Harvest On Crepsley Hill: Final Cut

Harvest On Crepsley Hill: Rough Cut

The Hobbit Empire Magazine Analysis

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Harvest on Crepsley Hill Empire Cover Analysis

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Harvest On Crepsley Hill Film Poster Analysis

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Dark Knight Poster Analysis

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Evaluation Part 1 : How does your trailer challenge forms and conventions?

Evaluation Part 1

My horror trailer uses lots of different conventions to make it a part of the horror genre. As well as different conventions of the horror genre, we also had some auteur influence from other artists. One of my favourite shots of the trailer is the shot in which the scarecrow jumps off the hill towards the camera. In this shot the scarecrow is in silhouette, this connotes an air of mystery as well as showing the contrast of the bright day and the evil character. It is also shot using a low angle "German Expressionist" style of shot, this type of shot helps enforce the character's strength and can be seen in many horror films such as this shot from Halloween (1978). Another person who has had an influence on our trailer is auteur Tom Savini. His work in Dawn of the Dead (1978) inspired us to make a gory red-band trailer, and we aimed to appeal to a mixture of action and gory horror fans.

Gore and "body horror" was an important part of our plans. Our group's favourite genre of horror was action horror, which we found to be the most gruesome in modern films such as Dawn of the Dead (2004). the use of body horror in films now is become a lot more frequent and a lot more violent. The Hays Code that was introduced back in 1933 would not have allowed the level of gore that is used in our trailer, even though it is very little. When the Code was abolished in 1968, body horror became increasingly more common, an example of which would be The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Audience's became desensitised to gore due to it's over-use, so it does not have the effect it does now in comparison to what it did in the 60's. In our trailer we decided it would be very hard to create a body horror effect that would be impressive, so we mainly used mild gore such as blood spurts, and then made use of restricted narration to let the audience imagine what would happen to the victim. This can be seen in the shot in which the scarecrow slashes down at a victim he has just grabbed, as blood splatters over him.

After researching other horror trailers on YouTube, we got a sense of the structure that is most effective in a horror highlights trailer. Our trailer fits the conventions of these trailers by using slow intertitles at the start, and an attempt to start character building. In most of the horror trailers that I watched for research the antagonist/monster is not seen. However, I did not think this was very effective, because I didn't feel like I knew what the film was going to contain. Therefore by setting our trailer in the day time, and also showing the main antagonist the audience can clearly see what the film is going to be about. Our killer, as is many horror movies (seen in the compilation video below), is the main selling point of the trailer.

As well as the showing the antagonist, another thing that makes our trailer distinctive is the use of silhouette shots and also the gore effects. The artistic style of the trailer is influenced by various George A Romero films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Land of the Dead (2007).

Evaluation Part 2: how effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Part 2

The poster that was created for our trailer/film was based around the layout from a Dark Knight poster.
However, after also looking at various other horror poster I found that the central image was usually the villain/antagonist rather than the protagonist. This led me to use the shot of the scarecrow as the main image. I then manipulated the image to look out of place, which in turn makes it a bit more frightening. The other main feature of the poster is the credits at the bottom in what is called the "billing block". This style was again taken from the Dark Knight poster but can also be seen in many horror posters that foreground the antagonist, such as the Nightmare on Elm Street poster.

 The background image in the poster was also essential because it uses a creepy location, which audiences will recognize as a horror convention. I chose white as the colour of the font as a more basic colour to avoid too much attention and also starkly contrast with how I put the important text in red. I chose red because it connotes blood and anger, therefore making the genre of the film easier to recognize.

The magazine cover that was created was based around the layout of a previous Empire magazine issue. I had a choice between using Empire or Total Film, but in the end chose Empire because our trailer is an action-horror which appeals more to mainsteam audiences. This is proved by the financial success of Dawn of the Dead and the recent horror releases of Cabin In The Woods and Zombieland.
The main image of the scarecrow is vital to my magazine cover because it shows that he is important in the film. This exactly follows the conventions of the Hobbit issue of Empire, which foreground a character to grab attention. To reinforce this idea the image covers some of the Empire logo, making him seem powerful. The Empire logo also has blood splatters over it because it is a horror special, again reinforcing the genre of the film.

The poster ties in with the trailer because it uses the creepy location of the barn in both. The barn was chosen because it is creepy, as well as also being commonly associated with murderers such as Ed Gein. There is also a small amount of blood around the tagline 'The harvest is nigh' showing that gore is used in the film.The magazine cover ties in with the film because it uses a canted angle on the scarecrow, connoting insanity, in which we use multiple times in the trailer. The rest of the poster ties into the gritty mood of the trailer, and I think the combined effect of both the cover and poster in the ancillary products tie in really well to my horror trailer. The whole concept of selling the bad guy as the main attraction of the film has been pulled off across all the media sources, and that helps make a successful campaign.

Evaluation Part 3: How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Part 3

In my research and planning stages I used various media technologies.  The first of which was Blogger, which was used to upload all my work. Being that Blogger is free to use it's not expected to be incredibly easy to use, but something that I tried to do were just not possible, or unclear as to how to do it. I wanted to simple make all the images from 1 label to show on the same page, but it won't let you have more than 8 to a page, making navigating my blog harder.Overall I found Blogger very hard to use, but when you get to learn how to get around the things that you can't do in browser it becomes a lot simpler ( such as making a custom banner). 

YouTube was also used, both for research and to upload the focus group screening. Youtube was very simple to watch and upload, the only problem was that you had to sign in to see some videos that were age restricted such as the Evil Dead trailer. IMDB.com was useful in finding various actor's names and dates that were required for referencing in my research and planning stages. IMDB was very simple and there was literally nothing complicated about it at all.

In the construction phase of my trailer I also used various other media programs. The main program being Adobe Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro is used in some professional film companies to edit movies  due to its versatility. Premiere Pro was used to edit the clips that we shot and to add sounds and intertitles. In this program we were able to crop the shots to suitable time lengths for our action horror trailer. The intertitles were actually made in Adobe After Effects, then exported to Premiere Pro, where we put them in sequence with the rest of our shots. The sound effects that we used we took from a site called freesounds.com which contains copyright free downloads of various different music tracks and sound effects.

To finish off, I used Garage Band on the college's iMac to create the soundtrack. It allowed me to use a mixer to plug in my guitar and record real time to a drum loop.

In the evaluation stage of creating the trailer we used a HD camera to film the focus group, and the file was then transferred to a mac through the SD card reader and uploaded to YouTube. YouTube was also used to screen all of the groups final trailers. Flickr was used to evaluate both my magazine cover and my poster. I found Flickr to be very simple and was impressed at how good the annotations look and how they appear when you hover over various tagged areas of the image.

Evaluation Part 4: What have you learn from your guidance and feedback?

Our focus group was useful in pointing out key points of our trailer that needed changing. Some of these changes were very minor things such as "can't hear dialogue sometimes" all the way up to shots being too bright for the horror genre. As well as this the music for the trailer was also criticised. Within our group we thought that the metal music fitted the trailer well, mainly because it's an action horror. We know that Metal is used in action horrors frequently like for instance in Dawn of the Dead (2004) we hear Disturbed's song Down with the Sickness. Affter taking into consideration the classes opinions on the music we as a group decided to keep it. In general our trailer was pretty well recieved, gaining 7/10. During the rough cut screening classmates said that they did not follow the narrative of the trailer to start off with After reviewing the footage we decided to remove the backstory scenes we filmed and make the storyline simpler.

After recieving multiple comments like "The shots are too bright" we decided to make all of the shots darker. Our trailer was naturally bright because we filmed after it had snowed so the sunlight reflected off the snow making everything brighter. But the snow worked in our favour in one of my favourite shots which is when the scarecrow runs and jumps off the hill, and the snow flies towards the camera. This shot was well received by a few class members as being "good use of silhouettes".

We decided that after releasing all of the suspense by showing the audience gore that we would need to have some sort of jump-sacre and the end. In our rough cut we did not have this, so after realising that our trailer did not have a memorable ending we then added it later on.

The location that we shot our trailer on was also praised. This was due to the fact that we found a location that fits in with the general horror convention of having a creepy location. We found some old silo's and an old broken down barn, which with the use of some canted angle shots helped the trailer become more mysterious.

The last main point that was commented on was the use of our intertitles. The text on the Intertitles we used was taken from dafont, and then imported to after effects. After quite of while of fiddling about with various presets we came across a preset we thought looked good without being too cheesy. To give the intertitles a little more interest we added a dark grainy horror background to keep the dark mood of our trailer constant.