09/12/11 - Adding text/images to our trailer

Text in a trailer helps to break up video clips so that it can maintain the audiences attention. After watching several trailers, we noticed that many of them include text that show the star ratings from various magazines and newspapers, as well as short sentences or phrases that are related to the movie. "A MODERN CAT AND MOUSE GAME" and a star rating were two things we wanted to include in our own trailer, and so we decided to play around with the programme so that we could understand how to achieve this. The text referring to the chase in the film trailer being like "a modern cat and mouse game" was used to break up two different clips. One showed our main character 'Lily' alone, looking slightly intoxicated as she stumbled along in a field. The second clip was of her picking up speed and starting to run in the field, as it is made clear that she is being chased. If these clips were just placed next to each other, then it would be harder for the audience to understand that she now feels like she's being watched, and we wanted to use something apart from a quick cut to black to break apart certain clips.

A common feature on film trailers, is to include the star rating a certain publication gave the film, which is why we thought it would be appropriate to include this on our own trailer. Unfortunately, after searching for a while, we discovered that the symbol we were looking for could not be copied over into the programme. In an attempt to overcome this small issue, we decided to find an image of stars on a plain black background and crop it down, but again we realised that we could not copy the image over into the programme.

After our attempts proved unsuccessful, we decided to just use the "*" symbol on the keyboard instead, and discovered that it still looked fairly professional.
We also added in the name of our thriller film, choosing to make the text big and bold, as well as adding an effect that made the word glow white, providing an eery feel.

We have decided to change the font we used, as the one we originally used was quite rounded, and we felt something that looked slightly jagged may be better suited to a thriller trailer. The font Weathered SF is the new font we have chosen to use, which we have applied the same glowing effect on.

At the beginning of film trailers, there is usually a green screen that shows the copyright information, showing who the movie is suitable for, while also displaying the companies that had a role in completing the film. On the left, is an image of the information that would be shown at the beginning at the beginning of a film. We have recreated a similar image that we placed at the beginning of our own trailer.

This is the one we created for our very own trailer.

02/12/11 - Film title

Until now, creating a film title has not been at the forefront of our minds, and so we thought that it would be smart to think about possible names. As our film trailer is for a thriller trailer that features a girl being kidnapped as her friends search for her, we incorporated this idea into all of the possible names. Below is a mindmap that we drew, featuring the names we have to choose from:

When thinking of possible names, we thought about basic words like 'taken' and 'missing' to get our thought process going, using an online thesaurus to find other words.

Each of us chose two possible titles that we preferred, and these are the six names that we considered using from the mind map. We asked some of our friends who fit the target audience for our film which name they preferred, and created a tally chart to show the results.

I made this results table after entering the data from the tally chart into Microsoft Excel, as I felt displaying it in a bar graph would show the information in a clear and easily understandable way. Contained and The Blame Game were two names that we eliminated after we decided they didn't really fit our movie, and were two of our least favourites. After looking at the results, we decided that we all agreed, along with the participants, that Seized was the name that best suited our thriller film trailer.