A2 coursework

This blog will help me publish all my ideas and finding of my A2 Media Coursework. Our task this year was to create a teaser trailer, a poster advertising the trailer and a front cover of a film magazine.
My initial ideas were to make a horror trailer in a forest about a murderer. My inspiration for this was The Blair Witch Project and The Strangers. I soon realised that it would have been difficult to make my trailer unique from these two films, it would not have been very original so I decided to leave that idea.

I then needed more inspiration for my trailer so I looked on YouTube at a few horror trailers and I looked for the conventions of a teaser trailer. The conventions are: credits, you are able to distinguish the genre of the film, title, diagetic and nondiagetic sound and the release date. I then went on to write down what I should do and shouldn't do in my trailer and what I should concentrate on the most.

• No fight scenes but you can suggest violence
• Music must be relevant e.g. if it is a horror trailer then don't chose a pop song
• Font for the captions - not too fancy or plain!
• Don't give the story line away!
• Think carefully about the scene, the costumes and the speaking parts! (no lengthy conversations)
• Clips should be non-linear
• If there is an irrelevant clip then delete it
• Try not to use "blood"

I then started on another idea and for this one I wanted to play on people's fear of being alone. If I'm home alone and I hear a creek or a noise I get scared very quickly, it happens to everyone. From this stemmed three ideas.

1. Guy is home alone, his parents have gone away for a few weeks. He has a party and after everyone leaves he falls asleep on the sofa. He wakes up and finds out there's been a powercut so he goes upstairs to sleep and hears weeping coming from his parent's room.
2. Starts with three people standing over a body. They try and cover up the accidental murder.
3. A boy with a split personality finds himself alone with no one to turn to, no one that he can trust. He believes he has turned into his other personality and that it is taking over his life. He then murders people close to him because he believes they are trying to kill him.

For my teaser trailer I started to develop ideas via a spider diagram, which I have attached, and I circled the best ideas which I came with which helped me to focus on them. I then developed my ideas further by drawing out my initial ideas for my storyboard. The main plot is a young man (aged between 17-19) developing a multiple personality disorder, suffers alone which leads to more danger for him and his loved ones. I chose the idea of a man with an multiple personality disorder because it is slightly less conventional to the typical teenage horror and shows possible real life events which could happen to anybody. This is both scarier as it follows a new trend in the horror genre focusing on real life events no matter how extreme e.g. The Strangers, Paranormal Activity and The Last Exorcism. The Strangers plays upon your paranoia about being home alone in the dark introducing the three masked intruders that say very little except powerful lines such as in response to the women who asks “Why are you doing this to us?”, one of the masked intruders replies “Because you were home.” Paranormal Activity also plays on your fear of the dark and uses noises around the house to escalate that fear e.g. stairs creaking, doors slamming and noisy pipe work. The Last Exorcism is filmed as a documentary film which makes the experience of watching it feel more realistic making the audience feel that they are true events rather than fictional created by a film crew and scripts.