My groups idea for a movie "CULT"

Our group had many idea's for our horror trailer, what we wanted to do is to use the main conventions of horror, so we created a survey on survey monkey and came to the conclusion to introduce a final girl, a plot line (which we created with the data collected from our survey) and binary opposition will be used to confuse the audience about the girl from the start of the movie/trailer, the questions that we want them to ask is 'is she Innocent/cute or is she not?' The idea is to make the audience think about what is going to happen and try to make sense of it themselves.

The plot of our horror story:

A couple is driving through the woods when they come across a little girl, they get out of the car to look for her but she mystical disappears in the dark. they decide to search for her and walk into the misty woods. As they search through the forest in search of her, they realize that there is something strange about the forest, walking around in the maze of a forest the couple realize that they're lost. They end up seeing a group singing and what looks like worshiping, in the middle is the little girl that they have been looking. Unknown to them is that he little girl isn't as Innocent as they thought, and in fact is the one in control of the cult. When they go in to try and save her they get caught by the cult and forced to do what they tell them to. While they are caught the demonic little girl try's to force them to her side/ to going the cult, but the husband has a heroic moment when he acts as a decoy to help the women escape from them, but in doing this dies after being tortured by cutting a cross into his chest and resits. After a amount of running the girl escapes and finds the car and drives off, as she looks back the forest disappears.

we decided to use Bordwell and Thompson's theory of distorting time and space to make the trailer/movie more complex by distorting the time. We thought that we could accomplish this by making parts slower or faster and rewinding them and replaying the. This would give the story that uneasy feel that it needs and make the unnatural work with in the plot.

Drafts of both products

Draft of the poster

Draft of the magazine cover

Original Photos

Magazine background picture (Unfortunately I made edits without saving the original)

Magazine face

Poster forest background picture (Unfortunately I made edits without saving the original and edited the original photo of the girl into the main poster)

Shot list and other planning material.

Shot list

Questionnaire

Story Board

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

Picture 5

Magazine covers

filmcover-2, a photo by MBRogers on Flickr.

analysis

magsgallery6-1160, a photo by MBRogers on Flickr.

analysis

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Intro vid:



Audience feedback vid:



Surveymonkey_link

My thoughts vid:

In what ways does your media product use, devlop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In the above two pictures, logos from different production companies can be seen, all of which are usually shown before a trailer or movie starts. This is very common in not only horror movies but all movies as the production companies what to get credit for producing their moves and because some people have a tendency to watch movies created by a particular company. This means that companies are able to attract an audience just with the production logo. As you can see in the first picture we created a production logo "ROUNCE" which follows these conventions as well as starting within the first 15 seconds of a trailer.


Above in the second picture shows a girl from the horror movie "Orphan" and in the first shows our young girl in the "CULT" from my trailer. What both have in common is that binary opposition is used to portray the girls as innocent little girls when they are in fact not. This is something that is used constantly in horror films and follows the horror conventions, as someone starts off good (in this case an innocent girl) and ends up bad as it moves to the end of the film.



Above in the second picture is fire in in the horror movie "11-11-11" and in the first shows fire in the "CULT" from my trailer. The reason i chose fire is that it has many connotations but a strong connotation connected to hell. As my trailer and "11-11-11! both have some kind of religious view in it I found that there are some conventions of horror to fire, although not enough to be branded a horror convention. The fire in our trailer was used to convey a sense of quick bursts of hell followed by religious gore cross to convey the religion in the trailer.



Above in the second picture shows the gore in "Saw" and in the first picture shows gore in "CULT" from my trailer. What both have in common is that they both use the convention of gore in a horror movie. The only difference is that "Saw" uses gore on an extreme level where as "CULT" doesn't and uses complex iconography to represent the gore in a religious way.



Above in the second picture is woods in "Blair Witch Project" and in the first picture shows forest in the "CULT" from my trailer. What both have in common is that they are both set in a forest environment which is a horror movie environment convention. The difference between my trailer and the "Blair Witch Project" is that the camera in our trailer isn't hand held.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

I was instructed to create a trailer for my main product and follow with a poster and magazine cover. The products work well together because the poster and magazine cover were easily based on the trailer and was the main reason for creating the trailer beforehand. These were used to promote our film " CULT ". Its clear that my products follow a certain color scheam, with the heavy use of red and black throughout the products. The reasons for using these colors are because red has a vivid conotaions of blood and hell and black connotations of death , darkness and being alone, these are all conventions of a typical horror that I wanted to be seen and I'm confidant can easily be seen. I decided to show a forest as the background for the magazine cover and the poster as I wanted to make it clear to the audience that the setting of the film is mostly set outdoors.

My three products are vital parts in the marketing campaign for the film. I feel that the trailer is the most important as it would most likely attract and entice more of a horror audience to want to watch the film as it would be viewed more on TV and on the internet. I would have used the same font for the titles of the trailer, poster and magazine cover, but I wanted to leave a sense of curiosity and mystery between the products that is conventional in horror products. I think that the trailer works effectively as a trailer for a film in the horror genre, however I think the trailer is lacking a bit in quality. With this said I think that the poster compensates for this in it's high quality and works well as a horror poster.



The magazine cover is a vital part of marketing as it is needed to attract the film buffs and regular buyers of the magazines. I used a close up of a girls face to make it more personal but faded it away with some reds to depict a horror product. With the use of large bold writing of " CULT " on the cover I made it easily visible to those from a distance.

The distributor's job is to ensure they know their target audience, this is to make sure their potential film will have the chance of becoming successful. The only way that they can do this is based on statistics and research. the distributor has to create a greater interest in their own title, this is done by creating different types of advertisement such as posters, leaflets, teasers, trailers and magazine covers and articles etc. by doing this they target the widest audience. The marketing campaign is used to maximize intake and profits by making sure that lots of people know about the film.The trailer we created can be found on YouTube which is a common place where trailers are uploaded and shown. One way a distribute promotes a film is through promotional posters and leaflets. these need to be simple and clearly express what genre the film is. The distributor identifies it's target audience to specifically aim advertising campaigns to expected audiences.

I feel that the trailer magazine and poster work well together and combined are very effective. The three products fit and link together well as a pack, which is mainly due to the color scheme in I put in place.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Blogger: Is a great example of web 2.0 as it allows the user to add content to the web. I used blogger to upload my course work, This works well because it allows more people to view and interact whith what I have created and also allows feedback with the use of comments. .Blogger is compatible with many other sites such as flicker, so uploading images from another source can be easlie done. Blogger allows the user to have creative freedom in an organised way.

Photoshop:Photoshop was used during the Planning stage of creating my Ancillry tasks. I used photoshop to edit my photos using different tools and filters.Phototshop is a powerfull tool that allows the user to decreas the time it would take to creat the final product. I used Photoshop when creating my missing newspaper articales in the final trailer.
Youtube: Was used to upload the trailer and helped with the research of Horror movies. Graphics tablet: I used a graphics tablet while planing the magazine and poster.
Video camera: I used a video camera to record the shots for my trailer and for research by asking people questions.
Flicker:
Survey monkey:
does this work? Mac:

Final Product: ancillary texts

A. Final Product: main product

Horror Film Posters

Freuds "The retun of the Repressed"

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis and is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression. The word Repression is the name given to the action that is disallows yourself to access painful memories by burying them deep into your unconscious mind. He thought of the term "the return of the repressed", this lead to the ide of neurotic symptoms. He thought about the personality as having 3 difftent aspects. These aspects were Ego, the Superego and the Id. He thought that the mind was structurally similar to an ice burg. He used this to describe what happens when thoughts and feeling try to force its way to the mind, which will be expressed know as "ID" . The Ego, known as the 'referee', would stop this by repressing it and allowing it never to be shown or expressed.


Freud argued that the repression didn't happen within a persons consciousness, which lead him to believe that a person wasn'teven aware of the traumatic memories and experiences that have been repressed. However, there are signs that repression has taken through symptoms, fantasies, slips of the tongue and character traits

Some people watch horror because they can relate to them, but might not realizes this as it is repressed. In the horror film 'Halloween' a 'return of the repressed' narrative structure is used to show the audience the return of a psychotic killer that escapes from a mental instatute and decides to kill more people. In the movie it is made to seem that the memories of killing his sister returns when he kill the others.

Using this approach as a narrative structure to a horror film, the audience an insight to possible reasons as to why people who have repressed thoughts might do the things that they do.

Narrative theory

After watching "The Shining" a 1980's horror movie we had a group discusion about applying four very diffrent narrative theorys by Bordwell and Thompson, Propp, Todorov and Levi-Strauss to the movie.

Bordwell and Thompson had a theory on the distortion of time and space within a movie. The distortion of time and space created the story of the movie and the theory went that without it a movie woudn't work. When his theory is compared to that of "The Shining" we notice that use of the distortion of time in the movie as it progresses. This is shown at the begining of each day when a month, day of the month or time is only shown to the audience, but with no other description, which gives us a noticable progresion of time but without the knowlage of WHEN it actully is. Space is also distored throught the movie and this is most noticable with Jack when he has illusions and when he is shown in the old picture at the end of the movie. Although the theory does apply to "The Shining" it has the problem that it dosen't actully tell us anything about the actual story that we see.

Propp created a theory based on characters and narrative functions. Propp suggested that there are eight character functions.

• The villain ( This could be jack or the hotel )
• The hero ( In places this is Wendy, the cook or Danny)
  
• The donor (who provides an object with some magic property)
• The helper (is the person that helps the hero. This could be the cook, wend, Tony and the ability of shining)
• The princess (This would be Wendy.... but this dosen't completely fit as she isn't the sought for person or the reward for the hero and object of the villain's schemes)
• The father (who rewards the hero. This would be Jack... the problem been that Jack dosen't rewardd the hero)
• The dispatcher (who sends the hero on his way, in this case the cook)
• The false hero (It's unsure who this could be and infact might not be anyone of the characters)

As noticed above sometimes a character may fit into the same role "The Shining" has a very small cast so it turns out that, some roles are played by the same person. However this breaks as some of the roles arent played by any of the characters in the shining. Propp also has a theory that suggests that all storys follow a narrative structure, a set of 31 stages. He says that these stages would follow in the order of the 31 stages. However it is clear that when the theory is compared to that of "the Shining" that it falls apart after the first few stages and then fits again in some other stages. This shows that "The Shining dosen't follow his theory but does have a few good few comparisons. Instead of watching a movie and seeing characters, Propp theorys show us a diffrent perspective of how to view the characters and their functions within a movie.

Todorov's thoery is that movies all begin with and equlibrium which then leads to an disequlibrium and the into a new equlibrium. Todorov's theory works when compared to that of "The Shining" as the movie starts it all normal, this would be the equlibrium and when jack goes crazy it would be the disequlibrium and when Wendy and Danny escape at the end it would be the new equlibrium. Although this theory fits in well with "The Shining" it also fits well with any other narrative as it follows the patterns of a standard narrative thta all movies/stories have a starting point, a middle point and an end point.

Levi-Strauss theory is based on binary oppositions (Binary is used for digital devises and is a set of 1's or 0's, this can mean on or off). He plays with the fact that when a human thinks something their also unconsciously thinking the opposite , A good example of this is when someone thinks evil they also thinking good. when compared to "The Shining" it is shown throughout the movie. This can be seen by Danny when the movie starts, he is inocent and harmless and the starts talking in the mirror as Tony which seem somewhat evil/ different virsion of him. His narrative theory fits in well with "The Shining" as its seen throughout the movie.

The narrative theorys, not only an interesting subject to studie but also gives a huge insite into underlines of the ways that movies work and create an indepth sight into their narrative structure. Although each give a good understanding of a theoretical narrative structure, it is just that a theory, as it's not able to define all narrative stuructures, but does fit well as somewhat of a guide to how a good narrative structures can work.

Although I don't think that any of the narrative theorys completely fit the narrative structure of "The Shining" I do feel that the theorys of Propp have the closet comparisans than the other theorys. The reason I think this is because it's more more about the characters and the theory of how a story is structured. Todorov's theory fits all narrative, but dosen't really tell us anything about the story, so although it's good, it dosen't work when trying to understand the narrative of "The Shining". For this reason I think Propps theory tells us most about the movie.

My Idea's for a Horror Story

Teufel, an unknown name given to those who are born deformed or diffrent, it means demon in german. The world is saperated between these normal people and the demons living amoung them unaware of what they really are. A spell is placed apon the born through thier parents DNA and has been done for a long time

Audience Research

In order to find out what the Horror audience wants to see within a horror movie we were tasked to create a survey that would be sent to different audience types within different areas. As a group we don't have funds and the experience to create a huge survey that would be sent world wide. So we decided to post it on as many social network websites such as twitter and Facebook to get as many results as we could and to a wider audience group that we could, instead of just sending it to friends who might have similar interests as us and could create a biased result.

We used an online application called "SurveyMonkey" to do our audience research and used social networks to send our survey to the needed audience.

This is our survey!

Open publication - Free publishing - More blogger

So I've posted my groups survey

The Role of the Distributor

There are four Main roles that are needed to creat a selling movie, these roles are : the producer, distributor, thearter and the customers (consumers).

I will be talking about the role of the distributer and how it's needed for a movie to make it into the thearter. The problem most movies have is not the making of the movie but the actual distributoin of the movie. The reason for this is the costs and time needed to distribute a movie. The role of the distributer is an important one and is vital to whether a film succeeds or fails. For this reason the distributer must be sure that they will be able to make the money back and profit from it. A good way that sells movies is having a well known actor, studio or ditector.

It's important that the distributor knows enough about the film itself to be able to market and gain the awerness of the correct audience. With a competitive market it's important identify the films audience, for this reason a marketing and distribution plan is needed.

Using a Marketing and Distribution plan the distributer must identify the films target audience and consider why this audience would want to watch this movie. A detail analsis has to be done to find the gender, age, lifestyles and media intrests of its core target audience. With this siad the distributor wants to target a large audience as it posibly can, so using the data from the analisis the distributor must find wasys to expand on the targeted area by promoting it in areas that it's not reaching.

In order to sell a movie it best to creat a BUZZ that can entice their audience, this is done by creating advertisment in the forms of trailers and posters, this way it leaves the audience wanting to see more (BUZZ). This is one of the ways that a distributor can persuade thereatres to play a movie, along with developing plans and partnerships to build an awareness and interest in the movie. The goal is to aim to convert as much interest as possible into cinema visits.

Once the distributor company has rights to a film, after the movie has been released, they then get the rights to distribute the movie on DVD and TV etc. Which is done to enusre nessery profits are reached. They do this by estimating the revenue across all formats of the movies release.

A movie would never succeed without the distributor. From what I have spoken about it's easy understand why there has to be a distribution and marketing plan, it obvious that movies can't sell themselves!

Horror Mood Board

To the right you can see a mood board I made to show what scares me and what I find horrific. As can be seen, most of the pictures I have chosen are of the unknown, religion and death. These photos have given me insperation for my horror trailer. Religion is one of the mane focuses in my mood board, this is shown by the coffin and the grim reaper, not knowing if religion is true or not and blindly folloing it scares me, because it relates to the unknown and if it's not proven then it's not right or wrong. A huge factor here would be the devil for instant.

To the top left of the board I have chosen two different pictures of aliens, the reasons for this is that aliens are from another world and we/I have no idea of where they have come from, what they are capable of, or what they are capable of doing. There are many movies and stories that play with the fact that we humans have a small amount of knowlage of the unknown and less about aliens. A well known real case is the reported alien crash in Roswell. What makes it even scarier is thinking that the goverment might be hidding things like this from us.

I decided that my pictures I choose should have teeth showing as that is what makes animal, creatures, humans and objects seem carnivourus, this makes it seem scary and can be seen in most of the pictures. Carnivourse animals are seen as as hunters and killers and playing with the idea that all things with large teath would be seen in the same way makes teath a vital way in creating that killer theme.

I have a zombie, a grim reaper and a coffin, this relates to the unknown but also death. Not knowing what happens after death has a scary impact on the way people see things, A good example of using this knowlage is the use of zombies and vampires in movies. This gives us an example of what could happen if we did die. At the bottom left of the board I have a picture of a porcelain doll, I chose this because I feel as if thees dolls are constantly looking at you and because it looks somewhat life like. This can make an object seem meanasing without having to do anything to it.

HorrorTrailers

The "Human Centipede 2" Is a gornography (A pornography with a horror twist). The main protagonist is a twisted scientist that try's to create a disgusting creatures from human life by connecting their mouths to another persons anus, thus the name "Human centipede". This movie doesn't follow the normal forms and convention of a normal horror movie in the way that it is only about torture and enjoying it. Wheres Most horror films have torture is more about making the audience scared than giving them pleasure. The reason I choose this video is because I want to have some torture scene to a small amount in my trailer.

The trailer above Starts by showing an older man getting out of bed and getting shouted at by his mother. He seems to resent this and is one of the reasons his trying to vent his anger onto other people but in a messed up way.



"The Ring" is a well known horror movie of 2002. I chose to write about this video because It is a well known horror movie that has started a ring of similar movies with the same kind of theme.
This movie follows the forms and conventions of a topical horror movie as it uses gore in an unusual way in which the female character climbs the well with her limbs twisting in unreal ways.



"Saw 7" is a new movie of 2011 and is a follow on of the "saw" movie series, It's a gornography (A pornography with a sick horror twist). This kind of horror doesn't follow the normal forms and conventions of a normal Horror movie, instead the "saw" movies have set the forms and conventions of other gornograph movies. The entire move is based apon gore and

Codes and Conventions of a Horror "Vanishing On 7th Street"

"Vanishing On 7th Street" Is about a man that wakes up one day in the city of Detroit to find out that the vast majority of the human population have vanished after a huge power outage. As daylight falls the protagonist and his friends he meets, realize that the darkness is out to get them, shadows of the unknown (shown below to the right) .