SVS

Diagram looking at the hands and the wrists.

Last year, I made a prop head out of terracotta clay in order to portray myself as decapitated. This year, to improve my skills, I decided to make a head and a hand focusing more on the actual structure of the human body rather than just moulding features on to. For the hand, I had a look at the structure of a human hand, and how it works with the muscles. To recreate this properly, I decided to use straws, string, terracotta clay wax and acrylic paints. In psychological horrors and thrillers, it's more likely that any kind of violence won't be outwardly shown.
in a Psychological horror, the action is likely to be shown, even if it's for a short while, whereas with psychological thrillers, it usually depends on the audiences' perception of the killing, and it's more often than not , that the death will not be shown; Psychological thrillers focus more on the effect on the mind. For our trailer, we've decided to replace all the running shots of Olivia's character with little snippets of the head in a crime scene, to show the danger of the group to society as a collective.

Diagram of the human skull and neck bones (vertabrae)

This is Sunantha, the girl I'm modelling my prop on.

Beginning of creating the prop head. Instead of starting just from the base, I created lots of bone structures in order to really get the facial structure right before starting on facial features. Starting from the nose, I then went on to create nostrils, the cupid's bow, the base of the eye and the eyelids with terracotta clay. In order to keep the head from drying, I immersed the unfinished head in water, then wax and kept it in a plastic bag.

Creating the prop head. As a continuation from when I first started, I went on to add the Irises, the eyebrow, the ears, the back of the head and the neck. With the neck, in order to show some progression from last year, I experimented with creating a vertebrae, to give the impression that the victim's head was sawn off , rather than cut off. This was much harder, as some of the pieces couldn't hold against the main head, but I managed to fix this with some sewing thread. After using wax on the almost-completed head, I used acrylic paints to finish off the head, and then gave it some hair. The total time to create the head was 5 days, meaning that the total time to create the props this year was 8 days, instead of 2 days last year.

NEON TYPOGRAPHY

Whilst debating on what kind of typography/font we would use for our trailer, we dug throughly into a wide range of trailers in search of finding something different and unexpected. Coming across the trailer of 'The Monster' introduced us to the idea of boldly coloured letters for our reviews and title. The bright pink contrasted beautifully with the dark background; the letters stood out and the title became easily remembered. 

From this discovery, we decided to ponder deeper into more trailers who used bright/neon colours and fell in love with the idea of it. The trailers below were our main source of inspiration for our own trailer.

INHERENT VICE

Inherent Vice was the trailer that made us aware of using neon letters against a bright daylight background, considering in 'The Monster''s background colour was black dominated. This helped us be certain that with our shots that are not in darkness, the neon lettering can still be effective.

THE NEON DEMON

The Neon Demon focused more on having neon objects in their shots rather than the font being neon; it was more like 'The Monster' with being brightly coloured rather than complete neon. Regardless, it was still a solid piece of inspiration to use to take on board with our own trailer in terms of colour choices and placing.

DRIVE

Drive's trailer did not include neon typography, only in the advertisement did neon dominate the pictures entirely. Again, this gave us ideas of what the best colours of neon are to use; and gave us clarity that choosing neon is the best idea for our trailer. Neon really does evidently make everything stand out and hopefully will leave our aimed target audience to be fascinated and intrigued with what our trailer will involve of.

EXTRAS OUTFITS

*Mid-shot of V&S (AP)

*Mid-shot of V seperately
*Low angle shots of V&S (focus on sunlight)
*Long shot of V&S walking towards camera- graphic match
- Graphic match should be in the same place as last shot. If not, re-film that shot to match it
*High angle shot of Edge of stairway, use 3 grid technique to stylistically place characters



*Day 3: 12pm-3pm (before sky darkens)
- Everyone was on time today! Camera did run out of battery towards the very end. Used Phone to shoot last 3 shots
- Oxleas Wood, Shooters Hill

*Long shot of Makeshift campsite- Focus on sunlight and colours of green/yellow highlighted, re-visit in Post production
*Tracking shot (Tripod) of area
*Tracking shot( handheld) Following V&S (Do this at least twice, then pick best one for footage)
* Spinning dolly- follow S whilst going 180 degrees around the characters in the centre (do this as many times as possible)
* Quick pan movement , V&S(AP) should walk closer every time pan is completed
* Establishing shot, V&S should look towards Vanishing point on the path 
- If any other person comes by during the shot, leave it in
*Handheld movements, Camera should now act as a character
*Handheld Movement, V and S coming towards camera and move as if the camera has been knocked to the ground- focus on sky once  V and S are seen looking directly down at the camera 

*Figure-of-8 handheld movement, Long shot and Mid-shots of V and S laughing into nothing and or dancing -> re-visit in Post production, try to match with still with serious expressions

*try using a colour filter on top of the camera to experiment with new shots
- if this is too blurry, take it off and edit in Final Cut.

*Day 4: 4pm-7pm (Dusk until Night )
- Everyone was a little late today, so we missed an opportunity to shoot some footage at dusk, when shadows are most prominent. Majority of shots done today are at night, no blue sky is left.

-The Tunnel, underneath Sun-in-the-Sands roundabout

*Midshot of all 4 characters (do this twice)
*High angle shot of all 4 characters- should crouch and turn towards the camera slowly
* Tracking shot of the tunnel moving - if the floor of the tunnel is too bumpy, remove dolly and try this handheld
*Extreme close up, 360 degree dolly shot, -> re-visit in PP, speed this us if you need to
*Close-up of Olivia - reflect craziness of chara.
* Close-up of Prelates -> do something that reflects craziness of character
* Long shot of Olivia skipping down path way -> outside tunnel, be careful of being too in the dark 
*Figure-of-8 handheld movement following Prelates running
*Long shot of olivia turning and running towards the camera
*Try a Canted angle of Olivia crawling towards camera
*Panning shot following Prelates outside the tunnel
* Establishing shot of motorway- > could turn this into Birds eye view Shot if you can (don't drop camera)
*Handheld movement, Midshot of V&S putting on disguises then walking away from camera, out of frame. ->If this doesn't work, get rid and re-film a still shot of the same thing

Audience Survey

When a film/trailer is released, the audience feedback is imperative and necessary to dictate how successful the finished product actually is. The main goal is to have it sold, and the only way to do this is by making sure you create something the target audience will love. So we decided to create a survey that involved of five questions about the genre and what they would expect:

(The link to our survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LN7ND36)

2. Font is a big part of a trailer, we must make sure it looks as professional as possible and suits the whole aesthetic. The 'messy' option won- the audience expect the theme to be hectic.

3. This answer to this question is most likely to change; it all depends on how the shots look and once we have done the experimenting is when we can decide what colour would be best to use. 

*Today was our 3rd filming day. We planned to do the shots where two of the main characters are seen doing things like laughing/ killing/screaming etc. here.


*We had to be mindful of the time we were there for, as daylight doesn't last past 4 in the afternoon.

* After walking a bit into Oxleas Wood, we found our desired location.

*Took a long-shot of this camp site, will revisit and colour match to the rest of the teaser trailer.


*More handheld shots were done today. Did a handheld shot, with the camera acting as a character running alongside V and S.


*Attempted 360 handheld spin around V and S whilst they spin around camera. After 3 Takes, this looks quite good, however will only use a couple of seconds from it.








* Also attempted another 360 spin from the outside going around the characters. This wasn't as successful as the first 360 spin so we decided to take that out



* Also attempted quick  180 pans from side to side. This was less successful with the tripod, so we decided to do this handheld. This ultimately looked better.







* Again, we had the camera act as a character. We took several shots of V and S coming quickly towards the camera and (fakingly) slapping the camera down to the ground.
Doing this with a long shot at first felt less personal, so we increased the zoom to change the framing into a 2 shot which makes its way into an extreme close-up. It was also important that the characters stayed central at all times to mimic a hunter trying to catch prey.


* Had two close-ups of V and S facing away from each other. Senem's hair is half down, half in a space-bun which symbolises both identities in her character. The fact that her space-bun is very loose symbolises her character's loose grip on reality. As well as this, the make-up (red veins, black contour, eyeshadow  etc.) is quite faint in full sunlight. This is meant to show that






* Its also good to notice that the main two characters are dressed in black and white against a natural green/yellow background. It makes the two characters stand out against the background, which is ironic, since the character's they are portraying are trying to fade into normal society. Its also ironic that the colours used here for their costume reflect the boundary between the persona and the shadow, as Jung explains. The character's boundaries are rather blurred into a grey space, which is why it was important to have both characters facing away from each other.

*Today was our 4th filming day, Today we were going to shoot all the shots where all 4 members of the group are shown.
 *Because we were a little later than expected, most of the shots are now at night time. Luckily the light in the tunnel allowed us to get the necessary shots that we needed.
* Took several hand held shots in a figure-of-8 of secondary characters in the tunnel location. This was good, apart from the shot on the left; it was much harder to get low enough for Olivia to crawl towards the camera.

*Took more hand held shots of V and S outside.
This was quite difficult, as there were no streetlights where we were standing, so we had to rely on adjacent lights from other streets. As a result, we decided to take this out
*Took a panning shot of above the motorway, a 5 min walk from the tunnel


*Also took spare shots, in case the 1st ones were not a smooth enough panning shot.
*Took a close-up of Prelate in his alternate persona or shadow (Jung). We only had to do this once, as the shot was pretty good the first time around.
* Took some photographs and straight cut shots of all 4 characters in the tunnel. what we noticed here is that everyone except Olivia's character fits in together. The problem was Olivia's mask, so we'll need another filming day to fix this .