Work Begins- Identifying a Concept/Planning

In order to begin planning our concept, myself and my group held a discussion about different ideas and storylines we each had. It was no suprise when we soon disco

vered that each of us had completely different visions about what our horror movie trailer should be like. However all of us were willing to acknowledge each others opinions and consider every idea for our trailer.

'Name of Trailer'

Vanessa had thought of a name and was really keen to share it with us in which we all later agreed to ' Midnight Massacre 2' - The Return of the Maskarade. The reason why we chose to decide a name for our movie first was so that it would ensure that mysel

f and Chantel and Vanessa were in the same boat in terms of themes for our trailer. It would be no good if me and Chantel had decided on another film name which had a completely different meaning to Vanessa's. Having decided a name, it was then easy to steady our thoughts on the basic storyline of our trailer. During our AS Media course, we had seen many films which were almost 'clique' you could say and we wanted to change that. We knew most of the other groups in our class would have simply decided the name of their trailer and we wanted to be different. The reason we chose to do a sequel was because we not only wanted our film campaign to be different, however we wanted to introduce more excitement for the audience.

The name: 'Midnight Massacre 2'- The return of the Maskarade, infers that there has been a previous movie. This makes the viewers more engaged wi

th our trailer as they would want to see the sequel.

In order to make our newly found name more interesting, we added a twist to the spelling of M-A-S-Q-U-E-R-A-D-E and instead spelt it as, M-A-S-K-A-R-A-D-E. This immediately gave the group the idea to make a mask a major feature in our storyline.

Above: Images of notes we made during discussion of concepts for trailer.

'Basic Storyline'

As a group we decided that our trailer would be of great success if we did not solely focus on just the trailer, but the story behind it. We felt that if we made up a whole story describing the characters in our trailer, where they lived etc, then it would be easier to make up our trailer. I suggested the idea of a woman jogging in the park with her dog in the evening with no idea she is being followed. I informed the others of my idea as at the time I thought it had been a sensible decision as it was not hard to find a character role to play the woman and also a park was a location that was in reach of us and not too unrealistic. As time was a key feature in our trailer, (hence the title MIDNIGHT Massacre) I thought we could frequently refer back to a shot of a clock counting down to midnight, also building suspense for the viewer. The others in my group thought this was a good idea. Chantel then suggested that the woman should have headphones in her ears. I tho

ught this was a good idea as it would create a sense of realism and would have more effect on the viewer when we introduce more scarier parts of the trailer. In order to again create suspense we decided that the viewers should not see who or how the woman is killed.

'Breakdown'

We had made a lot of progress when we were informed by our teacher that our location (park) was predictable and in his opinion many students across the country would also use that location for their movie trailer. One thing our group wanted to be was unique and different so we made it our agenda to work around this fatal flaw and change the storyline of our trailer. Although we were all disappointed by this, we appreciated the fact that it happened sooner rather than later as we were only in the planning process.