SILVER LINING LTD: 21/03/2010

MPAA Rating Cards

These rating cards appear at the start of movie trailers in the United States. A green band is an all-green graphic at the beginning of the trailer.

These cards read: "The following PREVIEW has been approved for ALL AUDIENCES by the Motion Picture Association of America," and often include the movie's MPAA rating G,PG,PG-13,R.

This signifies that the trailer adheres to the standards for motion picture advertising outlined by the MPAA, which includes limitations on foul language and violent, sexual, or otherwise objectionable imagery.

In April 2009, the MPAA began to permit the green band language to say that the trailer is approved for "appropriate" audiences.

This means that the material in the trailer will be appropriate for audiences in theaters, based on the content of the movie they have come to see.

A yellow band is a yellow graphic that reads "The following PREVIEW has been approved ONLY for AGE-APPROPRIATE internet users by the Motion Picture Association of America".

Three Part Structure

Film trailers are normally embedded with a three part structure:

They start with a beginning that lays out the premise of the story.
The middle then drives the story further and usually ends with a dramatic climax.
The last act often consists of a visual montage of powerful and emotional moments of the film and may also contain a cast run if there are noteworthy stars that could help sell the movie.

On Screen Graphics

During horror trailers, there are often graphics or credits relevant to the film trailer that appear on screen.

We wanted to emulate this and have our own set of titles appear appropriately throughout the teaser trailer.

Ideas for graphics:
COMING SOON
FRICTION
EDITED BY
STARRING
PRODUCED BY
DIRECTED BY
RELEASED BY

Themes of graphics:
TO ALL SHARE THE SAME STYLE AND COLOUR
TO BE IN EITHER UPPER CASE OR LOWER CASE
TO NOT APPEAR FOR TOO LONG OR DWELL
TO ONLY SHOW ONCE AND MAINTAIN SUSPENSE
TO ONLY TAKE UP A MAXIMUM OF 20% OF THE TRAILER

Production Company

Our production and distribution company is called 'Silver Lining Ltd'.

SILVER LINING LIMITED LOGO:

Magazine Cover Drafts

When we created our film magazine, we first researched and annotated real film magazines to get an idea of how our final magazine should look like. As we both were quite familiar with how a film magazine should look, we had already selected locations in our horror trailer that we were going to use for our magazine.

Early samples of our magazine cover:

Film Poster Taglines

If you are going to hide the truth, make sure it stays hidden

They thought that he was the victim, now they are
They thought leaving him behind would be enough
Karma is back in all of their lives, and so is he
If you need to hide something, make sure it stays hidden

Film Trailers

Trailers are an essential piece of marketing that freely distribute the film among people, whether a teaser, theatrical or television trailer they all feature the elements that make them so effective as a tool of distribution:

The unique selling point, a market gap or niche that makes them stand out among similar films
The talent, either the director, main star or several actors that bring in audiences just from the name
The time and date of the release in order to maximise potential audiences

Graphic Designs

This is a scanned image of a graphic storyboard we created, it shows how the title and other credits would look in different styles. Firstly, we wanted to use lower caps and have the words appear scattered across the screen. However, this was not effective as it first looked and we decided to change the fonts and styles. Using, Livetype and Motion the graphics improved but were still not perfect as sometimes the word would not fit fully on screen. To fix this we changed the lower caps into upper caps and switched the colours to match the style of our trailer.

Similar Films

I Know What You Did Last Summer:

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer:

Scream 1, 2, 3:

Final Destination 1, 2, 3, 4:

All of these films were helpful in our audience research as well as in our understanding of the horror genre and specifically the sub-genre our film is in. This is because all of these films are similar and contain themes of suspense, mystery and shock which thus mainly makes them psychological horrors.

Problems

Embedding youtube videos into Blogger as it was disabled by request
Finding official statistics and demographics from popular horror films
Choosing the right day to shoot our trailer to coincide with everybody's timetable
Designing trailer graphics and credits (picking the right font, colour, style, etc)
Creating a new blogger, hotmail and youtube account with the same username
Finding suitable horror trailer music that was copyright free and of a good standard
Shooting the trailer within limited time, actors, locations and resources
Meeting deadlines as sometimes shots had to be re-filmed in a different way
Editing and using effects to a high standard and choosing the right take

Horror Genre Types

Within the horror genre, there are three basic types otherwise known as sub-genres, these are: the supernatural, the scientific, and the naturalistic.

The first type is perhaps the most common in cinemas and are thought of as the true horror movies. These films often use supernatural monsters such as vampires, werewolves, demons, ghosts and zombies as themes of horror and content to scare viewers. These are creatures of legend and come from thousands of years of human psychic response to the mysteries of the earth.

The scientific horror film is the type where we find the mad scientist creating something outside of nature; something that will be lost from human control and run amok before being overpowered by human might and the world is restored to peace and harmony. The monsters featured here are often new creations, things we've never imagined, never seen before.

The third sub-genre are naturalist horror movies, those that do not have supernatural creatures or phenomena, just unexpected elements and situations which induce fear; movies which could theoretically come true in each of our lives but in extremely undesirable and unfortunate conditions and situations.

When researching into each of these, it was the third, naturalistic horror film that appealed towards us and seemed the most realistic. Whereas, supernatural horror meant using a monster, something we would not be able to gain access to or even have the expertise to replicate one using special effects. Scientific horror was slightly better in that as a topic it was something that had not been overdone and films like 28 Days Later and Dawn Of The Dead were both interesting and successful.

However, a naturalistic horror was what we intended to make, as it didn't require a budget, difficult props or even any more resources that we didn't already have. The storylines rely on day to day elements of life blended with unfortunate or rare situations. Referred to on one website as 'stories that are not far from what is reported on news channels', where normal people are either in the mix of something at the wrong place or wrong time.