Initial Ideas

Presented with many different briefs to choose, I decided to go with ‘a promotion package for a new film, to include a teaser trailer, together with a film magazine front cover featuring the film and a poster for the film’. I chose this partially because my partner has experience using photoshop, and I have experience using final cut pro, thus meaning that I can apply my current skills to the movie making and can develop my skills and acquire new ones which can be applied throughout the advanced portfolio.

Having chosen my desired brief, the very first aspect of my advanced portfolio that I decided to focus on was which genre to choose. Having considered various genres, I was contemplating staying with the same genre that I had used in the main task of my foundation portfolio – psychological thriller, however decided against this because I wanted to gain experience of making a different genre, to enhance my skills. Me and my partner chose to make a horror-comedy/parody, for a range of reasons. Firstly we had a wide range of various ideas for this genre, and also a large variation of effects and manipulation can be applied, fully utilizing our skills. It is also a minor genre, which will allow us to use our full creative potential when making this package.

Trailer Ideas

In terms of specific ideas, the first that we thought up was a zombie-based piece. This had potential for an excellent and engaging trailer, and the comedy feature could really be exaggerated. However, this idea had it’s limitations too. Despite conforming to typical conventions of this genre, we felt that this idea was too Cliche and repetitive to fully exploit our creative potential.

The link below shows a mindmap for our chosen main trailer idea. The piece is based on a possessed girl who supposedly haunts the college library, due to her death many years ago in this location.

As you can see, the audience we intend to aim the products at fits the stereotype of the ‘YouTube’ generation. This can be an advantage to us in the way that we market and produce our trailer. We chose this as our audience because the genre which we have chosen is relatively modern and should therefore appeal to this audience of teenagers, both genders and lower/middle classes. Thus we decided to adapt the media language to accord to this, including occasional slang to help the audience feel more relative. In terms of the narrative for the trailer, we have kept it to a typical linear, chronological, third-person structure in order to avoid discombobulation of the audience. This type of narrative is fairly conventional too, which will allow for clearer understanding by the audience, because they will most likely have experienced film narratives in this way before, thus being able to interpret referring to familiar experiences.

Magazine Feature Ideas

For the magazine front cover featuring our film, it has been decided that we will create a general film magazine, i.e. not an explicitly genre-oriented magazine, e.g. horror film magazine or comedy film magazine. This is because we wish to create a contemporary feel for this magazine, because of our target audience. In modern society, it is apparent that various cultures are becoming more combined, which is notable for example in the food industry within the UK. Within cities to villages, we can see a diversity of food types from all over the world being consumed by the British population. Our magazine will also aim to emphasise upon this mixture, through the featuring of diverse genres alike. Also, by creating a film magazine which focuses on all genres, it will perhaps also emphasise upon the comedy within our piece, because it is, after all, a blend of two main genres itself; horror & comedy.

Poster Ideas

The ideas which we had developed for our poster were actually less complex than we predicted. We have decided to include typical conventions of a horror theme, including the colours of black & red mainly, which represent many aspects of the horror genre, including blood, gore, death, misfortune etc. The poster will be rather simplistic and plain aswell, in order to add a sense of mystery and avoid distraction from the main image. We have decided to have only 1-2 aspects of humor, but major ones being the main image and some text, possibly a funny pun.