Pre Production: Blog Update

Being busy with pre production is taking good time but making sure my research and practice is well up to scratch will improve my final production, the indepth research in my genre will enable me to satisfy my audiences needs.

In order to improve the effectiveness and impact my trailer has on my audience i feel it is decisive to get all of my production techniques up to scratch.

With some research into camera movement and angles etc i found an excellent resource to refer back to whilst doing my production, Vimeo film school offers superb examples and run throughs that are easy to understand and can be quite simply emulated in my work.

Here are the techniques and descriptions of these tips:

Star of your Movie: The Sound!

You know the shark in Jaws is about to attack when its signature sound starts playing. Sound is the most important character in your scary film and can give your boogeyman a helping hand. It can build suspense, indicate mood changes and even give an extra scary jolt to your audience.

Although "Drive" is not necessarily a scary film, the sound design team was very particular about building tension and establishing a mental sound space that puts you in the driver's seat. When you have a scared audience, their hearing becomes hypersensitive, and constructing an effective soundscape can both set an eerie mood and deliver the biggest scares.

Remember a great resource to find music is Vimeo Music Store, where you can search for tracks with tags like, "dark, eerie, intense, etc." or by tempo if you're trying to build tension with a fast or slow music pace.

Look out!

Keeping your audience engaged and on the edge of their seats is important, and you can easily accomplish this by isolating what they can and can’t see.

Alternatively, you can add anticipation by switching up the perspective of the scene and allowing your audience to see what’s lurking around the corner, while keeping your main character in the dark. Another great example, Alexis Wajsbrot and Damien Mace's viThe Red Balloon, keeps you on edge alongside a babysitter and a little girl as they discover they are not alone in the house.The camera spends time looking at random, inconspicuous objects, like stuffed animals or a red balloon. This steers the audience's attention away from the danger that is lurking offscreen, and takes us by surprise!

Sometimes, less is more!

Many classic horror films never even reveal what the scary creature or character actually is. What made the Blair Witch Project so scary? The audience never actually sees the witch and is left to use their own imagination, right to the very end, about what horrible presence resides in the woods. When creating a low-budget scary movie, the unknown and viewers’ imaginations are much scarier than the real thing. For some inspiration, 'Internet Story,' which uses video blogging and flash animation to draw you into a very eerie modern mystery offers big chills by implying much of the creepy details without explicitly showing us. Also, nothing beats a well-delivered narration to make our imaginations run wild!

Lights out!

Typically you want to shoot with the light so that it is in front of your subject, however, when it comes to a scary movie, try shooting your subject in a dark room with a single light source. In horror movies, the characters often rely on a flashlight or a torch to keep away the dangers that lurk in the dark, making your light source a potentially important plot device.

Shake it up

When you’re shooting your scary movie, don’t be afraid to go handheld. It’s usually best practice to try and steady your camera or use a tripod so that you have a nice smooth shot, but a little shake can go a long way in adding more panic and suspense to a scene. A great example of this can be seen in the sequences depicted in the teaser trailer for Darkstone Entertainment's "Plan 9."

The contrasting levels of urgency switches. The shakiness in productions makes the audience feel like part of the chase, and visually keeps them on their toes as they look around more carefully for danger. On that note, you may also want to consider putting the camera in the hands of your main character so that the film is shot from their perspective. In a similar vein, sometimes lower quality video with a grainy image quality or shot in black and white gives a story an amateur but more believable demeanor. It's an aesthetic option to consider.

Film Synopsis

In the rapidly growing industry of Horror movies, many different audiences are fast becoming de-sensitized to violence and gore, leading them to view some of the most gruesome horror titles around. ‘The Proprietor’ offers a fresh new spin on the typical ‘slasher’ film; with un-rivaled costume design and driving dialogue set to the most chilling backdrop since we were introduced to Camp Crystal Lake in 1980.

The blood-chilling nightmare begins with our young protagonists who challenge the rumors and supposed myths of the forest in a small village after a number of people are reported missing. The teens are adamant in their youthful naivety that they can disprove the rumors and separate fact from fiction. Predictably, our principle characters soon find themselves faced with our titular character, “The Proprietor” who is responsible for the strange disappearances in the forest and surrounding area. He lives like an animal; hunting prey as the self-proclaimed predator of the uninhabited Strangle Woods.

In terms of background information; “The Proprietor” himself was moulded into the mass murderer he is now due to delinquent vandals torching his house and killing his family. The house remains a burnt shell, forever providing Rick (the killer’s former name) with a lasting memory of what he once cherished. To most of the people in the village, Rick too perished in the fire that claimed the lives of his family, although whispers of a shadowy figure still lurking in the wooded outskirts provide many of the locals with an interesting campfire story. With an axe constantly by his side, The Proprietor does not hesitate in disposing of anyone who ventures too far into the aptly named Strangle Woods and the youths who enter this dark domain stand little chance of survival.  

Fans of previous favorites such as Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre will not be disappointed by this fearless slasher flick with it’s ardent attention to detail in every vital department of production. A collaboration of a strong script, eerily forbidding setting, skillfully directed photography and a main antagonist that would give Freddy Krueger nightmares make this a chilling tale not to miss when it hits the screens just in time for Halloween in 2012 where not even the strongest persons subconscious will be shown mercy to the bloodstained axe.

Greg Rundle directs ‘The Proprietor’. 

Audience And My Production

Target Audience is decisive

As 'Hall and Holmes’ have explained through their quote in 1998 ‘Any Media text is created for particular audience and will usually appeal most to this particular audience,’ a target audience affects the media language and techniques applied by a production team in order to cater for there needs.

When a media product is launched there needs to be a lot of consideration towards audience because that is the primary purpose of any film, there is a lot of work done on the commercial aspect and how well the product will satisfy the audience’s hierarchy of needs. So in order to provide the right content for my audience I will have to get the right ideologies of a slasher Horror trailer. There are different types of audiences one of which is ‘Mass audience’, my film does not cater for a mass audience as it is not a mainstream genre but can be appreciated by the ‘Mass audience’ stereotype, which is made up of working class people. The audience I will be catering for are considered more ‘Niche’ but are not upper class citizens as my Survey Monkey results prove that my audience are of a slightly low social class and generally low paid workers with a few exceptions. These results can be justified on the NRS (National Readership Survey), my audiences tend to have a social grade of E or D.

Audience profiling can prove effective when producing products for the media market, by having the knowledge of your audiences gender, age, demographic and profile you can configure a stereotype audience. For my trailer my gender is identified as males and I will continue to make this gender the appeal by showing male dominant characters. Age of my audience is considered between the ages of 16-24, as many are low skilled workers or students, by showing characters in the film that age they can find someone to relate to in the film. For my production and me it is hard to figure a demographic for my audience, as that sort of research is quite a way out of my budget. So I think the most important and strategic decision to make is to give my characters a mutual region accent and not make any particular dialects stand out so I have bigger overall appeal.

Developing lifestyle marketing has also become a more popular technique through the years as it offers more terms, values, attitudes and beliefs to be added to it. At this current time there are ten current categories. The categories that can be applied to my audience are the ‘Tribe Wired’ group and also the ‘Fun/Antics’ they both follow the characteristics of digital, spirited, aspirational, creative and fun seeking. So by targeting this type of audience particularly when producing my media text and I can market very successfully and receive a good critical reception.

Ideologies need to be well thought out when taking part in production, as Marx claims ‘dominant ideologies are those that already underpin society.’ So by supporting certain ideologies in my trailer I can ‘underpin’ a good audience. By making sure I cast characters that follow the male hero character type I will be able to draw in a female audience who are attentive towards the male. By doing this furthermore I will stick to a common ideology that slasher films use by showing good looking characters to try and overcome the antagonist.

By referring back to this and other media texts I can create a successful production in terms of my audiences wants.