The document discusses a student film project titled "No Time for Goodbye" that was originally intended to be a thriller with romantic elements but ended up taking on more of a horror genre convention. The student analyzes how their film trailer and accompanying poster/magazine cover fit within the conventions of their chosen horror genre through their use of music, lighting, quick cuts, and ominous imagery while still developing their own style.

1. No Time for Goodbye Bethany Wright

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

3. Originally in June we researched the film twilight for inspiration, I would say Twilight is a fantasy romance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBvOhfL4mYw http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v =6HMd59MaBWI We wanted our own project to be a thriller with a bit of romance involved, however over time this had to change. Our final project ‘No time for Goodbye’ has become more of a horror. It wasn’t our intention for this to happen, but once we realised that filming scenes that would be good for a teaser trailer it some became apparent that this was what the film would come across as. It was very difficult to show a romance in the beginning which would have caused the loss of her family and to show any fantasy elements in under a minute. With the equipment we had and the time limit it wasn’t possible for us to film and edit the piece to look successful in this way. However we feel that what we now have achieved is effective in looking like a horror and very much fits that genre convention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_uz4LIBfeE Originally in June we researched the film twilight for inspiration, I would say Twilight is a fantasy romance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBvOhfL4mYw http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v =6HMd59MaBWI We wanted our own project to be a thriller with a bit of romance involved, however over time this had to change. Our final project ‘No time for Goodbye’ has become more of a horror. It wasn’t our intention for this to happen, but once we realised that filming scenes that would be good for a teaser trailer it some became apparent that this was what the film would come across as. It was very difficult to show a romance in the beginning which would have caused the loss of her family and to show any fantasy elements in under a minute. With the equipment we had and the time limit it wasn’t possible for us to film and edit the piece to look successful in this way. However we feel that what we now have achieved is effective in looking like a horror and very much fits that genre convention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_uz4LIBfeE

4. The posters we researched were films such as Eagle Eye, New Moon, The Usual Suspects and the Dark Night. By the time we had come to research posters we had already wrote the script and drawn up are story board…so we knew at this point it was no longer going to a fantasy romance but much more of a horror. We also wanted the genre of our movie to come across in our Empire cover so we made the main character of Cynthia to look very sad, it had a very dark background and red writing. The only thing different to a typical horror convention is the writing. The font is very feminine, romantic and pretty.

5. A teaser trailer is a short trailer to advertise the up coming film. In it is important to get across the genre and the main characters of the film. We wanted to stick as closely as possible to conventional ideas of horror movie teaser trailers; with quick moving images, lots of running and flashing shots. We also wanted to make it slightly confusing with the flashing images of the stained glass, the bible and the candle to try and weave in some ideas of religion. The start of our trailer shows Cynthia running down the stairs as though she was being chased; we edited the footage so that it was black and white to make it more dramatic. I believe this helps to stick to horror conventions. We edited it so it showed her running down the whole flight of stairs as those the person was behind her. This meant in this part there is lots of match on action which is very effective. During this part we have titles come up saying ‘Murder’ and ‘Lies’. We used iMovie to do this. The next part moved on to a conversation with her husband…he says ‘…it was just someone playing a joke’ then it flashes with ‘Deceit’. This comes across as a horror movie teaser trailer as it is implying that her husband, Mark, may not be telling the truth and also introducing the ‘villain’ of the movie.

6. It then moves on to quick shots of the stained glass, candle and bible to create a more dramatic effect. We sped up the shots of the bible and added a glow effect to the candle.

7. Mise-en-scence; this is all to do with costume, props, setting and weather and such things, ‘everything in the shot’. It was important to us that Cynthia was wearing clothes which made her appear older, as she is supposed to be 30 years old when the actor playing her is only 17. This was one of our worries in the piece not being so realistic but as I am a boarder there was limitation to what we could do, with not being able to shoot outside of school grounds we could only use pupils. The only other person is Mark, her husband. He was about the right age of the character and what he was wearing was not so important. He just had a casual black polo shirt on. We used an area of a boarding house, Housman Hall, which gave the perfect setting as a front room. It had a piano, fireplace and pushchairs around so it looked like a family home. The only problem was the fire escape signs on the wall and it was very difficult to keep them out of shot. We used over the shoulder shots here.

8. In the scene of Cynthia being chased down the stairs we found a fire escape, which was very dark and we think it gave a good effect of being scary. We wanted the lighting to be dark but due to natural light coming in through a window it was to light. Once we got to edit the piece we changed it to black and white and made it slightly darker instead of darkening the shot as the black and white effect gave it a better feel.

9. The shower scene was the easiest to get the mise-en-scene we wanted. It was very simple, yet hopefully effective. We decided to speed it up to fit in more with the soundtrack and give it a quicker pace.

10. The soundtrack was the part that restricted us most. We are not able to use copyright music and using Jamendo it took a long time to find anything that was right. Finally we did, the day before we finished the project, but due to restrictions on school computers there was no way of getting the music from Jamendo onto the Macs and have time to edit it as well. Luckily we found a track on iMovie called dogma, it was the perfect length and gave exactly the dramatic effect that we wanted. We also took sound from the dialogue between Cynthia and Mark and placed over scenes of her running down the stairs and in the shower. This made the pace much better and told the story without having to show the physical conversation, however we did find it important to put a small bit of the conversation in to introduce you to Marks character. The majority of are soundtrack is non-diagetic as the music is not within the scene apart from the small bit of conversation you see. I feel that sometimes the music drowns out the voice over even though we made it as loud as we could.

11. We had also used sound effects on garage bad on the Mac’s…we used a combination of a rain noise and police talking over a walkie talkie. When we edited the trailer together though we no longer used the footage that the sound effects went with. It did feel like wasted time but it was a good experience for us both to use other programs and develop our learning.

12. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Click this!!

13. As it was the poster and empire magazine cover that we created first we were able to experiment with fonts, tones, colours and other things here to get the best thing that would go with our genre of film. In our empire magazine cover we liked the fact that Empire is always written in red and stuck to that convention as it by far the most recognisable feature of the magazine. We knew we wanted to have a very dark background and originally we choose grey. However once we had edited the photos on Photoshop it became apparent that this did not look very good. We then changed the background to black and merged the colour of her hair and the black so it looks almost seamless. The other colours we choose were yellow and white. Those two colours are quite gentle and conflict with the image of the red and the genre. We whitened the eyes and added eyelashes for more impact as well. The poster is plain black and white with a splash of red. We wanted to keep this simple and have the red relating to the colours on the empire magazine as a feature to relate the two ancillary tasks together.

14. Both tasks have the same person on them, this was another linking factor. As it is only really Cynthia, played by Devon Burley, that you see in the trailer it was important for us to produce the poster and the magazine with the same person on it. If we were to go on with the project, making a theatrical trailer and the film there would be more characters introduced, allowing us to create posters with other characters on them or an ensemble cast. We intend for our poster to give very little information apart from the title of the film and coming soon, almost a teaser poster. It could be distributed in Empire or Total film magazine to gain attention or in bus stops or billboards. This Walk the Line poster gives no information at all and is grabbing your interest. This is what we wanted.

15. In the trailer the titles are white and black. Originally we used livetype for our titles and could be more creative with them; they were white and yellow here linking back to the empire cover. Yet when it came to importing them no one knew how to save them as movies so we could not import them. We then used iMovie titles and managed to use the same font zapfino which is almost identical to the font used for ‘No time for goodbye’. On the ‘No time for Goodbye’ and ‘Coming soon’ we were able to use the ones we made on live type but got rid of the yellow as we could not do this on the ones we made on iMovie. They have an effect called pinglow on them which makes them appear on screen glowing. This looks very effective. Unfortunately for Lies, Murder and Deceit we couldn’t do this. It is very important to be able to have a distinguishing feature of your film when promoting like any product.

16. The posters, magazine covers, titles within the film and DVD cases are all related. Within the promoting stage the magazine, posters and teaser trailers are often released simultaneously. It is good if someone says “Have you seen the trailer for no time for goodbye?” and even if the person hasn’t they no what there talking about from the magazine and once they do see the trailer they will be able to relate them automatically. It is like a brand image you have with any product. I feel that we have been successful in this.

17. See the rest of our evaluation on blogger… http://g324wrightdavis.blogspot.com/2009/12/advanced-portfolio-evaluation-laura.html