The Blair Witch Project Trailer.. (Analysis AM)

The Blair Witch Project is a film which has set the boundaries for a new genre of film, for example, Paranormal Activity directed by Oren Peli. The handheld camera only confirms the realistic feeling of fear that the audience begin to feel in the cinema. As our movie is based on teenagers having a 'fun' trip camping which turns horribly wrong this movie trailer is very 'current' and the values which are decipted from the group of teenagers is something that we would like to create and bring in into our own media coursework.

The Blair Witch Project is a movie which has been viewed by a wide range of audiences from adolescents to adults and therefore does not have a set audience, which could be argued to be hard to acheive in the modern day world of cinema and film. This is an original film which I believe is achieveable on a low-set budget. However, trying to make a movie trailer based on hand held shots is risky and we may find that actually the shots do not look as good as if we were using a tripod and using long shots and medium close ups etc. Therefore I feel when we film our first draft, to use both handheld shots as well as camera shots such as long shot or close up.

The message at the beginning of the trailer, decipting that the movie is a real life story is also a method which can be seen in many major movies in the Box Office e.g. the Last Exorcism. The black and white lighting is effective as the audience feels as if they are physically in the dark as well as 'being in the dark' about the information in which we are given about the presence of an evil spirit. The realism that is created by the black and white lighting and hand held camera shots acts as if the audience is filming the documentary with them, and thus, builds up the suspense.

Cabin Fever teaser trailer

Friday the 13th teaser trailer

Friday the 13th (full trailer)

Conflict... AM

• Conflict deals with how your characters must react and and act so that they can reach their intended goal

What is a story?

1. Central conflict - Emotional conflict/Physical conflict. Work together to explore character and are 'connected.' Avoiding 'conflict condoms' and other mistakes that drain the life and emotions from your story
2. Character conflict - the three best techniques to make your protagonist three dimensional. Emotional and physical conflict - Why you are your protagonist
3. Bringing your protagonist to life - How your character's jobs, props, clothes, friends, home, traits, slang and car can give the audience important information and bring the characters back to life
4. Conflict and Ideas - How conflict and concept are connected. Brainstorming - Methods for creating original ideas from nothing. Finding the right idea for your script. High concept is MY concept - a story that you will be passionate about that screenwriters will be passionate about
5. Conflict and story - internal and external conflicts and story. Growing story from character or character from story. How story works. The connection between story and character
6. Conflict in theme - Using conflict to explore theme. Theme and nexus, theme and dialogue.
7. Structure and pacing - How the traditional 3 act structure really works - why its been used for over 2, 400 years.
8. Thinking in pictures - film is a visual medium, and we use conflict to 'show' character through actions. Visual characterisation and visual story telling.
9. Conflict and your supporting cast - How each character in your supporting cast helps to explore the central conflict
10. Emotion pictures - A good script emotionally involves the reader. How to involve the the audience by using reverse, suspense, and plot twists.

Discovering genre.. HT

All genres are divided into sub genres which helps the audience identify and become familiar with typical characteristics. Steve Neal (1995) says the 'genres are not systems they are processes - they are dynamic and evolve over time'. Genre characteristics all share similar elements; Typicla Mise-en-scene, iconography, location, shot types, camera angles and special effects. They also all share typical narratives and generic types for example typical male/female roles and archytypes.
Media producers all use familiar codes and conventions to often make cultural references to their audiences knowledge of society. Genre also allows audiences to decide what products they want to consume.

Rick Altman (1999) says how genre offers audiences 'a set of pleasures'...

• Emotional pleasure: These are offered to audiences when they generate a strong audience response.
• Visceral pleasure: These are 'gut' repsonses felt by the audience and is done by construction to create a physical effect on its audience. People can describe it as a 'roller coaster ride'
• Interlectual puzzles: Genres such as thrillers offer the pleasure of trying to unravel a mystery or puzzle. Pleasure comes from trying to guess the plot or the ending or even being suprised by the unexpected.

Teaser trailer also throws up alot of discussion in whether itself is a genre..

Definition: A teaser trailer is a short trailer which advertises an upcoming movie, game or television series. They are unlik conventional trailers as they are much shorter in length (usually about 30 seconds long) and usually contain little if any acutal footage from the film. Teaser trailers today are increasingly focused on internet downloading and the convention circuit.

Teaser trailers are a genre which is intended to appeal to just one type of audience. they are used to promote awareness of a film and are not always literal representations of the film. Teaser trailers are a medium known for experimenting and to use controversial genreic conventions.

Creativity... HT

When looking at Tim Clagues video on creativity, says to focuys on stroy chatrs in order to get a structure for our trailer. Story charts are used to help combine story telling with technology as an inbetween stage in order to plan the structure of the film.


Tim also discusses how beachcombing is a good process to use to help generate creativity and initial ideas. He says how gathering little pieces of information and eventually creating into something is a process in which doesnt come quickly. When looking on Tims blog direct i found a diagram to help expalin this process...

When looking on http://www.petesmediablog.blogspot.com/ pete discusses how Tim Clague uses another technique called storycards. Which helps organise a piece of media this simply involves pinning up fragmented ideas and then reorganising them into shape an overall project. Tim also reccomends recording all discussions and ideas generated from whatever source just incase one day they are needed to go back to. it all helps to build up a story for a piece of media. however this idea isnt exclusively from Tim Clague he said he took this idea from the way H.G Wells an english author who created 'War of the worlds' and 'Time machine' who constructed his ideas by writing things on scraps of paper and putting them in a jamjar and when it was full would open it and start to construct ideas.

He also mentioned a site called http://www.postsecret.com/ which can help us generate an idea for our project. This site describes itself as a 'community based site' which enables people to post their secrets anomynously. He explains how this could be a good place to look for something to fuel an initial idea.

CA,HT,AM

Link to Wikipedia-thriller film titles CA

Thought we could use this link to find other films we haven't heard of in our research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thriller_films

Link to Wikipedia-thriller films

This link has got so many thriller titles which we can use to do background research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thriller_films

How to turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller..... AM

STEP 1: It's the mind of the Audience

• Make sure the content engages them and reels them in
• Change everything in your screenplay so that it is done for the audience
• Use the characters to tease the viewer and pull them along desperately wanting more
• Hitchcock knew why people are drawn to a darkened theater to absorb themselves for hours with images on screen (do it to have fun)
• As a film director you can throw things at them, hurl them off a cliff, or pull them into a dangerous love story and they know that nothing will hapepn to them. They're confident that they'll be able to walk out the exit when its done and resume their normal lives. And, the more fun they have, the quicker they will come back begging for more (Gottlieb)
  

STEP 2: Frame for Emotion

• Emotion is the ultimate goal for each scene



• First consideration of where to place the camera should involve knowing what emotion you want the audience to experience at that particular time



• Emotion comes directly from the actors eyes



• Can control the intesity of that emotion by placing the camera close or far away from those eyes.



• A close-up will fill the screen with emotion, and pulling away to a wide angle shot will dissipate that emotion



• A sudden cut from wide to close up will give the audience a sudden suprise



• Sometimes a strange angle above an actor will heighten the dramatic meaning (Truffaut)



• These variations are a way of controlling when the audience feels intesity, or relaxation.
  

STEP 3: Camera is Not a Camera

• Camera should take on human qualities and roam around playfully looking for something suspicious in a room. This allows the audience to feel like they are involved in uncovering the story



• Scenes can often begin by panning a room showing close ups of objects that explain plot elements



• Everything changed drastically when sound finally came to film in 1930's.



• Suddenly everything went toward dialogue oriented material based on scripts from the stage



• Truffaut - Movies began to rely on actors talking, and visual storytelling was almost forgotten
  

STEP 4: Dialogue Means Nothing

• One of your characters must be pre-occupied with something during a dialogue scene.



• Their eyes can then be distracted while the other person doesn't notice. (Good way to pull audience into a character's secretive world)



• Hitchcock - 'People don't always express their inner thoughts to one another, a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs'



• Focus of a scene should never be on what the characters are actually saying - resort to dialogue only when it is impossible to do otherwise



• Hitchcock - 'In other words we don't have pages to fill, or pages from a typewriter to fill, we have a rectangular screen in a movie house,'
  

STEP 5: Point of Editing

• Putting an idea into the mind of the character without explaining it in dialogue is done by using a point-of-view shot sequences (subjective cinema) - You take the eyes of the characters and add something for them to look at



• Start with a close up of the actor



• Cut to a shot of what they're seeing



• Cut back to the actor to see his reaction



• Repeat as desired



• You can edit back and forth between the character and the subject as many times as you want to build tension (audience wont get bored)



• Have the actor walk toward the subject - switch to a tracking shot to shot his changing perspective as he walks



• Truffaut - 'The audience will believe they are sharing something personal with the character' - Pure cinema



• If another person looks at the character in a point-of-view they must look directly at the camera
  

STEP 6: Montage Gives You Control

• Divide action into a series of close-ups shown in succession



• Carefully chose a close up of a hand, arm, face, and gun falling to the floor - tie them all together to tell a story



• You can portray an event by shwoing various pieces of it and having control over the timing



• Hide parts of the event so that the mind of the audience is engaged



• Hitchcock - transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience'



• Famous shower scene in Psycho uses montage to hide the violence - impression of violence is done with quick editing, and the killing takes place inside the viewers head rather than the screen



• Anytime something important happens, show it in a close up. Make sure the audience can see it
  

STEP 7: Keep the story simple!

• Simplistic, linear stories that the audience can easily follow



• Everything in your screenplay must be streamlined to offer maximum dramatic impact



• Each scene should only include those essential ingredients that make things gripping for the audience. - 'What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out'
  
  

Step 8: Characters Must Break Cliche

• Make all of your characters the exact OPPOSITE of what the audience expects in a movie
  
  
• They should have unexpected personalities, making desicions on a whim rather than what previous buildup would suggest



• Ironic characters make them more realistic to the audience, and much more ripe for something to happen to them
  

Step 9: Use humor to add tension

• Pretend you are playing a practical joke on the main character of your movie - give him the most ironic situations to deal with - unexpected gag, the coincidence, worst possible thing that can go wrong - all can be used to build tension
  

Step 10: Two things happening at once

• Build tension into a scene by using contrasting situations



• The audience should be focus on the momentum of one, and be interrupted by the other



• Usually, the second item should be a humorous distraction that means nothing



• E.g. when unexpected guests arrive at the hotel room in the Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day are in the midst of a tense phone-call. The arrival of the guests laughing and joking serve a dramatic counterpoint to the real momentum of the scene.
  

Step 11: Suspense is Information

• Information is essential to Hitchcock suspense; showing the audience what the characters don't see.



• If something is about to harm the characters, show it at the beginning of the scene and let the scene play out as normal



• Constant reminders of looming dangers will build suspense



• The suspense is not in the mind of te character- they must be completley unaware of it



• In Psycho (1960) we know about the crazy mother before the detective does, making the scene in which Balsam enters the house one of the most suspenseful scenes in Hitchcock's career



• 'The essential fact is to get real suspense you must let the audience have information' - Alfred Hitchcock
  

Step 12: Suprise and Twist

• Once you've built your audience into gripping suspense it must never end the way they expect
  

Step 13: Warning: May Cause MacGuffin

• The MacGuffin is the side effect of creating pure suspense



• When scenes are built around dramatic tension, it doesn't really matter what the story is about



• The MacGuffin is nothing - only reason for MacGuffin is to serve a pivotal reason for suspense to occur

Urban Legend trailer - AM

A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss: Frankenstein goes to Hollywood - AM

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v9gy5/A_History_of_Horror_with_Mark_Gatiss_Frankenstein_Goes_to_Hollywood/

• Cinema's are were we come for a 'collective dream'
• Horror films engage with our nightmares
• Lon Chaney
• Bela Lugosi
• Boris Karloff
• 'Realm of shadows and suggestions'
• 1925 - Silent - Phantom of the Opera
• Its about 'knowing you shouldn't look, but wanting to see'
• 'Feast your eyes- glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!'
• Lon Chaney - Godfather of horror actors - man behind mask (Phantom of the Opera) - 'MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES'
• Silent era
• Chaney - 'extraordinary characterisation'
• Phantom of the Opera is as much an exercise in ethnic spectacle as it is a claustrophobic horror picture
• Dracula became a figure that could be... welcomed into society
• Dracula - first horror picture with sound
• Lagosi becomes a shadowy figure who 'comes to get you whilst you sleep'
• Could be said Dracula was the first modern horror film
• Atmospheric settings e.g. dark decaying castles
• Frankenstein - coffin corressed with negrophilic tenderness
• Daring tone and stylish execution
• Visionary but credible
• Frankenstein's face really tells a story e.g. through screws in neck
• Looking different makes a difference

Theorised Creativity

Representation

Woman Clone

• The CD cover, in semiotic terms presents the band as a text and connotes the 'world of the text' in ways that are both straightforwardly feminist - dealing with the representation of women as clones, as commodities and as objects - and at the same time postmodern and post feminist
• The audience is not expected to be exposed here to the idea that women are reperesented in traditional ways for the first time, but that this representation of a media reality is actually a return to a feminist perspective in the context of a backlash against feminism
• In post-feminist environment, women are seen as complicit.
• The 1990's 'girl power' culture was a manifestation of this, through which females are represented as seeking equality, but at the same time dressing and appearing in ways which are keeping with the male gaze.
• The blending of the CD cover with these band member images, and the punk aesthetic of the music itself, delibaretly complicates the meaning of 'Woman Clone' and plays with gender representation to displace the audience.
• Barthes - 'Striptease is based on a contradiction. Women is desexualised at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say taht we are dealing here with a spectactle based on fear.'
• Roland Barthes (French Structuralist writer) - giving an example of mythologies - a seminal theory outlining the way that media representations relate to broader cultural myths and belief systems
• 'In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly' - Mulvey in Humm 1992
• Laura Mulvey - men look at women and the media reinforce this by filming or photographing women from a male point of view - so the norm for media representation is that the camera is male.
• Feminism itself is a misunderstood and derided political project, often undermined by the very people it seeks to liberate - women.
• 'Historically people and movements have been called feminist when they recognised the connections between social inequalities, deprivations and oppressions and gender differences. Currently feminists are pursuing questions about the consequences for women and fo men when gender oppressions intersect with other forms of oppression, with homophobia, classism, ageism, disability and racism' - Humm
• There is more symbolic oppression in the media than at the time of Humm's description, as we add the xenophobic reaction to Islam in the post 9/11 context and the gradual erosion of civil liberties which is partly facilitated by media representations of 'the threat'.

Audience

• How do people make sense of and give meaning to cultural products
• 'Pop stars are, to some extent, symbolic vehicles with which young women understand themselves more fully, even if, by doing so, they partly shape their personalities to fit the stars alleged preferences' - Paul Willis
• Interplay between pop idol, female fans and media is already knowing and ironic, but nevertheless the symbolic exchange of gendered meanings around music is still powerful

Creativity HT CA

10 commandments for reflective writing;

1) Focus on creative decisions informed by institutional knowledge

2)Focus on creative decisions informed by theoretical understanding

3)Evaluate the process-don't just describe it

4) Relate your media to 'real media' at a micro level

5) Try to deconstruct yourself

6) Choose clearly relevant micro examples to relate to macro reflective themes

7) Avoid binary oppositions

8) Try to write about your broader media culture

9) Adopt a meta discourse

10) Quote, Paraphrase, reference.

In OCR media studies book there is a case study by Sophie Hughes called 'woman clone'. It brings up lots of areas for duscussion.

MEDIA LANGUAGE;

• Uses semiotic approach in dialogue with theoretical perspectives from feminists and postmodernists.


• Theme area of critical perspectives linking to synoptics.


• Pull out any one of the micro images that make up the cover and analyse it in isolation.


• Representation of couple in formal dress this could purely represent a straightforward social activity. But placed in this frame along side the rest of the images anchor the name of band/album.


• Sign is motivated towards a cynical response.


• All images suggest a cloning of women in relation to dominant ideas to gender.

GENRE;

• It is possible to locate different styles of covers in sub genre categories e.g. Sophie might consider how her abstract symbolic approach might sit along side other genres of a contrasting style.

NARRATIVE;

• entirely grounded in cultural knowledge linked to a CD cover, we are socilalised to expect this relationship between texts and the ways they are packaged.
• The logo of the band anchors the selection of images and therefore constructs a narrative and how it expects the media to show various signifiers.

Narrative is such a powerful tool that it is, arguably, an even more important key concept than genre. Narrative has probably existed as long as human beings; It is likely that the stone age artists who drew 18,000 year old cave paintings expected narratives to be woven around their images. (Nick Lacey 2000)