Blair Witch prelim

What I learnt

By doing this prelim I learned that the most important thing in order to create a brilliant trailer within a group dynamic is good speaking and listening skills and team work. By doing this trailer we got to spend time together. I think this is important because we will have to spend a lot of time together making this trailer so it good that we’ve briefly spoken about roles and we get along. This is 100% beneficial in order to create a good horror trailer.

Technical aspects

On a technical side, I learnt that when we film our own trailer we are going to have film many of the same scenes from different angles and positions. We need to do that as a convention to horror films as an audience generally see’s a lot of the same scene from different angles and movements the camera makes. We learnt just how long and tricky that will be when doing our prelim because although The Blair Witch Project had longer scenes in it, we are filming a trailer which means different scenes will be coming up 3 seconds at a time and our trailer will have to last around 3 minutes.

As far as sound, Blair Witch used all of the natural sound of the weather; the harsh wind and the leaves ruffling along with dialogue and that worked. However when it comes to our trailer I think we are going to need some sort of creepy underlying music which I will create for my group to include.

Finally, mise en scene is very important and that was highlighted when filming the prelim, because The Blair Witch Project is set in the woods, we were able to go to a forest-like place outside school to film and it worked because it was very similar to the film. However when filming some shots we had to make sure we didn’t get cars or swing sets in the shot otherwise it would feel like the film was shot.

Differences to the trailer

One important thing about the prelim task is that my group and I film a scene from a film, for our final product, we need to create a trailer, so although the same rules apply when filming such as sound, mise en scene and camera work we have to take in considerations the conventions a trailer uses verses the conventions of a horror film.