Drafts of Ancillary Tasks (Sketches)

Evaluation Question 2

Story Boards

Shooting Schedule

To keep organised we had a shooting schedule plan to make sure we knew what we were doing at each shoot, and how many takes, and shots we did. This allowed us to plan ahead so that we could get on with our shooting knowing everything we needed.

Teaser Trailers and Theatrical Trailers

A teaser trailer is a short trailer that is often used to help to advertise an upcoming film or other media form. It can be released months before the due date of the official film to help create anticipation and interest from the target audience. A theatrical trailer is a much more in depth well revised longer trailer which tells us more about the plot of the film and gives us exact dates when it will be out.
A teaser trailer is a lot shorter compared to a theatrical trailer. The teaser trailer's main purpose is to 'tease' the audience with short snippets from the movie and by not revealing too much of the plot. It is normally under two minutes whereas a theatrical trailer is usually much longer, sometimes up to four or five minutes.
Distinctive features of  a teaser trailer are: The length of the trailer which is usually under two minutes, in teaser trailer the produces and actors.acresses are exploited to create interest from the audience. e.g a famous actor such as Johnny Depp would instantly get audience interest due to his wide variety of films. The trailer would also show when the film is going to be out e.g 'This Summer' where as a theatrical trailer usually tells you the month is will be out or even the date e.g 'August 23rd'.
At the beginning of the teaser trailer we are instantly being exploited the directors' name and possibly his previous work e.g 'From the makers of...' The theatrical trailer is much more heavily edited with voice over's and inter titles where the teaser trailer does not contain all these things. We can relate the main protagonist in the film by watching the theatrical trailer as it reveals more about the plot than the teaser trailer.

Audience Research

We conducteed a questionnaire to fifteen people in the college to get a glimpse of their interests in different horror films, what types they like, and whether they would enjoy our synopsis. Here is the questionnaire we handed out:

Here are the results:

The majority of the people interviewed were female.

 The audience research could have been slightly biased as the people who I interviewed were mostly between the age of 16-20 (which is the target audience), as this was the only group of people available to me in the class time. This could have an affect on the interestes expressed in my results.

According to the results the target audience's biggest fear in film type is psychological horror first, then in second place is ghost films which scare them the most. This shows that there is a market and interest in my type of film as it is a ghost film. It is not necessarily the first in demand but there is a clear interest and fear factor in ghost horror films.

We asked our target audience what their worst fear was and here was the results we got:
Ghosts:  2
Children: 1
Ducks:  1
Spiders:  5
Clowns:  1
Eyes:  1
Madness/mystery:  2
Masks:  2
Heights:  1
Burried alive: 1

According to the results the biggest fear people had were spiders. This doesn't support my horro film. But in equal place was ghosts which is what my film was based on.

We then moved on to more specific questions about the trailer itself and what we were planning on including in it:

Here we asked the audience if women/girls in white, black long, hair haunting/stalking scare them. 81% of the audience said Yes and just 18.75% said No. This indicated that the main villain of my horror trailer would be appealing for the target audience. It would fulfill its purpose of scaring the audience.

Initially this question was asked because we had an idea to have the girl show up in a mirror behind a character in the trailer. Instead we brought the ghsot up behind the characters. But the majority 87.5% would be frightened by a shocking appearance of the ghost, which indicated that possibly they would be frightened by the sudden shock appearance of the ghost behind the characters. It would almost make you want to say to the tv 'look behind you!'.

There is a 50:50 decision on the audience's preference to gore. We didn't really want the film to be fully based on gore such as the film SAW, but we did want the deaths to look scary and realistic, and brutal. We did put some blood on the ghost's face to indicate she is evil and deadly. But the only real scene that shows death and blood is the bath scene and the scene where there is blood written on the mirror.

We asked the question 'Do you like to see the monster of the film in the trailer' because we wanted to see if the audience prefers a mystery or like little hints to tease them. The majority 75% said Yes and the 25% said No. In the audience feedback, the audience said that the monster was seen too often. However, a hint of the monster teases the audience.

Women's Representation in Horror

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

My audience have their say.


  We gained most of our audience feedback from our classmates. This was because they were clearly in our target audience of 16-24 year olds and many of them were horror fans. It was an interesting experience showing our video to them and then getting the feedback. The majority of the audience feedback referred to the good use of fast pace editing, and the editing of the past versus present binary opposition. However the audience also commented on the fact that they fet the horror monster girl image was overused, and as soon as they said this we realised they were right! This would be the advantage of having a test screening before the trailer was released.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Horror Film Magazine Cover

Horror Movie Poster

ASYLUM Final Horror Trailer Product

Film Magazine Cover Analysis

FILM magazine cover - avatar, a photo by v.cleave on Flickr.

Hover to view notes.

FILM Magazine Cover Analysis

FILM magazien cover, a photo by v.cleave on Flickr.

Hover over to read notes.

Analysis of real Horror Film Poster

INDISIOUS POSTER, a photo by v.cleave on Flickr.

Hover over to see notes.

Analysis of Real Horror Film Poster

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS psoter, a photo by v.cleave on Flickr.

Hover over the picture to real notes.

Role of Distribution

Movies are capable of enriching pretty well every aspect of our lives. They retain an extra ordinary power to amaze us. They influence the games we enjoy, the music we play, and they inspire the fashions and advertising images that spring up all around us. Films can have an impact, social and commercial. Films only come to life when they invade the consciousness of the citizens, consumers, for who they target.

Distribution identifies and delivers the largest possible audience for every film. This is no small task, especially when there are so many other entertainment options available both inside and outside the home. There is an addition to the 500 or more titles released in the UK cinemas every year. Research shows that most cinemagoers know in advance which film they want to see, and its principally due to competing distributors’ efforts to promote interest in the titles they are handling.  

Tailor-made, audience focused distribution is, and will remain, vital to the prospects of individual films and to the industry as a whole, whatever the medium or format in question. Every element of the communications and entertainment industry has been and is undergoing rapid change. The advent of digital in the cinema sector has not merely resulted in a change of format with d-cinema succeeding the long-standing 35mm presentation, but it has had a transformative impact. Digital has remodelled the ways in which films are released, promoted and consumed and it is reshaping the kind of entertainment centre that a modern cinema can be.

A few fundamentals remain rock-solid. Sharing great stories has always been part of human nature and filmed stories look, sound and feel their very best in the cinema. During the continual changes and challenges of recent years, UK cinema has been remarkably resilient.

Distributors connect films with audiences

“As a filmmaker, I know only too well that films do not exist for their own sake… they only exist when they are experiences by an audience”. Sir Alan Parker CBE

More than a century after film was invented the cinema has accumulated a phenomenal heritage. The world around a wonderful spectrum of stories is created thought the camera. The digital age had brought more choice than ever. And with so much information available, you may have read or heard a great deal about actors and filmmakers. Right at the heart of the film industry is a dynamic sector working to deliver the largest possible audience to every new release.

Distribution is the highly competitive business of launching and sustaining films in the market place. Films don’t become talking points or find their place in the world by accident. The distributor’s challenge is to bring each one to market by:

>identifying its audience

>considering why they’d go and see it

>estimating the revenue potential across all the formats of its release

>developing plans and partnerships to build awareness of and interest in the film

>aiming to convert as much interest as possible into cinema visits

>persuading exhibitors (cinema operators) to play the film

Movie Trailer Synopsis

The movie is based on a young teenager girl who is a patient in a mental institute. She is raped and murdered by her doctor whom she once trusted. The hospital was shut down in 1989 as a result of this.


20 years later, a group of teenagers visit the abandoned building which was once the mental hospital. The teenagers are ruthless and have heard about the story but do not believe there is any living beyond the grave. Little did they know the girl had not left the hospital, her spirit stayed to get revenge.
The teenagers see the girl and flee the building. One by one they die horrible, gruesome deaths. She has returned from the dead for revenge.

Horror Mood Board

This is my horror mood board, containing most of the things that frighten me the most. As you can see my main fear is women in white, and they portray a certain inoccent past, but an evil present, either posessed or an evil luking back from a tretorous past. Blood in a gory form or a ghostly form also frightens me as it shows a sign of pain. The thought of mentally ill people also scare me because it seems they have no contiouns or sense of right and wrong. Mental institues and grave yard also frighten me as they are a place of death and wrong doings.

Horror Film Trailer Examples

The Last Excorcism




The part in this trailer I think is very effective is the bits where the possesed girl's body is bent and twisted in abnormal ways to signify her being possesed by an evil soul. The shot which shows the view from out of the window where she is walking past is also very effective, and adds to the 'creep' factor. I think knowing of the unknown is a scary aspect of this trailer and film (as i have seen it before). The deamon is possesing an inoccent young girl, who is turned evil. Her costume (a white gown) is also stereotypically frightening.



The Echo




This trailer also has parts in it which I find very effective in scaring the audience. The shots moving under the bed make the viewers heart flip in a way, because they are expecting something to be under there but at the same time are scared that there will be something under there. The 'boogie man' legend, of something hiding under the bed is still very much alive today. Not knowing whats in dark places.

Narrative Theory

We applied the theories and ideas of four narrative theorists to The Shining. Propp was a Russian critic who explored the underlying structure of folk tales and proposed a set of universal character and narrative functions which he thought were the basis for all stories. His ideas are an uneasy fit with the Shining as even thought there was a clear villain and hero, there were potentially more than one and some character’s roles were unclear. For instance Wendy could have been seen as a hero and she had the guts to stand up to jack and lock him up in the food store room. Also Halaran could be seen as the hero as he communicated with Danny the little boy and came all that way to the hotel because he could sense there was something wrong happening. Even though he got murdered before he could help anyone, he supplied the Snowplough which in the end helped Danny and Wendy escape, leaving Jack (the villain) dead. Jack’s role changes from the beginning of the film to the end. He is seen as harmless to begin with, but it is unclear whether a supernatural entity has turned him loopy or the isolation of the conditions in a big hotel, away from any other civilisation. Either way he is seen as the villain because of his actions towards Wendy and Danny in attempting to kill them with an axe. We see earlier traits of his strange behaviour, when he speaks rudely to Wendy and swears at her. He also loses his sense of time; as we witnessed when Wendy brought food up to him he asked what the time was and it was 11:30am, which for a man who claims he has lots of things to do is not a sensible time to wake up. Later on we realise that he wasn’t actually writing he was writing a repeated phrase on hundreds of pieces of paper “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

Propp’s outline of the functions in a horror film are somewhat followed by The Shining. The preparation that starts with a member of the family leaving home relates to the film, the preparation, complication, transference and struggle are followed by The Shinning. However, the return and recognition is not a part of the story outline of the film. The film ends with the villain (Jack) eventually dying, and the heroes escaping.

Claude Levi-Strauss looked at the narrative of horror films in binary oppositions. They are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of the media text. An example of this would be Good, and Evil. Other examples used are:

Earth/space

Past/Present

Humans/Aliens

Normal/Strange

Natural/Supernatural

He was not focused on the events which took place in the plot, but instead more for the deeper meaning of the themes. He looked at how the narrative might be a property of the human mind. He extracted common myths and crossed them with cultural boundaries. These binary oppositions where seen to structure our understanding of the world.

The hotel in the film is seen as a bad place, from the beginning of the film, as the film went on it increasingly got a worse image. Jack, Wendy and Danny were seen as the innocent people coming to take care of the hotel. This illustrates the example of good and evil. Also when Jack becomes a villain, it is him against the good Wendy and Danny and he turns into the evil presence. There is a large sense of past and present in the film, some of which is unexplained. The cook Halaran tells Danny that the past usually comes back to haunt the hotel, as a warning.  Jack is haunted by the past which could have been one of the reasons why he became a villain. He may or may have not just imaged the ball where he met O’Grady, it is not explained. It is still questioned whether he was possessed, or he became a villain through paranoia and isolation. This brings us to the normal and paranormal part of the film. There were lots of paranormal activity occurring. Such as it is unexplained how Jack escaped from the food storage room, after being locked in there by Wendy. It can be argued that every time he images things there is a mirror in the room, therefore he could be imagining it, but we as the audience do not know for sure whether he is really seeing this, as a result of the haunted hotel, or he is just imagining it, going mad. The idea of humans and aliens could relate to what Danny is seeing when he sees the two girls around the hotel, he isn’t going mad like Jack but he is seeing these paranormal images too, therefore it could explain what Jack is witnessing. The humans are Wendy, Danny and Jack, but could it be argued that Jack turns into an alien? The old woman in the bath, the twin little girls, and the ball were all a sign of alienism because theoretically they were not meant to be there.

Bordwell and Thompson’s theory was that the narrative is a “chain of cause and effect occurring in time and space.” The delineation of time and space: the screen duration, plot duration, and story duration. The film The Shining itself is 115 minutes long. In this amount of time the plot duration was around 6 months long, and the story as a whole was set through 60+ years. For them, a narrative typically begins with one situation, a series of changes occur depending on pattern of cause and effect, eventually a situation arises that brings the end of the narrative. The narrative shapes the material in the time and space, it defines where everything takes place, when, and how fast they take place. It uses technical techniques to manipulate the audience’s awareness of time and place by using: flashbacks, replays of action, slow motion, speeding up, jumping between places and times.

As audiences we connect events to make sense of what is happening. For instance a shot of the hotel, then a shot of the family in a room signify that the family are in the hotel. This is an important factor in narrative because even if there is no obvious connection, we still try to make one. This is a humans natural reaction because making connections is how we natural make sense of the world around us and we transport this into films. The director can create a mood or atmosphere by choosing certain shots in certain order to build up a picture in our minds, so that the film makes sense. There is an instant link to what happens in one shot in those either side of it, in the same way it would happen in real life.

Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker in the 1920’s experimented by showing people shots of actors in between shots of different objects of food, a dead woman and a child. The audience interpreted the actor’s affectionate. This is because the brains try to make continuative sense of what we see. This is called montage, the placing together of images. Sergei Eisenstein is another Russian filmmaker of the same era, he believed that it was more effective if consecutive shots were not obviously linked as the audience were forced to think and interact more o make the mental jump from shot to shot. In a more light-hearted way montage is used today in pop videos and advertising, to encourage the audience to make associations and link ideas.

The Return of the Repressed

The definition of ‘Repressed’ is the ego one holds for suppressing and forgetting its instinctual impulses. The Return of the Repressed is Sigmund Freud’s theory of neurotic symptoms. The unconscious thought and feeling that would push for access to the fiction which the mind holds in order to be discharged. Repression is when the subject repels and keeps at a distance from consciousness representations (thoughts, images, memories) that are disagreeable because they are incompatible with the ego. Freud’s repression is the privileged mode of defense against the instincts. This is linked to the discovery of the unconscious; the notion of repression accompanies all the developments of Freudian theory. It is one of its major points, "the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests" ("On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement).

It is described in combination with hysteria; repression plays a major role in other mental disorders as well as in psychic activity. Generally, repression is a type of defense that mobilizes the mind to deal with conflicts and to protect the ego from the demands of the instincts.

An example is, an only child whose parents are having a second baby. The first child receives the most attention as it’s the only child, and is the centre of the parents’ universe. The child which has then had to give up their spoilt role as being the only child, and will feel demoted when the new child comes along. Typically, there is a mix of love, excitement, and trepidation at the arrival of the new baby; when the child realizes the new baby is going to get most of the attention that used to be all his, the child then gets jealous and angry. The child then realises that yelling and screaming is not going to get the child what it wants. The anger goes underground and eventually becomes unconscious. Often, as part of that process, the child shows his overwhelming love for the baby (a defence known as "reaction formation" is involved); the unconscious anger toward the baby then reveals itself in the child's attempts to "love it to death." This usually happens with children from age 3 onwards; therefore parents shouldn’t leave toddlers alone with infant babies. Eventually, the child manages to find ways to deal with his anger in acceptable ways and ideally learns that his love for his sibling outweighs his childhood resentment.

Freud showed the existence of a real intention of the mind that looks to forget, to cause disagreeable representations to disappear. These representations are isolated in a "second consciousness. Separated from the mainstream of thought. The psyche is thereafter "dissociated," the unpleasant idea having been transferred to another place, "repressed," is then blocked by any discharge of painful emotion that might be associated with it. It can be seen that the notion of repression, from the outset appears as a relation to the unconscious.

Horror Film Trailer

This film is called Grave Encounters (2011), it is set in a psychiatric hospital that has been abandoned. It was the 'dumping ground for embaressing family members' as they said. A ghost hunting crew goes in to investigate the paranomal activity. The setting of the film is in an isolated abandoned building, which had previously been occupied. What once was a busy building full of people is now a nest for the undead. The hospital itself seems to be located in an area far from the city, or any civilisation, this makes the thoguht of being in this place more scary as if anything went wrong there would be nowhere to run. The building is known for its past, its history of mentally ill people being isolated here. Lots of distressed people were fostered here, which adds to the creep factor of the building. The building is large itself, with many hall ways and corridors which give a hint of a secretive past, or unwelcome presence lurking behind the walls. The whole trailer is filmed at night, in the dark. Where supernatural entities seem to stereotypically lurk. This also challenges viewers fear of the dark, and the thought that there is something hiding in the darkness, almost stalking you.


The trailer is based on a ghost hunting team filiming one of their episodes in this mental institution, on the basis of the rumours around the local town that it is haunted. The trailer is filmed by hand held camera either on a stand or by hand. This gives a quite jolty effect, when the characters run the camera runs too, which makes the whole scene more personal and as if the viewer themselves are running from the undead. This type of camera work is very expressive rather than your classic filiming point of view, this involves the viewer, which in a horror can enticen the fear factor. There are views of the camera being places in the room to watch the paranormal activity take place, this adds to the fear of the trailer as it shows that no one is around and that these events are seemed to be occuring by a supernatural force. There are many people in the film, not just one person which in a way also adds to the fear of the film as it shows that even when your with company you can still get effected by the spirit around. There were a few unsettling jumps which gets the viewers heart racing. It is a fast moving trailer but it also tells the story from the main character's point of view, the fact that they are a ghosthunting team on a mission to explore the spirits of the abandoned mental home. This way the viewer gets a slight taste of the story without giving away too much, but also to leave them wanting to know more. There are sudden points of silence, then a shock of a jump where something frightening has happened, this again gruel's the viewer. Most of the sound is diagetic which makes the scene seem more realistic as if it has really happened which will frighten the viewer more, as they will be able to relate more to it.


Most of the film is taped therefore its got that black and white feel to it, which connotes an ancient, old school type feel but also a dark scary night feel. The shots showing the room in the dark are scary to a viewer as they know something is going to happen, but they dont know what and when. The dark connotates evil, and mystery and most of this trailer is in the dark. The only light source is a light which one of the crew members has, which also adds to the scare of the film, the thought that if that light blows, there is no way of seeing anything, and the unseen is always feared. There is not many objects int he terms of mise-en-scene in the trailer mostly just objects you would find  in a hospital such as beds, but things such as windows are a key point. There is a fear stereotypicall of doors and windows shutting on themselves by a source of paranormal evil, which is shown in this film. At the end of the trailer also we see a girl in white in the corner, which is all meant ot be innocent she is possibly scared, then she turns around and makes a gruelin, shocking, hideous face and it completely turns the situation around we are suddenly frightened of her.