Favorite genre for film

My favourite genre in movies is horror, although I mainly prefer ‘zombie’ horrors as they offer a lot of action ( which I also like ). There is a lot of effort which goes into it such as editing, acting, make-up and the time to create it all.

I have two preferred horror films, Zombie land and Shaun of the Dead, both being exceptional and tense whilst also maintaining some comedic value to it. Shaun of the dead has great actors, including Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Kate Ashfield. A lot of effort went into making the film, especially the makeup and making the story, whilst it is dramatic and funny at the same time. To be able to make that kind of film it takes a lot of effort which makes the film even more respectable.

Another benefit of horror movies is that they release built-up tension, via the stimulation of one's personal fear level, so there is also a benefit to watching horror movies!

Characters used

As we only had two characters in our trailer we were able to task our minds with much more determination on those two characters and use our creativity to create what we thoughts was the best costumes which we could find at that time, as we bunched together some things such as a trench coat, a horse mask and a Kukri blade for the antagonist. Also seeing as the two characters did not talk much due to us deciding on not including any dialogue, we pondered on the thought that it would make them seem just emotionless and vague characters which is extremely boring, since horrors generally rely on creating a stereotype such as in teenage horror films where a powerful murderer finds and usually ends up killing the group of teenagers, each inevitably being given a certain way of behaving, such as the blonde girl usually being the first to be killed as well as the smart nerdy dude being killed second to last with one of the quiet female characters. With the protagonist we hoped that we could apply some kind of emotion to him, which we did but it was hard to spot, as the only expression you could get from him was pain. In human nature we generally feel bad if we see something in pain and want to help it to some extent, which is why we tried to show the protagonist as a vulnerable and somewhat impeccant person.

production difference

Our production is different from others of horror films since we were mainly focusing on having a Friday the 13th themed story line, since we have the antagonist who is chasing after the protagonist but at the same time can be killed fairly easily if the protagonist had a weapon, the antagonist also has a machete which he will then use to kill the protagonist further into the trailer, or will he? Through this we left a good enigma and a cliffhanger ending to see whether the fallen over protagonist will survive the Michael Myers lookalike. Generally other people who produced a trailer for A2 had stuck with more of a possession and ghostly horror film which creates more spooks and less goofs and gaffs like our film. I believe with a film including malevolent phantoms the antagonist generally wont be seen and only requires fairly exceptional acting from the protagonist in order to get a higher grade, but with our film we placed a mask on the antagonist to make him somewhat anonymous but also something which the audience can see, so we had to get a taller person to make him seem more intimidating. The change between both our films and others' films is important because both groups need to be able to clearly display that they are capable of doing something which they plan out to do, and with both groups planning different variations of one genre they need to make it clear for the audience most of the time so that there aren't so many questions being asked and that there are enough answers.

generic conventions

generic conventions have been adhered to since we stayed with a fairly classic old school style of filming where the protagonist is being chased somewhere, for example Attack of the killer tomatoes which is a fairly old classic film where the antagonist overpowers pretty much everyone else. If we had subverted the horror we wouldn't have included any blood and it would have seemed more like an action or a comedy film since it is so crazy, so the blood and the use of a weapon helps the audience determine that it is indeed the horror film which they wanted to see and not something else, such as a romance.

mise en scene

I believe that the make up and the costume gave it away for our horror film, since we had the antagonist wear a trench coat and have a horse mask, which is although fairly funny in certain contexts, it can be quite disturbing in others, such as a dark building located in the middle of nowhere with a massive forest which has no end (Not actually the setting but we imagine it so for immersion). With any horror film, all you have to do is change the color scheme to a much darker tone and you have the shot. It can be as simple as filming outside whilst it is really sunny and then all you have to do is as said, location sorted for the horror film, which is what we tried to do however we got to the location a bit late and had a dark setting anyway, which funnily enough someone gave bad feedback about. We also included a lot of blood on the protagonist since we wanted the audience to know that he was injured and trying to escape from the antagonist. If we had made a proper film the story would have been explained a bit better but since we didn't have much time to film we had to focus on the shots.

genre and how its conveyed

The genre of our film is horror, we conveyed this to our audience by using everything that we knew, this being how to make the location seem more ominous and mysterious by making it darker, as well as including fake blood which we used fairly well in order to create a good look on the protagonist. Also we had used one of the most basic things in horror films, a omnipotent being randomly chasing the vulnerable protagonist. Of course there should be a story behind why this is happening but it would be explained much more in the real film. We tried to add as much immersion for our audience through the use of over the shoulder shots of both the protagonist and the antagonist, although we gave the antagonist much more prevalence over the trailer.

male gaze

Since our whole cast were males, we decided that the male gaze is fairly important in understanding our trailer, since there is so much violence and chasing going on it would be hard to understand, and having the male gaze it would be easier to conform to the trailer and understand it since males may see the trailer as more exciting than it actually is since it has a quick clip of fighting, since our main target audience were teenagers, and since the majority of people who view action and horror are stereotypically male, so we realised that in order to improve the immersion for our audience we would have to apply basic scenes which contained action in order to attract that audience.