This document summarizes the creative process behind a student horror trailer project. It discusses how the students researched horror film conventions to inform their trailer's narrative, story, and editing decisions. Specifically, it mentions how the trailer tells the story of girls living in a house who find a possessed diary. Research was also done on horror magazine covers and posters to design marketing materials. Sound and music choices were made to draw in audiences, including permission to use music from the film Sinister.

1. Evaluation
Question One

2. When creating our horror trailer, we
used many horror forms and
conventions in different ways.
Researching into horror trailers has
helped massively when figuring
out how we wanted our trailer to
be. We have used many
conventions that we have found
when researching into other
trailers.

3. Narrative
Within our trailer, we decided to release a lot
of the storyline so that the audiences
attention is grabbed, this often happens
with low budget films. When creating our
trailer we challenged the convention of
how much information was released as most
horror trailer don’t give very minimal
information away. However, we did use the
convention of making a low budget trailer.

4. Story and Plot
When creating our horror trailer we wanted to
create something that an audience would
want to watch. The trailer is based upon a
group of normal girls living in a house together,
even though each individual is not seen
throughout the whole trailer itself. The typical
horror trauma begins as the group of girls find a
box with a possessed diary inside of it. This is
then what most of the trailer is based on as the
diary managed to possess one of the girls. A
range of personalities are then used as the
possessed girls life completely changes.

5. Research
Once we had came to the decision that we wanted to
create a horror trailer, we researched into trailers within
same genre. We looked into the different conventions of
famous well-known horrors and found ways to place
similar things into our trailer as we wanted our final
project to turn out successful for an audience to watch.
We then went into understanding the codes and
conventions that would be used on a horror magazine
cover and poster and researched into other ones so
that our cover and posters would be successful and
stand out to an audience. I found that a lot of them
used a dark colour palette such as blacks and greys to
connotate horror and danger and also red as this
represents blood.

6. Editing
While editing we had to get an idea of what the editing is
like in successful horror trailers and looked at how each
trailer is different, this helped when thinking about how
we wanted our trailer to be set out. Our trailer is built up
of little sections which have been placed in a
chronological order. The trailers starts with things that
happen later within the film so that this draws the
audience in. The trailer we have created starts off with a
dark shot which is not normally used within trailers. The
final sections of the trailer are a build up to the final
scare, we followed the convention of having a final
scare as we found that this is what most successful horror
trailers do.

7. Music and Sound
Throughout our trailer we haven’t used much
dialogue as this is a way to make the audience
wonder what is going on, this challenges horror
trailers as most of them involve a lot of speech
throughout the whole of the trailer. When we
decided on what music we wanted to use, we
were inspired by the music from Sinister as this fits
well with out trailer. To use the music from this, we
had to get permission from the directors which we
ended up getting. We used the music as a strong
way of getting the audience attention.