Evaluation Task One - Characters

Throughout our whole planning phase of our trailer, we realised that the relevance of the characters needed to have as much or as little camera time as possible, to ensure that we give the right effect and impact on the audience. We wanted to maximise the amount of characters that we were going to include in our film trailer to express the broad feeling. We introduced the characters in our project at around the same time, so the audience knows who the main protagonists are and by showing the glimpse of the antagonist at the end helps the audience identify the information and that they can also gain more information by watching the entire movie and that they will gain more of an interest from the trailer.

Going back to Propp’s narrative theory, this theory was a vital aspect to our production. In the trailer, we wanted to show the protagonists (heroes) first, although, the audience doesn’t find that our in our trailer, we tried to follow the introduction of characters to the helper and villain. The audience identifies Dan and I having the same importance throughout the trailer, due to us having the same amount of prevalence in our production, but later on in the trailer, there is the disappearance of Dan and more screen prevalence of myself, to increase the question raised by the audience, where did Dan go? When do we next see him? What happened to him?

Horror is a difficult genre to try and cooperate with the character introduction, we both has a mutual decision of making our horror production a found footage horror, where we see many point of view shots of the characters, Dan and I, giving the same amount of screen prevalence but also that it was easier to produce and also having the same effect on the audience as a conventional horror film. We see from the first shot, there is an introduction where Dan is explaining the setting of our trailer and myself filming him like it’s a documentary. Where you see in the next shot, that myself are trying to have a joke with Dan but he seems quite concerned and worried about the area we were in. We both introduced with dialogue where Dan was speaking to the camera and myself was speaking to Dan. To the audience may already imply that Dan and I might become victims of something as it is shown at the introduction of the trailer.

During the last scene of the trailer, being in a car down a country road, giving the effect that we are trying to escape from somewhere/something, another character is introduced, the antagonist. From an audience prospective, this gives the feeling or the question if it is either Dan or I. With having a bright light shining of the person, this has a cliff hanger effect that is introduced on the audience, once again, raising more questions and suspicion as the trailer ends. Dan and I wanted to give the audience this influence and want them to watch the film in order to find out who or what the person is.

In this shot, we can see Dan introducing the setting and explaining to the audience where it is based, also introducing Dan's character of Denzel 

This shot at the end of the film implements the cliff hanger we wanted to have on the audience as it shows a mysterious figure and want the audience to raise questions about the person and want them to watch the whole film.