WEEK 3 – w/c 27/09/10

This week i have returned from my IT work experience, since returning i have realized that me and my partners have a lot of different ideas about what the teaser trailer should entail, my partners wanted the trailer just to be urban in terms of scenery with a small segment relating to hood life while i wanted the film trailer to have these hood aspects to be the centralized theme with the horror aspect taking over. So somehow we had to get around this problem, i did this by researching myself and i discovered that there are some films that have more than one trailer e.g. Friday the 13th (2009).

(production: writing and shooting & presentation session)

Friday the 13th Trailer 1

Friday the 13th Trailer 2

This is done for a variety of reasons such as there being a American and a British version or there being a trailer coming out and another trailer coming out closer to the date of the movie's release. After discussing it over with my partners we decided that their trailer would be the one that comes out in the UK and mine would be the one to be shown in the US. So i decided to research more into it and i realized that American trailers have a particular difference from British trailers which is the green preview screen shown below which only appears in American teaser trailers.

This where the age rating given by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association Of America) is displayed as to allow American viewers to know right off the bat if they should allow their children to watch it.

New Entry: After i put this image into my teaser trailer and showed it to one of my tutors he advised me that i should not use it because it is not something that i created or edited to make my own, to get over this problem i decided to edit the image in Photoshop by giving it my own rating. Instead of R for Restricted i changed it into T for Traumatic.

WEEK 2 – w/c 20/09/10

This week i have been focusing on the audiences that these horror movies as well as hood movies are targeted at, I did this by not only researching online from various websites but i also asked my Facebook friends via my Facebook status asking questions such as “do you like to watch the Saw movies?” & then ask them their age, although i was just attempting something new, this proved to be rather beneficial, the results that i received indicate that the majority of people that enjoy these types of movies are Young Adult Males (or as i like to call them Y.A.M) demographic aged from 16 – 25.

A new type of multimedia that i used this week was the website that i used to create my simple survey called http://www.survermonkey.com/ where they allow you to create your own questions in a prefered style e.g. text box answer, multiple choice and allows you to distribute the questionnaire via diffrent multi media platforms such as Facebook and twitter, i put my questionaire up on Facebook as shown below

However there was some contrast in age groups from what i researched on the Internet and the Intel i received from friend in terms of age groups for watching Hood movies; because these movies usually contain violent scenes and some sexual content they are usually rated for ages 18+ but my individual research shows that allot of teenagers aged 13 to 18 enjoy watching or have watched hood movies e.g. Menace II Society, kiDULTHOOD, etc.

The main reason that i see behind this could be for a number of reasons such as the fact that gang life and crime has been glamorized by the media, they relate to this lifestyle or problems that the subjects of the movie are going through, etc.

Some people don't realize it but slasher movies and hood movies if properly Incorporated would blend with each other nicely e.g. both genres usually involve murda in cold blood. in my project I am setting out to make the two blend together well enough to attract both demographics from each genre.

WEEK 1 – w/c 13/09/10

(pre-production: mock-ups & storyboarding)

For our A2 Media Project me and my partners decided to create a Teaser Trailer for our film. However during this week i was on work experience for my IT Course so they were working together without me. Despite this i have been doing research on my own time at home because i know the basic background of our trailer from the storyboards that we created.

Because of this conflict of timeing I decided to note down my research and ideas for the teaser trailer and inform my partners about it when I got back.

The genre that we chose was an Urban Horror so i researched some over the internet e.g. http://www.horror-movies.ca/horror_14174.html into the aspects and conventions that are associated with the genre and this is what i realized:

• Isolation: this is a convention that is commonly used in horror movies which is essentially the killer keeping their prospective victims within a certain vicinity, basically isolation = no escape.

Other conventions that i gathered from actually watching films e.g. Scream, was the reasons for people being killed which sort of gives off ideas to the viewers that the people who do the wrong things often have their wrongdoings catch up with them, the reasons i identified are:

• Partacking in sexual activity (victims do not notice the killers presence)
• Drinking or doing drugs (makes the victims easier to take care of)
• Leaving the group e.g. to go to the toilet
• Being arrogant or selfish (Often left till later on in the film, usually having the most gruesome death)
• I also believe that in the past being black also affected your survival rate in horror films, this is not so apparent these days however (this was mostly due to society being less civilized then it is today)

The most prominent conventions that i picked up from watchin urban hood films like Gang Tapes & Menace II Society are as follows:

• These films are predominantly centred around young black men 18 and under without father figures in their lives leading to gangs
• Poverty is another factor that icreases their reasons to commit crimes
• They usually involve acts of violence via gun and knife crime (e.g.the scene below)
• They are often looked down upon by the rest of society due to the way they have been represented as a group as well as being mistreated by the police and therefor adopted it seeing as if someone tells you are no-good after some time you will believe it too (these views are also seen below).
• Reasons for killing are often trivial because of ignorance however this often leads to deserving retaliation through a serving of street justice.

These genres meld together & challenge the conventions of the individual genres, here are some of the ways:

• Sexual activity, drinking and doing drugs are commonplace within urban hood films.
• Usually when you watch a horror movie like Friday the 13th or My Soul to take the number of white people out number the number of black (showing the minority), this however is contrasted in urban hood films with the some exceptions.
• The main common factor that i discovered between the two genres is the bloodshed, however it is the motives that differ; in a horror movie the motive comes down to the killer while in a hood movie you dont really need a good reason to kill someone or at least try to hamr them.