Evaluation 1:Media conventions

1. Title:

The title of our production is 'Sharpie', and we showed this in our trailer by placing it on a black screen with hazy writing, as shown here:

This can be compared to the title of films such as 'Se7en', which can be seen here:

This shares similarities to our title, as it is also on a black background, with white writing on it, and the writing has white 'splotches' near it, connoting a sense of illusion.

2. Editing:

Our trailer was edited in Adobe Premier Pro, as seen in the image below:

Similarities can be drawn from films such as 'The Snowman' they are similar because they both start of relatively calm, then show that something bad has happened to someone, then as the trailer progresses, tension is built through the fast editing style, and the increasing music in the background.

3. Characters:

The characters we used in out trailer were all people from our year group, although we were able to pull this off as the people they were playing were only a couple of years older than they actually are. The only exception to this is our antagonist, who face cannot be seen, so no-one has any clue about his age. Some of the characters from the trailer can be seen in the image below:

4. Settings:

The setting for our trailer was a school that was shut, as it was set after school hours. This follows conventions of other thrillers, as it is a darkened place, that can be portrayed as 'creepy' and 'eerie'. A shut school is a place that is empty, so, therefore we didn't have to find lots of people to be in the background of our film. Below is an image of one of the darkened corridors
in the school.

5. Sound:

The audio that we used for our trailer was mostly royalty free music that we found online, and stock ambient noise that was saved onto the schools computers, as well as noise that was recorded when we were filming the trailer. For example, at the end of our first draft there was a scream heard over a black screen, which was just recorded in a large empty hall, so that there was an echo. this was later removed, although a lot of the other audio we used has stayed.  the background music behind the second half of the trailer is royalty free music that we found online, after searching for royalty free music, and then using filters to try and find certain types of more eerie sounding music on multiple websites. Below is an image of one of the sites we searched to find royalty free music.

6. Camera Angles:

We tried to use a variety of different camera angles throughout our trailer, with examples such as the long wide shot high angle of the school at the start of the trailer, the low angle in the middle which two of the protagonists jump over while running, and the tracking shot right at the end that follows the last surviving protagonist through a  dark corridor. We also included some more ordinary stationary shots  at the start, and we used these to connote that there wasn't much happening at this point, and that this was not too vital to the rest of the piece. Below is a still from the panning shot of the school from above.

7. Props:

We didn't use a lot of props in our trailer. we intended to use a fake knife and axe for the antagonist to wield, but in the end we didn't get hold of any, so we found ways to covey his intentions in other ways. We did use some props however, such as phones that were shown on tables, glasses with drinks in them, although we didn't use real alcohol, it was just water with lemon and lime juice mixed in to look like alcohol, and the piece of paper at the end that was stuck on a wall that said 'Its you i'm after'
Below is a picture of some of the phones that were used, as well as the type of knife we were going to use until we decided against it.

8. Film Poster:

For my film poster i started by choosing the background image, then i made the billing block text for the bottom of the poster, then added the other effects, such as the blood splatter in the corner, and the release date, although i then changed the main image, as we went and took better quality photos, so one of those was was then used, and because of the was everything else was previously arranged on the poster, not much had to be changed.

9. Magazine Cover:
For my magazine cover, i went through multiple images that i was going to use for the cover, such as a screen grab from the trailer, a run down school corridor, and damaged desk, but i eventually used one of the photos that we took at a later date, as it was much better quality, and suited what i wanted to do more. I also added all the pugs from the other film trailer being made from people in our class, and the masthead, as well as the other text around the cover.