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.
