2. ESTABLISHING SHOTS
This is the first section of our trailer so far, where we have used establishing long shots of the road, and we have
added fade in fade out dissolve transitions, to create initial suspense from the beginning of the trailer, and when
paired with the suspenseful music, it will connote danger and tension to the audience. It is also reminiscent of the
fade in fade out transitions used throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre trailer, which is used in that to also
create suspense as well as create an enigma and tease the audience, as each clip is only a few seconds before it
fades in and out again. The shots are a pan left long shot of the road which sets up for the equilibrium and
introduces the audience to the location. There is also a pan up mid shot of the house in which the villain lives. This
shot creates a sense of intrigue in the audience because it shows there is a focus on that house and they question
who lives there and what happens. The establishing shots we filmed were used to convey the location of a quiet
street making the audience question why is seems so tranquil before they see the villain. It also gives a sense of
false security, and the location is common to the audience as it could be any street, anywhere. (CONTINUED...)
3. (CONTINUED)... The overall effect of the fade in and out transitions are partly to create unease and suspense,
but also are kept quite calm and slow, because we are aiming to create a short equilibrium before the
build up of trouble., therefore the pace will faster further on in the trailer when we want to create more
fear in the audience.. to do this we are making sure these establishing shots are around 3-4 seconds long,
whereas the later shots are cut down to around 1-2 seconds each, creating a faster pace near the
important events. These later shots will be more like teaser shots of killings and the villain in more detail,
where the audience will be teased of the events but will not see the full extent, which is important for a
successful trailer as they want to see what happens.
TITLE SCREEN
We created the title screen saying “The Girl
Next Door” in Photoshop and we created two
versions; one with the full title on it and one
with a few letters missing, because we wanted
to edit them together in a way in which the
letters would flicker away and flash on and off
screen to fit the conventions of a psychological horror. I think this was successful but may be tweaked to look
more fitting with the trailer once it is more complete. This technique is reminiscent of the psychological
horror genre, and features in film's title screens such as paranormal activity, where the text flickers and
distorts, and are often in a green or light coloured glow, because of the supernatural and psychological
themes, however since ours is a slasher-psychological horror hybrid, we used red coloured text with the
flickering to use conventions from each sub genre.
4. END SHOT/CONVINCER
Here we used another shot's audio with the main shots video, because one was more successful in the video but
couldn’t pick up the sound. The video clip we used is of the girl in the cupboard and has a bright flashing light from
the top left of the back of the shot. We used a pan up long/mid-shot and it goes from the bottom of the cupboard
to the girls face, where you can only see the brim of the hat and the bottom of her face through the crack in the
cupboard doors,creating enigma and shows she is part of the plot and main story line because both her and the
main villain we see wear the same hat. The lighting creates shadows and a unnatural and strange flashing light.
The flashing going from bright to dark again creates a sense of insanity and is reminiscent of the ring, when the
bright image of the circle flickers and distorts, with the contrast of black and bright light. This is a common
convention in the psychological horror. The audio clip is from another shot of the girl, but we hadn't used the
successful flashing light effect but it had picked up the line where she says “kill them”, which is important to the
storyline, so we used the audio from the clip and moved it to the right timing so it was in sync with the video.
5. AUDIENCE FEEDBACK
We got audience feedback from our target audience about our progress so far to help us change
and alter any negatives and weaker areas and identify what we needed to add, before
planning more filming or editing plans so we could keep our changes to what our audience
thought was needed. Firstly, they found the level of engagement to be around the middle,
but not high. To increase this we will need to add our fast paced teaser shots towards the end
of the trailer, and more suspenseful shots of the villain, where we will change the way we
introduce the villain, instead of tracking shots of him walking up the road we will do focused
close ups of him pulling into the road in a car and shots of his feet and head/hat area to
create enigma and engage the audience. The target audience said there were good clear
genre indicators and the villain was well identified, but there were still gaps in the characters
which they could not fully identify. This will be improved when we film more shots of each
character, and the characters are introduced chronologically when the filming is all complete.
They thought the narrative thread was good but mistook some areas of the plot and were
unsure on some factors of the story. For this, we are going to add the cutaway editing shot,
where it becomes clear that the villain has two sides or personalities. Overall the audience
feedback was very useful because we can now focus on what needs to be done to make is
more successful for the target audience, and we can tell what we are missing and the action
points we need to take.
