Silent Night Animatic Draft

Diary Entries

The first problem we encountered was that the internet in the Mac Suite was not working so we had to wait for it to come back on. After a while the problem resolved itself and we were now able to go onto the internet and upload things to our blog.

The second problem we encountered was that the sound of the animatic was not working, we haven't resolved this problem yet but we plan to sort it out as soon as we next go into the Mac Suite.

As you can see we did edit the interview and put the results of the questionnaires onto the blog.

Targets For The Week

Over the next week we plan to have all the questionnaires filled in, all the interviews recorded and the storyboard completed with pictures, shots, duration of shot and what effects we plan to use. We also need to put our results of the questionnaire into some form of chart that will be placed on the blog.

Interview Questions

Describe a typical Christmas day for you?

What's your favourite horror film? Why?

What's your favourite Christmas film? Why?

What do you expect to see in a horror film? Why?

What do you expect to see in a Christmas film? Why?

Is music an important element to a horror film? Why?

Is music an important element to a Christmas film? Why?

Questionnaire

What is your gender?
Male
Female

What kind of setting do you prefer in a horror movie?
Woods / Forest
Family Home or Neighbourhood
Derelict Building
Public Place

What do you prefer in a horror movie? Male or female lead?
Male
Female

What would you say is the most important element of a trailer?
Music
Editing
Location
Special Effects
Suspense
Mystery

What sub-genre of a horror would you prefer?
Psychological
Thriller
Comedy
Paranormal
Sci-Fi

How much violence/gore would you expect in a horror trailer?
Lots
Quite a bit
Not important

Which of these well known horror movies have you previously watched?
The Chainsaw Massacre
Scream
The Grudge
SAW
Halloween
Nightmare On Elm Street
Silence of the Lambs

What would you say is the most important element of a Christmas movie?
Snow
Christmas Trees and Decoration
Santa Claus
Presents
Religion
Carol Singing
Family

Which of these well know Christmas movies have you previously watched?
Home Alone
Santa Claus
The Grinch
ELF
A Christmas Carol
Jack Frost
The Polar Express

3 Act Trailer Treatment

Act 1 - A shot of a christmas tree, the image is then blurred. Screen turns to black and the title of the film 'Silent Night' is shown. A shot of Ethan getting into bed, his mother, Julie, walks in to tuck him in and he asks for a bed time story.

Act 2 - His brother, Sebastian, walks in and tells Ethan the same story but scary. The mother will also be telling the story at the same time but she will be saying the good parts and Sebastian will be asaying the scary parts. This will be a narrative. As the story is being told parts of both stories are being played out. While this is going on 'Santa Clause Is Coming To Town' is being played.

Act 3 - The end of the story. Julie & Sebastian leave then Ethan looks outside his window to see a dark figure dragging a sack that leaves a trail of blood. He sees Ethan looking at him, stare for a while then walk off whistling a christmas tune slowly. The door handle will turn and Ethan rushes into bed then a title will see the word Santa turn into Satan. It will then flash to his brother opening the door telling Ethan to "Get to sleep or else Santa will come for you".

Audience Research

The objective of qualitative research is that it aims to gain an understanding of peoples underlying reasons and motivations. They sample a small number of people that may not be representative but they fulfil a given quota. They collect data by individual interviews that help produce a lot of detail. In the analysis only key themes are identified. The outcomes of this type of research are debatable but go into a lot of detail.

The objective of quantitative research is to quantify results and generalise those results to a population of interest. The sample is usually randomly selected and usually a large number of people. The collection process is structured techniques such as questionnaires. In the analysis, statistical graphs and charts are used. The outcomes of this research are usually conclusive but go into little detail.

The 3 types of sampling methods are:

Simple random sample - where you get a sampling frame, give them numbers and choose who to use using a random number generator.

Systematic random sample - assign everyone a number e.g 1-5 then every nth number is selected.

Stratified random sample - people are put into groups then a group is chosen to use depending on sex, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and so on.

We will use simple random sampling and systematic random sampling to see who will answer our questionnaires and we will use a stratified random sampling to find out who we will be interviewing.

We chose these ways because we thought that we would be able to get quantitative data from our questionnaires and qualititative answers from our interviews. We chose systematic random sampling because it gives us a lot of people to answer our questions and it also gives us more of a chance to get a more diverse opinions on what our trailer should show and what they thought would be the best elements to show.

We chose stratified random sampling for our interviews because it allows us to select a small amount of people to fill our quota. We will have a mixture of males and females from all ethnicitys and this again would provide us with a lot of different opinions into what people think what is important in both a horror and christmas trailer.

Reference
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~nhunt/meths/index.html - More information on the different types of sampling.

Target Audience Analysis

Age:
Our product will aim to target an age group of 15 - 25 year olds because the majority of the characters in the trailer are around this age, this will make it easier for our audience to relate and empathize with the characters.

We gave our film a BBFC rating of 15 because when we looked at 'Black Christmas' (Rated 15) we wanted to give our trailer a similar feel to it and have some of the same content e.g. moderate language. We decided not to give it a rating of 18 because when we looked at 'Halloween' we found that we couldn't put sex, over the top gore and bad language into our trailer. We felt that having it as a 15 was more appropriate and allowed us to have a wider age range.

Ethnicity:
Our trailer will include a Caucasian cast but we feel that it would appeal to wider ethnic groups because a lot of films, particularly mainstream, aren't affected by not representing as many ethnic groups in them.

Our trailer would only be released in the UK so we thought that this was more appropriate and would work better.

Gender:
Our lead character is Ethan. He is a 9 year old boy, brown hair, blue eyed boy. This character will appeal to a lot of people because he is young and will be very innocent. Our other character is juxtaposed to Ethan because he is a killer and very dark. We need to emphasize this contrast to show who is good and who is evil, this will also help show our Binary Opposition better.

Socio - Economic Groupings:
The class profile of cour characters is generally DE but our trailer will be aimed at people from of classes C2DE because they will be more likely to be able to relate to these classes. People from higher classes will not be able to relate to the character as much as the other classes and may not enjoy the film as much because they are seen as more sophisticated.

Nationality/Reigon:
Our cast are from Birmingham so their accents will be easily understood in other parts of the country. The cast do not have strong "Brummie" accents so we wouldn't experience much difficulty in the box office.

Weekly Lesson Review

This week we have been studying codes and conventions of trailers. We have learnt what should be in our trailer and what we could possibly put in to subvert these codes and conventions. We have also modified and finished our treatment because we found that we did the treatment for the trailer not the film and didn't answer the questions on the blog.

Draft Treatment

Act 1
A young boy is tucked up in bed on Christmas Eve and his mother is sat beside him. She has just finished telling him a Christmas tale. After the mother has wished the boy goodnight and left, his older brother sneaks into his room. He tells him the 'real' Christmas story that happened years before: a young boy with mental problems was taken away from his parents near Christmas time and was sent to a mental home. During this time he went crazy and escaped, killing those who got in his way. One Christmas he came back and killed his family in the very house the boy lives in.

Act 2
After hearing the story his older brother told him, the young boy is scared and begins to hear and see strange things around his neighbourhood. He has yet to see this mysterious killer but feels as if he is being watched by him. Strange things continue to happen until someone is killed and the boy realizes this story is actually real and that the killer is coming for him. People start to disappear and the older brother, with his friends, hear a womans scream so they go to investigate. The split up and the 2 friends are killed. The killer attacks Sebastian who is left injured but alive, when the killer is about to make the fatal blow a passer by sees the events and goes to hunt them.

Act 3
More people are being killed. Several people are murdered and the boy starts realizing that the killer is getting closer. The boy gets trapped in his house and after running around trying to hide the killer has cornered the boy and is about to kill him when he is suddenly saved by his older brother and he stabs the killer with a kitchen knife, seemingly killing him. The boy and the older brother leave the house and the police arrive outside, the film ends with the killer on the floor and his hand twitiching once.

Treatment questions

1.What is the main theme or idea?
The main theme is centered around the traditional story of Christmas which is twisted in our film. It is going to take the well known character of Santa Claus and subvert him into an evil, sadistic killer.

2.Have you created a distinctive main character who is a rounded, believable character?
We have the created the character of a little boy who is going to be the main protagonist of the trailer. The boy's name will be Ethan. Throughout the trailer, he will be the subject of the killers attention and will be trying to escape from him.

3.What is his or her goal? The goal of our main character Ethan is to survive.

4.Who is stopping him or her achieving this goal (the adversary or villain)? The killer who will be dressed up and representing Santa.

5.What is at stake and why? The lives of the boy and the people that live in his community. This is because the killer used to live in the boys neighbourhood and therefore returns to get revenge for what happened to him many years before.

6.Where does the film take place? The film will take place in the house and around the neighbourhood of our films main protagonist.

7.Have you created other interesting characters? We have created other family members for the protagonist of the film, his older brother and also his mother. The older brother will be called Sebastian and his mothers name will be Julie.

Mood Board

This is our mood board, we have incorporated all our ideas and what we want to achieve in our trailer. We chose the photo of the little girl to show that our trailer will have children involved as the main character(s). We have pictures from Pan's Labyrinth & Donnie Darko because we want to give our trailer a fantasy feel to it. The middle of the mood board is the title of our film 'Silent Night' , we thought this was a good idea due to it being Christmas based and it also sounded like a horror film title.

We used bright colours to show a christmas setting and to show that we wanted our film to show the contrast between light and dark. The light would come from the mornings when everything is fine and the dark would be the night when all hell breaks loose and the killer is free to roam around without people seeing him.

We chose to use a lot red to symbolize blood/gore and it is also the colour that is linked with christmas and/or Santa. The word 'Music' is there because we thought that it was vital to showing the genre of our film and it plays a big role in creating suspense and an enigma, this is what we hope to achieve in our trailer as we think that it is important creating/using the right piece(s) of music in order to make the audience feel what we want them to feel. The word 'Fear' is used because we want our character, like many iconic horror film antagonists, to strike fear into other characters and the audience. We thought that Santa was ideal for this as he is a character that near enough every person knows and 'Twisted' is on the mood board because we want to twist the idea that Santa is good and it also implies that the character himself may be a little psychologically fragile.

The characters from Saw, Halloween and A Nightmare On Elm Street are there because we thought that these were the scariest characters and the films themselves used a lot of gore and violence, these are elements that we hope to encompass within our trailer.

This is my presentation on Forms & Conventions.

Scream 4

The trailer I watched was Scream 4 which was directred by Wes Craven.

• The film starts with a phone call and you see the main character (Cindy) from the other Scream films. Then you hear the killers voice which is easily identified as the killers voice from the other films. The voice is also very deep & menacing so that the audience can tell that he is the killer.




• After that there are shots of all the main characters in the film all looking very scared/shocked. This suggests that the film is going to be a horror/thriller because people link a scared/shocked look with that genre.




• The is also white and red writing on a black background. The black backgound suggests that the film is dark & scary while the red suggests blood and that there will be a lot of gore in the film. Gore is also another convention people associate with a horror film.
  



• Later on in the trailer there are flashes of people running and climbing scared of something, this is also a convention of the horror genre.
  
  
  
  This is the poster to Scream 4
  




• As you can see the 4 is in red and is meant to represent the A. Also the 4 is the colour red which may resemble blood. This indicates to the audience that blood and gore will be involved within the film.





• The black background suggests a dark feel to the film. The background may make the audience think that there is an unknowing of things which could be the man in the mask identity, who he is and what role he will play in the film.





• The iconic mask of the killer immediatly shows the audience what the film is going to be about and the possible cast. This would only apply to the people who have seen the 3 previous Scream movies. If a person had never seen these movies before then it would create an enigma by getting the audience to wonder who is behind the mask.





• Also the the release date is linked to film since it was out on the 4th month of the year. This is a promotion tactic to lure audiences to see it because of the link.

References
2011 - Scream 4 - Wes Craven
Poster picture from: movienewz.com

Plot Idea

We gathered as a group to discuss our ideas on what our trailer should be like. We discussed the genre and contents of the trailer plus a plot for the film as a whole.

We came to the conclusion that we wanted to do a Christmas Horror that seemed like a fairytale. We wanted to make it feel dark and used 'Pans Labyrinth' as our base for the fairytale look of the film. The main film we will be looking at will be 'Black Christmas' as it is very similar to our idea.

We decided to call our film 'Silent Night', we thought this was a very good idea because it doesn't make the genre obvious to the audience, it also relates to the Christmas theme we wanted.

We discussed the narrative, we decided to have the trailer mainly as a child being told a story by his/her older brother/sister. We thought that having children as the victims would give the narrative a very dark feel to it. The idea behind the killer is that he is crazy and comes out every Christmas to go on a killing spree due to a bad even that had happened previously.

Group!

Our group consists of me, Levina, Sameena and Tom. We will now be working on our idea for our trailer.

First Things First

We have tried to sort out what groups we are going to be in, we have had no luck yet. We are now going to try sort out who will be going with who.