This is our poster for our trailer. We chose to insert a christmas lyric because it was relevant to our genre and it adds to the scare factor of our trailer. This is because it implies that our villain is all knowing and has his eye on his victims all the time. We chose to blur the picture because it distorts and twists the view of our Santa character, it also adds to the enigma of the character and could make the audience want to know/see more. We decided to put in poster credits (this is the information at the bottom of the poster about who stars, directs and produces the film. We put this in because it was a convention of posters. We also added a release date, the title and the name of our company because we had looked at previous posters and added them into our poster.


References
http://www.movieposter.com/ - Date accessed: 13/03/2012
http://www.empireonline.com/gallery/list.asp?p=1 - Date Accessed: 23/04/2012

Magazine Cover

This is our first draft of our Magazine front cover. We chose not to choose this one because we felt that it didn't show the genre of our film well and the image wasn't right for what we wanted to show. We thought that the magazine itself didn't show the genre well because Spiderman and having interviews with actors/actresses that aren't linked to the horror genre took the attention away from our picture and led the attention to famous actors and films.









This is the poster we chose to show our film. We managed to draw the attention mainly to our film and adding other films to do with the horror genre e.g The Woman In Black. Also we added in the title of our film in the same font and style as it is shown in our trailer. This makes our film instantly recognisable as a horror because the red represents blood and the way everything but the red of Santa's suit also adds to this horror feeling. These conventions help the audience recognise the genre of the film and capture their attention.



Reference

http://www.listal.com/list/total-film-magazine-covers - Examples of magazine front covers from Total Film. Date Accessed: 23/04/2012

The Making Of...

We chose Toms house as our setting because we thought that this was the most suitable location for our film because the characters are a family and being in a house shows that they are a family and live together.

We used a large park that we could all get to quickly and easily for the chase and death scenes because there are a lot of large trees and filming it in winter when the trees were bare gave it a christmassy feel and we felt it added to the horror genre. We had to re-film these parts as we thought that the lighting was too bright so we decided to film in a darker area at a darker time of day. We thought that the brighter time of the day didn't keep to the codes and conventions keep to the horror genre so we chose a different day to film it and we chose a day where there was a lot of frost and it was very cold. We found that the lighting gave the better feeling the second time we filmed the scenes.

As well as filming in a park we filmed in a tunnel which Tom scouted as a suitable setting for a killing/chase or a scene to create tension. The tunnel was very dark and slightly lit up so we could create a darker feeling to our trailer. We were able to film quite easily here due to cars not passing by very often and our ability to film from different angles and distances e.g. close up, low angle and medium close up.

Levinia provided us with a scrabble board and fake blood which she had prepared at home. We felt we needed these props to make sure the trailer had high levels of verisimilitude and to follow the codes and conventions of the horror genre. We needed to make sure the blood looked as realistic as possible because without the blood we thought our audience wouldn't associate our trailer with the horror genre.

These are ingredients Levinia used to create the blood and what it looked like when it was on Toms hand during filming. As you can see it looks fairly simple to make and has a good effect. it also looks realistic and worked well when used on set or used on people.

Silent Night Trailer - Final Cut

This is the final cut of our horror trailer. Hope you enjoy it.

Final Decisions Costume

This is the only costume we will need for our trailer. As you can see it is a stereotypical santa outfit. We will use this outfit because the usual opinion of Santa is that he is friendly character and we plan to subvert that so the killer is a terrible person. We will also subvert the idea that children idolize santa, we will do this by making the children scared of him instead. Due to our characters personality his costume will be juxtaposed to the killers personality yet the red can symbolise blood so it could also be a good match.

References
Myth of Santa - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34525202/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/santa-claus-real-man-behind-myth/ - Date Accessed: 18/01/2012

How Coca - Cola changed Santa - http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html - Date Accessed: 18/01/2012

Final Decisions Props

These are the props we plan to use in our trailer. Most of them are very typical of christmas e.g. the christmas tree and the santa hat. We have decided to use these because we feel that it will convey the idea that our trailer is set around Christmas/late December. The scrabble board and book are also there to show that the characters are kids and that they are still young enough to believe in Santa.

These pictures are juxtaposed because we have the typical objects associated with christmas yet we have a knife and blood which is associated with gore, horror and brutality. These objects are vital to our trailer because without them we will not be able to give the christmassy - horror feeling that we would like to convey to our audience.

Christmas Logo

Below are some ideas for the film logo that Tom created. As a group we had to choose which one we thought was suitable. We liked the font and the red on the letters from the 2nd one but we thought that there needed to be a christmas tree in the background from the first idea.We also like the black and grey colours from the first picture but we aslo wanted the blurred effect in the background to be added in from the third idea so Tom went away and produced our final film log which is the 4th picture down. We feel like this is a suitable logo because it shows that our film is very dark yet we can see the elements of Chistmas.


We found that this was a great idea because it had the red in the text. This is good because it symbolises blood and danger yet it is tightly connected to christmas. We decided against this idea because we thought the swirls looked like eyes and it gave away too much about the danger, this also disabled us from having some sort of enigma.


We also like the idea of the red and the font but we found that the background may confuse people because the green tinsel could have been confused for a branch or something else. A general audience response showed that this wasn't popular because the green tinsel could be misconstrued as a snake/ribbon.


We found that this one gave no clear idea that it was associated with Christmas or it was a horror. The colour in the font and the background do not create any meanings or obviously symbolise something.

This is our final logo that we came to agree on. We found that the grey and almost white symbolises fog, snow and darkness. It gives a feel that there is a lot of unknown, this implies that the film will be of the horror genre. Also, along with the grey/white the red on the font implies gore/blood/danger and the Christmas tree implies Christmas and happiness because the star is very noticeable.