skills from this other subject. Below is a screen shot of the arrange window, showing all of the regions I created with sounds. I didn't use all of the sounds, but most of them have made an appearance in my teaser trailer:

Here it is...

The final teaser!
I won't babble on this time, here is the finished product:



Now here is where I babble...
You can probably see some major changes here. I have added a new shot, like I planned to do, which actually turned out really good. I desaturated and added distortion to this clip, the same as I did with the field clip with the character in the background.
The other major change is the wording of the inter-titles (again).
Because the last inter-title stood out the most, everyone who watched it thought that 'to survive' was the title of the film, when in fact the original idea was to have 'the last day' as the title.
I thought I would go with what my target audience said, but didn't think that 'to survive' was very good, so I changed the wording to make 'survival' the last inter-title, making that the title of the film.

One more shot?

Yes please.
I have an idea for another shot that will be played very quickly to help the pace of the teaser.
The shot that I have in mind is of the girl featured in my teaser being dragged across the floor again, but away from the camera down a hallway of sorts, into the darkness. I am taking a camera out for a week to do this shot, as I have other plans for the camera to do with the ancillary task... But I will explain more on that later on.

Second Draft of Teaser

Here is a second draft of my teaser trailer.

One of the major changes is that I have taken out the inter-title saying 'for Earth'. The reason for this is that from some of my feedback (and from some of my own opinion) I learnt that talking about Earth as a whole makes the film seem like an alien film or a different form of science fiction. I originally chose 'for Earth' because I couldn't think of anything else and it was the only thing that created a certain 'horror' impact. I then thought of humanity because it makes even more of an impact, but this time it's the right kind of impact.

I re-did the inter-titles on LiveType, so they now don't get cut when they scroll across. This has also now enabled me to cross over the words 'for' and 'humanity', giving a greater effect.
Here is the result:

A busy busy day...

Luckily, the school had a 'digging deeper day' today, which means five hours of media! (Woo!)
Within these five hours, the whole class had a sit down to show each other our rough teaser trailers.
Due to my hard working nature, I had an almost finished cut of my teaser.
Some of the comments I got included:

"There is a lot of areas in the teaser where it is just black and nothing is happening." - I could easily rectify this by closing the gaps between shots. It's not so much that there are gaps, it's more that the handles of shots sometimes go on for too long.

"There is a little bit too much footage after the last inter-title." - I could see where they were coming from from my research of teasers. Most teasers that do include inter-titles only have one or two more shots after the last inter-title, sometimes not any shots. I re-jumbled the order and put the last 'survive' inter-title in between the 'dark' shot and the 'blood' shot at the end, finishing with the 'blood' shot.


"The inter-titles sometimes get cut." - To change this, I did the inter-titles again in a program called 'LiveType'. This is a program specifically designed to make inter-titles or regular titles. It was actually a lot easier and it worked well.




These were the only major comments that I got, a minor point was just volume levels, which I planned to do after I knew I had the teaser pretty much finished.

Teaser Mark 01

This is a first draft of what my teaser trailer will look like.

Door Bang Sound

Here is a short video showing how I got the sound for the door banging sound nearer the end of my teaser trailer:

I will then import the audio on it's own into Logic Pro 9, cut the audio file down to just the sound that I need. I can then bounce the sound to a separate audio file and simply drag it into Final Cut to be used in my teaser.

Call Sheet

A call sheet is probably the most important document when it comes to filming. It is basically a roster of who has to be on set, what time they have to be on, what costumes they need, what props they need...
All of that sort of information will be on a call sheet and will definitely help greatly when it comes to filming the real thing.

In this I have included the days I filmed on, when I started filming, how long it took to do every shot, when I finished filming, the cast who had to be in on each day, the props needed and a list of all the shots to be filmed on that day separately.

The reason why the props list is short is because (simply) I didn't need that many. The shots are pretty much only of people as it is quite a psychological horror.

Click on the image to enlarge it.





Finally, here is a presentation showing my thought processes about locations, props, lighting, cast, costumes and anything else:

Shot log

While doing the filming I needed to make this document to decide whether any shots needed to be filmed again or whether they were good enough. Below is a document to show this. It is the same layout as the shot list so the shots are in the same order as they are on the shot list:


















Click on the image to make it clearer.

Shot List

I realised quickly that after finishing my practise teaser, I had missed out three shots. Even though I had a storyboard to look at and work with, it doesn't help when you're filming them in a different order to what is on the storyboard.
To rectify this mistake and to improve the overall organisation of the filming, I will make three documents.
The first is a shot list, which will be below, the second is a shot lot and the final one being a call sheet.
The shot list is also explained below. The other documents will be explained in their own relevant posts.

A shot list is a document that gives a list of shots in the order that they will be filmed. Not in the order that they will appear in the teaser trailer or film. Below is my shot list:

Again, this is not in the order that the teaser trailer will be in. This is the order that it will be most convenient to film them in. When renting a camera, which would only be for one weekend, I would film the first three shots at home on the same day, then the next two shots on the same day but at the local park.
The rest of the shots will then be filmed the day after in the nearby town.

Animatic Storyboard

Here is the finished animatic storyboard with a rough version of the soundtrack to go with the teaser: 

This post was supposed to go before the post containing the rough cut of the teaser, but due to a maintenance issue with YouTube at the time of uploading, I posted them in a different order.

Practise teaser

Here is a rough cut of what my trailer will look like. Following this post will be a post containing some 'behind the scenes' of how I got some of the sounds within the teaser:



Due to it only being a practise I didn't use any costumes and didn't worry too much if someone laughed, because I didn't use the original sound of most of the clips.
Also some of the clips are not very well shot in terms of lighting, so I have learnt that I need to take things like this into as much careful consideration as anything else.

Change the video setting from 360p to 480p for better quality.

The next step...

The next thing I have to do is make an 'animatic'. To do this I need to take some still images of each shot that is on my storyboard, with similar, if not the real locations.
I will then put the images into final cut along with the music. This is done to see whether the shots go with the music to decide whether any shots or even just the music is changed.
Here is an example of an animatic used for a music video:

Changes to storyboard ideas

After discussing with some of my target audience what they thought of the ideas for my teaser trailer, I have made some amends to the shots:

The third shot on the storyboard (that was originally the merry-go-round shot with the couple talking) will now be changed to just a normal shot of a merry-go-round with people on it, and then another shot will be inserted later in the teaser of the same merry-go-round, but with darker lighting and with no-one on it.
Instead of the dialogue in the merry-go-round shot, I will have inter-titles asking the audience questions to get them interested.

The sixth shot (of the character in the dark room, opening the door) will have sufficiently less dialogue in it. The original idea of the character giving out a distress signal in the video has now been changed to maybe short clips of voice trying to give out a distress call, but not the whole thing to make the shot shorter and more mysterious within the teaser.

The reason why the writing in the eighth shot has been crossed out is because that was the first idea to go. I wrote it in there to show that writing will be there, but i wasn't sure what the writing would say.

Instead of a specific release date in the shot after that, I may change that to something simple like "coming soon" or a seasonal release like "winter 2011" or maybe even based on a holiday - "halloween 2011".

Storyboard - first draft

Here is a crudely draw storyboard to get some of my ideas on paper. I have decided to also take some still images on a digital camera, put them into final cut and put the soundtrack along with the pictures to see if the music will play well with the shots or not.
But here is a scanned image of the first draft of my storyboard, with captions underneath of what is happening in the shot:

As per usual, it will probably be easier if you click on the image, it should get bigger and clearer. Clicking again will zoom in even further, making the text easier to read.

The main idea of my film is that a couple are just filming themselves, making a home movie and on that particular day, things start to go very downhill into a massive slaughtering of the world.

I received most of my inspiration from the film Cloverfield, where a group of people are filming a party when the monster attacks. I watched Cloverfield and the trailer for it many times over (as well as other films for research, of course!) to get the main conventions and to try and include lots of shots that they have used.

Now, obviously because it's a horror film I will probably need death, however I am not too sure at this time what/who will be the killer. I want the teaser to be like Cloverfield in the way that at the end, a clip of the couple shows up again before the even happened. I plan to make it more obvious and more often, though. I want the teaser to switch between the couple, when everything is fine, introduce the horror aspect and end up in the panicked scenes, finishing with some sort of image of death. I've drawn a pool of blood on the floor, so that is the idea I will test out first, but I may adapt that idea after seeing it with everything else.

That is the basic idea I have for my teaser trailer, so I'll see how it goes.

With these ideas in my head, I can start to piece together ideas of how my teaser trailer would eventually develop into a theatrical trailer.

Ancillary Product Analysis

Ancilliary products

Here is a slideshow of all the different posters I have looked at.

Below is an analysis of each poster, scroll down to read the analysis of each poster along with the picture.

The reason that I am looking into ancillary products so early is to get a good base knowledge of how ancillary products are made and what content is on them etc.
I won't be starting my ancillary products until I am happy that my teaser trailer is nearly or completely finished, but what's the harm in getting an upper hand on the research, eh'?
I have mainly looked at posters associated with the teaser trailers I have also looked at.

Typical conventions

Ancillary products like posters generally include the film name, release date, jargon of some sort and main characters expressing their character. At the end of each analysis I will add whether each poster sticks to or subverts away from the typical conventions of posters.

     Cloverfield
At first glance it just seems like the statue of liberty looking onto New York City. However after a little bit of looking you can see that the statues' head has been ripped clean off. This creates the obvious questions of 'why?' and 'what did it?'. In the background the city seems to be on fire to the right, indicating something may be attacking them, but as an ancillary product, this could have been released years before the film was brought out, so no one would really know what was attacking them. With some very detailed looking (and it is still quite hard to see), in the clouds at the top right of the poster you can see the vague picture of some sort of monsters head. (Highlighted in the picture below, which will enlarge when clicked).

This then hints at the fact that a monster (or more than one monster) is attacking New York. This image in the sky is not too obvious though. After seeing the film myself I can now say that this is because the whole film is about subtle hints at things. For instance at the end of the film the main characters are filming the sea, and very subtly something falls out of the sky into the sea, but no one sees it. It is even quite hard for the audience to see it too, but the whole film, like I said, is about subtle happenings that join the whole story-line together, and also joins the film to this poster.

Cloverfield veers off from stereotypical posters as it doesn't show any main characters of any sort, only the statue of liberty and a vague image of a monster. Cloverfield released three posters prior to the films release, each showing only one main image and the release date, this one also including the film title. By not releasing too much information about the film on the ancillary posters it keeps the mystery within the film until the film itself is released. This mystery ties in greatly with the narrative of the film.

          Dawn of the Dead

This is a very simple poster, with no real image - just one created specifically for this purpose. Unlike 'Cloverfield' the title of this film gives quite a lot of information to the audience about what it is about. The background of the poster is orange with the image of what looks like the sun. This indicates sunset and the beginning of the night, which is where most horror films, especially hybrid genres like zombie films, are set as it is the most frightening time of the earth's cycle. The characters shown as the main image resemble the monsters of this film and the main point of this film. The caption "scary as hell!" at the bottom of the poster is used for two main things: telling the audience that the film will be scary, advertising it to the target audience, and also the 'hell' bit is used for another reason. Zombies are supposed to be reanimated corpses of the dead that are said to have been 'rejected from hell'. So by having the hell part on the poster also hints at the fact that there will be zombies in this film.
This poster has the title and no main characters as such, but does show the main 'enemy' of the film. The caption at the bottom is the jargon for this poster. It also states what the USP (unique selling point) of the film is. This poster is from the 2004 remake of the original 1978 release by George A. Romeros, so widescreen was quite a popular thing back then, so it would have made more people see the film for this reason, similar to how popular 3D technology is at the moment.


            Saw III
The part of this poster that stands out the most is the teeth to the right of the film title. There are three teeth, obviously indicating that this is the third film. The title of the film on the right is written in a way to make the 'W' look like 'III', again indicating that it is the third film. The saw at the top that the teeth are hanging from links in with the title of the film as a sort of icon. The caption underneath the title that is aligned slightly to the right says "This halloween, he's pulling out all the stops.", stating a few things: halloween is known as the scariest time of the year and is also indicating the release date of the film. People who know the Saw series will know who the main person of these films is - known as 'Jigsaw'. So the name would not need to be written on the poster, which is why it only says 'he'. "pulling out all the stops" links with the pulling out of a victims teeth seen just above the caption and used as the focal point of the poster. That sentence also means one is trying their hardest, so 'Jigsaw' in this film is obviously working at his best, and fans of this film series will know that this means more gore and more death, being the films USP.
This poster has the title of the film visible and some sort of jargon but no characters of any kind, only their teeth. However in this film there is only one main character, but he is the antagonist and most posters show the protagonist.

            Resident Evil: Afterlife

This poster shows the star personas name at the top of the poster, along with their picture as the focal point. The name then takes up about half of the poster along with a caption and release date at the bottom. On this poster the '3D' is written in red, making it stand out as a USP of the film. It is also written in this way on the trailer and the box cover.
So this poster follows quite a lot of the conventions, if not all of them, and is a very typical poster. The caption "September 10 experience a new dimension of evil" gives a specific release date as opposed to something like 'summer' or a similar label. The rest of the caption is used for a few different things. Firstly the 'new dimension' part hints at the 3D aspect of the film (3rd dimension). It also advertises the film saying that it perceives evil in a much different way, therefore stating that it is better than its predecessors. Lastly it shows that it is a horror film, even for people who have not seen Resident Evil films before and don't know what they are about. The picture has been edited to come over the top of the title, over the 'E' and part of the 'R'. This is a common technique in magazines too, as found in my coursework for AS level when working with magazines. This has been done in this case to push that this is a 3D film into the audience.


     Resident Evil: Apocalypse
The focal point of this poster is the main character, similar to the other Resident Evil poster. This one also has quite a large part of the poster filled with the mast head, but not quite as much as the other poster. This time it is also completely vertical as opposed to being slanted like the other poster. The 'Resident Evil' part is spaced away from the 'Afterlife' bit, and is also slightly bigger. This is to separate out the title of the series from the individual films name (the series is 'Resident Evil', the film is 'Afterlife').
This poster has the main character, showing their intimidating attributes, the mast head displaying the title of the film and a main picture in the background, in this case the eye. However there is no technical jargon on this poster, which makes it quite plain and simple.

Analysis of teaser trailers in horror

Here are a few more videos of analyses of teaser trailers.
Here is 'Resident Evil: Afterlife':



I filmed this just after uploading this to youtube and added the 'Inception' analysis to my blog on an earlier post, just to clear up any confusion from what I mentioned at the start of the video.

To clarify points I loosely made:
The shots of the teaser are in time with the beats of the music, whether it's an actual song or whether it's just sound effects like the beginning, throughout the whole trailer. Almost every cut is in time with a beat of some sort.
Click here to go to youtube and watch the trailer yourself, if you so desire.

Analysis of teaser trailers

Some of the general teaser trailers I looked at included:
Resident Evil: Afterlife,
Cloverfield,
Shaun of the dead,
Tron,
Prince of Persia,
Superhero Movie,
Inception.

These trailers gave me a good idea of the codes and conventions within a teaser trailer over a range of genre's. Here is a video showing my analysis of the 'Inception' trailer, explaining the codes and conventions:

You may have to make this full screen to see clearly.

On some additional notes, Inception is a sci-fi (science fiction) film written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan. In this trailer it's things like people flying around a corridor, the tilted glass of water and curvy buildings that bring out the sci-fi part of the film. All these things mess with your mind and play tricks on you, which is one thing that sci-fi does well - being out of the ordinary.

By clicking here you can be directed to YouTube to watch the teaser yourself.

Conclusion of genre chosen

 I have chosen to do a teaser trailer for a horror film. The main features of a horror film is to frighten or panic its audience. Horror films have also developed story lines to do with killers/murderers, alien invasions and zombies, which is where horror links in with science fiction.

I have had some thought on the type of horror film I wanted to do, so now I need to do some research on conventions of teaser trailers to see how they work and what to include or exclude in my own production.

Introduction to area chosen

I already knew, before researching, that I wanted to do a teaser trailer.
Due to my additional knowledge of music software, I wanted to do something that would help develop my skills in the composition area too.


A teaser trailer, or just teaser, is the very first piece of video footage that is released about a film. They last typically between 30 and 60 seconds. It is also released up to almost 2 years before the film they advertise. The name 'teaser' literally does what it says: it is used to tease the audience to eventually make them watch the film when it is released.


There are many different genres of film, including:

These are just the main genres, there are many sub-genres in most main genre, and sometimes even sub-sub-genres within sub-genres.
For example 'slasher horror', or 'action-thriller'.