Research - Music for Film Trailer

When finding music for our trailer, we want to find a number of royalty free tracks that create both suspense and a sense of accelerating drama as the trailer progresses. We need to have multiple tracks so that the music does not become boring for the audience, and also to show the change in pace from the beginning to the end. Some options for music are:

Straight away this piece opens with an eery sound to set an ominous tone. The lack of time signature, as well as creative use of silence and diminuendo on the sound effects in the first 5 seconds is quite disorientating for the listener. This is then punctuated by the entrance of the drums, which follows a driving rhythm that continuously builds throughout the piece, until we eventually reach the climax point when the cymbals enter. This progressive development increases the tension and excitement felt by the audience as the piece goes on, which may make it useful to use towards the climax of our own trailer.

The melodic motif heard at the beginning of the piece is based loosely on a minor triad, which sets quite a dark tone to the piece. The introduction of the drums could be used in our trailer to represent the violence in our plot.

The use of fast quaver rhythms almost immediately, coupled with the crescendo and addition of more instruments heard for the first 50 seconds of the music makes this section of the piece appear to be where the drama builds. We could use this part of the music after the exposition of our trailer, where the pace of the plot will begin to quicken.

The piece uses a lot of supernatural noises which create a sense of foreboding. It is also atonal, so there is no sense of the music settling or being defined by key which is both disorientating and disconcerting for the listener. Although it is unclear where, having this somewhere in our trailer would help to establish the horror genre.

The vocal part of this piece sounds quite hymn-like, which is an aural representation of the religious aspects of our plot. The use of semitones in the melody helps to establish the minor key, and the build from a solo to choral vocal part also helps to build the tension created by dissonance via suspensions in the accompanying choir part.

The lyrics "Darkness is coming" represent the genre of horror well because darkness is often used to show the presence of evil. The choir arrangement of this piece adds to the religious representations that we need to put in our trailer.

Production Film Vlog - Detective's Office (with both Detectives)

This scene shows the arise in suspicion among the detectives (as to whether the detective's partner is the murderer) seeing how one of them was at the scene where and when the murder happened.

            

Production Film Vlog - Crime scene at Queen's market

For this scene, we went to our local market on one of the days it was meant to be closed (but since it was during half term, there was an event happening there instead) so we came across a few problems of the location of having a crime scene without interfering with the general public.

So instead, we had the idea of using the car-park on the roof top to record the chase scene and for the last minute, we used one of the film crew members to be a passerby who supposedly saw something at the scene of the crime.

            

Production Film Vlog - Office scene with Detective

This is the scene where the detective is letting the most recent case cloud her thoughts but then as she takes a closer look at the papers, she has a sudden realisation and rushes out from the office.

            

Production Film Vlog - Beating up scene of victim

For this scene, we had the victim wear torn and dirty clothing with fake-blood on them so it looks like they have been beaten up. This scene will be used as part of the montage when it starts to come to the climax which will end with a scream (thus conforming the convention for the horror genre).

             

Production Film Vlog - Location: Sixth Form Staircase

One of the scenes involving the detectives was when they were hurrying off to the crime-scene of the recent murder that took place.

             

Production Film Vlog - Location: St Angela's Chapel

The original location idea for the news report scene was for it to take place outside in front of St Antony's Church but it was too cold to film outside so we decided to just shoot in the parlour bit of the chapel so it looked like it was another part of the church where the interview took place.

             

Production Film Vlog - Location: Inside St. Anthony's Church

While we were taking establishing shots from different angles and positions in the church; we were also pitching ideas of what other scenes we can take within the church when we have to re-shoot other scenes in the future.

               

Production Film Vlog - Location: Westminster (Central London)

This is the second day of filming for Hyde Productions and we followed the plan we created earlier in the year. We filmed establishing and pan shots of parliament with big ben and the river thames.

These shots are going to suggest to the audience that the film is set in London.

           

Research - The Kuleshov Effect

The Kuleshov Effect

The Kuleshov effect was discovered by Lev Kuleshov who was a Soviet filmmaker.

This is one of the techniques discovered through juxtaposition. His experiments and research led to him finding out that depending on how a certain shot is taken; the audience are able to attach a specific meaning or emotion to it. So in a way, it's what the audience stereotypes the actions to be.

To test his theory of how the audience viewing psychology; he carried out an experiment which used a picture of a man whose expressionless, a girl in a coffin, a bowl of soup and a pretty woman on the coach. The results of the experiment said that the audience saw the man being sad (picture with the girl in the coffin), the man was hungry (picture with the bowl of soup) and the man was lustful (picture with the pretty woman on the coach).

Even though the man showed no expression in the scene before each picture; the audience was still able to come up with a different emotion for each of the different 2-sequence footage.

Our group can apply this effect onto our trailer through the use of a hidden priest followed by a shot of the weapon. The audience will be able to tell that the person is a killer straightaway with the link of the two scenes. Another way this effect can be applied to our trailer is with a shot of the detective walking over to an area then another scene of a close-up of the hand of her picking up the piece of evidence. Straightaway, the audience will think that she's the jealous type or she's the convict possibly (the guilty party) with these 2-shots.

Final - Film Poster

The final outcome from the final draft. I added a few more social media representations to demonstrate how up-to-date the film is since the world of social media is rapidly evolving thus giving marketing for the film new opportunities to advertise.