Sunday, 19 December 2010

My Viral Campaign

I decided to go ahead with the idea of CCTV cameras following somebody due to the fact that I felt that this was a great metaphor. I used a student from my school and used the school as the location for the shoot to be taken place. The reason for this was because there were a lot of buildings in which I needed in order to create a high shot resembling a CCTV camera shot. I think that my viral campaign has come out great but the fact that I was limited as to the effects I could use did not help me attain the level I was aiming for. I was not able to create the time and date on the clips when the CCTV footage is playing in my video which was due to the fact that the software I was using was an older version which did not support this. The sound I gathered from iTunes sound bank in which I found three clips, one of a 35mm zoom lens and another one which is just a normal zoom sound effect and I also found male footsteps in which I thought would work well for when a person is following the boy. I paid 99p for each sound clip. Below is the final trailer:

Thursday, 16 December 2010

Viral Campaign

Viral marketing are marketing techniques that use existing social networks to build on their brand awareness or to achieve marketing objectives such as sales of dvds. The way in which viral marketing works is by word of mouth and can take form of video clips, interactive flash games, ebooks, brandable software, images or text messages and consumers simply forward or inform other people of this media and they will inform their friends and family and the cycle goes on. This is where the name comes from as a virus replicates itself rapidly and a viral campaign works in the same way.

One viral campaign which caught my eye was the transport for London campaign called test your awareness.

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

The purpose of this campaign is to inform drivers that it is easy to miss something that they are not looking for. This viral campaign is brilliant as they have combined the two main important principles which are surprise and competitiveness. This will hook the audience on to the viral campaign as it puts them to a challenge and makes them realise themselves the purpose of the campaign instead of the facts telling you.

The idea I have for my viral campaign for ‘The Vanishing’ is a clip giving information on the killer. I want to make the film seem realistic and the way to do this is by making a clip where the killer himself is telling everyone his background and why he is so blood thirsty. The clip will be around 0:45-1:00 minute long and will be based on a deep voice talking with a black screen. There will be images appearing every few seconds of the actions in which the killer done, for example, a handless arm or a man lying on the floor with blood on his face. This will gain interest as there will be no images of the killer supporting the voice which will create enigma.

I also had another idea which is a series of clips from CCTV cameras of a man walking around following his daily routine. The point of the clip is to support the idea that you might not be able to see them but they will be able to see you. The idea will support my film as in my film, the boys don’t know that the killer has their eye on them until he starts to kill them one by one. The message at the end will be presented in white text which will turn to red and start to drip down like blood. This will link to the horror genre and may physiologically affect the audience as the fact that you are filmed more then 300 times a day on average (supported by times online) will make people realise that they are always being watched as this viral campaign is based on facts.

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

Final Trailer

The final trailer was put together using Final Cut Studio, as mentioned below, and the music was part created by myself and part from itunes sound bank but all put together and equalised by myself.

Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Screen Shots

Below are some screen shots from Final Cut Studio:

Monday, 6 December 2010

Draft



The first draft was put together using Magix Movie Edit Pro which we purchased for £59.99. The idea was that we would put together a draft as a group but complete the final trailer individually. I didn't feel comfortable using this new program as I normally use Final Cut Studio Pro 7 on my macbook pro to edit videos. Therefore, I felt as if it would be best if I stuck with the program I am use to in order to allow my full potential to be achieved.

As a group, we came to conclusion that the trailer was too long and decided it should be around the 1-2 minute range. Also, I felt that the trailer also contains too many effects as well as the trailer not making much sense due to some scenes being in the wrong place. Moreover, the pace of the trailer was not that fast consequently causing the feel to be less tensed and scary. I decided to make the trailer shorter, take the effects out, increase the pace of the trailer and rearrange the scenes a bit.

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Sounds

The music was created at my house as I have a music studio in my loft. I used Reason 4.0 and Logic Studio to create the beat and I made the beat to a standard which I was satisfied with. It took around 3 hours 30minutes to create and once created, it took 4 days for the beat to be mastered in order to bring out certain elements of the beat which gave the horror feel and a little bit of presence. A company called Prabus Productions mastered the beat and helped me through out this process as well as give good advice. Some sound effects such as the foot steps and the cracking noise at the end was purchased of iTunes and slipped into the areas matching the video.

About The Software:
Logic Studio - A program which contains effect plug ins, virtual instruments, large range of audio loops and sampler instruments which allows the user to record, edit and mix audio.
Reason 4.0 - A program which is fully virtual hence all equipment online, containing everything needed to construct music. This also contains samples, instrument racks, plug ins and virtual instruments.

Reason 4.0 was used in slave mode hence controlled by Logic Studio.

Production Logo

A production logo is used in order to give film companies a way in which to brand the media they produce. It can take form of a still image, motion or synchronised sound. For smaller companies, the production logos are normally referred to as vanity cards informally. Below are some examples of well known production logos:

Warner Brothers:


20th Century Fox:


Below is our production logo. I was allocated this task by my collegues and thought deep about what I wanted to show. Firstly, the name arose from the first letter of our names, O from Omrick, A for Anil and Ashwin and lastly R for Rishi which spelt AROA. The point which others missed was that this is a production logo not for this one film but for all the films we will produce. We are determined not to produce just in the horror genre and plan to expand our films into the comedy and romance sectors as well as the rest. We had to keep our production logo open and simple so our audience would remeber us. Our logo doesnt suggest what genres we produce as we want our audience to understand we produce all genres and the video camera on a tripod clearly gives the message across we are a filming production company.

The way I produced this was on photoshop and the image of the video camera was extracted from google images. The font is standard Arial and was placed in such a way that it looks like the name is coming out of the camera lens. Below is the finished product:

Saturday, 4 December 2010

Intertitles

An intertitle is a printed piece of text which appears in certain places during a motion image normally to convey information. Below are examples of intertitles from various trailers.

The Strangers:

The above intertitles expresses the fact that the film is inspired by true events. It fades in and fades out and there is a high contrast between the white writing on a black background.

Friday The 13th:

The Friday The 13th intertitle above has another film name which they produced which is a good idea as people who are a fan of the texas chainsaw massacre will want to watch their new film.

A common convention used in intertitles are the white writing on a black background as well as the names of other films they produced. Other common intertitles are coming soon, inspired by true events or the date.

The intertitles which we will include in our trailer, considering the common intertitles used, will follow the narrative structure of our film. The intertitles which we will include in our trailer are below in the order they will appear:

1. ‘From the makers of THE KLEAR WITCH PROJECT’
2. ‘An AROA production’
3. ‘Four friends go out’
4. ‘A normal night..’
5. ‘turns into’
6. ‘A NIGHTMARE’
7. ‘The Vanishing’
8. ‘Coming soon’

Film Names

We had a meeting in order to come up with some film names and we asked our friends and family what they thought of the names for the film and gave them a brief of what the film is about. We got the results back in and the name and number of likes are listed below:

The Stalker ( 4 )
The Vanishing ( 7 )
Bat Killer ( 1 )
Forest Hunter ( 6 )
Cloak Man ( 0 )
Disguise ( 0 )
No Help ( 0 )
Travel of Hell ( 5 )
Forest Breh ( 2 )
Unstoppable ( 6 )
Psycho ( 2 )

The chosen name was The Vanishing as it gained the highest number of votes.

The possible fonts we can use are below:

Terror Production:



Shock Therapy:



Straight To Hell:



We chose the Straight To Hell font as we felt it looked more suitable and adequate for the genre of the film. This will be used for the intertitles too.