Evaluation 4 What have you learnt from

your audience feedback?Joseph Donaldson

One of the praises we got was when we done the mirror shot of Alex to Caitie and I personally think this is one of the better shots we done as it is cleverly edited and very spooky. We done this on premier pro by adding the two shots together but connecting the two shots just in front of Alex’s face. You can see the cut quite noticeably on this screenshot but when the trailer is playing it’s almost unnoticeable. Another shot that we were all really pleased with is when Alex’s hair is dragged up. We done this by tying a very thin amount of thread to her pony tail and we pulled her hair up out of the shot whilst I was filming and flashing the lights. we decided to use the flashing lights whenever Caitie is ‘haunting’ us to show her presence. We then reversed the hair pull to make Alex’s hair stand up so it looks like Caitie is pulling her hair up. We were inspired by ‘Paranormal Activity 2’ (2010) when Kristi is down the stairs by a ghost. Obviously we don’t have the equipment to pull Alex’s whole body so we decided to do it on a smaller scale and just use her hair. We did manage to pull Joe up the stairs by rolling him down the stairs and reversing the shot, but it isn’t as good as the Paranormal Activity version.

When we were filming and editing, we didn’t plan on using the jump scare that we actually used but after playing around with different jump scare shots, we thought that one worked best alongside the loud sound effect and due to collision cutting, it does look quite scary and works effectively. One thing I really like about the jump scare is Caitie’s contact lenses. They made all of her eye black giving the impression that she is in fact possessed and it is the best shot to see her up close and personal, making the audience feel like they're in the trailer with her.

One thing we struggled with whilst filming the trailer was explaining the narrative within around 20 seconds so the audience knows exactly what's going on. After the first focus group we had we learnt that it was very difficult for the audience to actually understand what is going on so we went back and re-shot a few scenes and added in a new note. After this the audience found it a lot easier to understand what exactly was going on and we managed to trim it down to make it quicker and more interesting.

Overall, I am very pleased with how the trailer came out and I definitely think the hard work paid off in the end. The only thing I would improve about it is the narrative as I would probably try and make it even clearer to the audience, although it is only a trailer so you can’t give too much away so when watching the film you don’t know the whole storyline.

The main last minute changes we made to the trailer was the lighting and colour. Because we filmed the trailer over a period of 4 days and in different locations, the lighting and colour was a bit off in some of the shots and the continuity was ruined by this. Once the trailer was all in the correct order we went through the shots and evened out the brightness and contrast to try and make every shot match as much as we could.

The other change we made was deleting some unnecessary shots which took up to much time on our trailer. For example we got rid of the shot where Joe and Alex drive away with the baby as we felt like it wasn’t very important and just wasted valuable time. We also cut a few shots so they were shorter in length, like the shot you can see above, so it shaved off a bit of time, making our trailer quick and snappy.

You can see the difference in lighting between the evaluation cut (left) and the final cut (right).

Compared to the feedback we got in the first focus group, I am very pleased with the comments in the evaluation screening as there wasn’t really any negative comments that we could improve on making our trailer near enough perfect. The positive comments we received were all very nice and it reassured us that our trailer looks smart and professional and sums up the fictional film ‘Lullaby’. When it comes to our target audience, I think it would appeal to them quite a lot as our trailer is a very typical jumpy psychological horror, a lot like other films our target audience would watch such as ‘Sinister’ (2012), ‘The Exorcist’ (1973) and of course ‘Psycho’ (1960). Another reason why I think Lullaby would appeal to our target audience is because it doesn’t have a similar storyline to a lot of recent psychological horrors like ‘The House At The End Of The Street’ (2012). Our storyline is completely new and never been done before which would make it stand out amongst other psychological horror films. My favourite part of the trailer would probably have to be the hanging scene. I really like this part of the trailer because it seems so real and it flows together nicely with a good range of camera angles and sound effects. The only bad bit about this scene is when Joe discovers Caitie as his reaction isn’t great but apart from that I think it looks really good and effective, especially the shot of Caitie’s shoes swinging back and forth making it look like she actually hung herself.