Timeline

Target audience

To make a product the target audience needs to be established at the very start, this is so the products can be made to fit. For our target audience we are going for mid to old teenagers (aged 15-19). This is mainly because we, ourselves are in this age boundary (17/18) so we would know what we would like the see in the cinema making it easier for us to design aspects of the poster and magazine and also what to put in the trailer.

Characters

For our trailer we are going to concentrate on three characters:
The victim

This is the person that will go missing at the start of the trailer.
She will have to look very innocent and be dressed in light/pale coloured clothes.
Our victim will be walking drunkenly home from a party so will have to be dressed up in party clothes and high heels. She will have to walk with a bit of a sway and possibly trip on the ground. As she walks she begins to fear something is following her and gets scared.
We are going to call her Lily as we researched names and discovered what Lily means.
 

She will be around 17 years old and has a tight friendship with two other girls. She will be walking home from a party to her house across a field, this is where she will go missing.

This is the person we will use to play her

Friend 1 (obsessed)

There will be two other characters which will be her friends that want to find her. This one is going to get obsessed with finding her and will not stop until she finds out what has happened to her friend. This will cause tension between her and the other friend as she almost gets too caught up in what has happened to her. She begins to blame everyone around her and her trust with everyone has gone.
We are going to call her Shannon as its quite an unusual name and is easily recognised when said in the trailer. 


Friend 2 (accepted)
This is going to be the other character that will be used in the trailer. She will be the other friend of the victim but after a while she will become accepted that they will never find out what has happened to their friend. She will not be seen as much as the 'Shannon' as she will fade out of the trailer near the end as she does not wish to carry on searching for 'Lily' as much. However she will be an important character to the movie as 'Shannon' will start to become suspicious and blame them for the disappearance of 'Lily'.
I will be playing her in the trailer and her name will be 'Chelsea' as it does not sound like an innocent nice name.

First set of shots

On Thursday the 15th September we did our first set of shots. The three of us went after school to the selected area and did our first set of shots. We decided that we would just use this time to try and understand the equipment we were given and how our actor, Georgie, would look in different positions.
We came across many problems, one was the lightning. As ours is a thriller film we wanted it to be dark as she was going across field at night, but because we filmed too early in the day it was too bright. However by using Adobe Premiere Elements I was able to edit it to make it look darker. The first clip is too light and although the lighting was reduced you could still see the blue sky. I then tried to put it into black a white to see if that would work better. Although it gives the illusion of darkness better it still does not work completely. The last shot of the shoes works the best as it still gives the colours but in a darker/blue shade, causing it to look dark. It does not look 100% realistic but it is a lot better then what it first looked like. 

Next time we film we are going to try to do it a bit later so the lighting will fit with what we want and we will not need to edit as much.

Some of the shots we did thought worked well and we were happy about how they ended up after some editing. The clips above of a close up of her shoes walking on the ground and her walking along the path worked well for the first shots. I like these shots because they tell us about the character and where she has been, also because we filmed that a bit later then the other slips, the lightning is slightly darker causing editing to be easier.

However, by filming at a lighter time we could easily see what would work and what would not for example the clip below is not going to work because the light reflecting off of her makes her look ghostly and does not work. I believe it would work better at night to shoot this shot as the light would not reflect off of her as much causing a ghost like appearance to happen.

Where it will be set

For our trailer we wanted a place that had houses in the background, as this is where our victim would be coming from, but also was out of the way in the woods or a field somewhere. So for this we went onto Google Maps and looked the the location around each one of our houses to see if there was anything that we could use. We found out that around my house was the perfect spot with huge fields and woods either side with houses just in front.

We would be using the biggest field on the picture above as it also has a pathway between it and the smaller green field to the right of it.

Here is a zoomed in version of the field and a possible house that our victim would be walking away from.

As we were filming our first shots we also took pictures of our surroundings and created a JIF to show the setting.

Trial on Adobe Premiere Elements

Today was the first time I have used this program and at first I found it very difficult to understand and find everything I needed. But after about an hour of looking at things and trialing everything I think I have understood the program more.
Our teacher gave us different camera shots and told us to put them together to create a tense short film. I cut down the clips and I either made them fade into each other, did basic cuts and the very last clip I made appear very sudden. By doing this I feel as though I created a dramatic short film that builds tension to the very end.
After an hour on the program I managed to produce the video above. However it caused lots of problems getting the video onto the blog. In the end I had to make a YouTube account and upload it onto there so I could then post it onto my blog.

Types of shots

In the summer holidays Jeni and I decided to do some shots of ourselves in different positions and used the camera to shoot ourselves in different shots. Although they will not be used for our actual trailer we found it very useful and reminded ourselves of all the different shots we could actually do. Also by doing this short bit of filming we can look back on these and see what type of shot would work best for the section we want to do next.