Because our sub-genre is supernatural horror, we needed to have some supernatural activities shown in the trailer. We came up with a few ideas: chair flying across a room, cups/jam jars smashing, 'abandoned' girl and footsteps.
We practised the pulling the chair across the room first. To do this, we used some string. It worked quite well because the string was thick and strong enough to pull the chair at a good speed however, you could see the string because it was yellow so it didn't seem supernatural because you could tell it was being pulled by someone in the next room. This is the chair that we used.
We then re-thought this idea and got some fishing wire. Because the fishing wire was thinner than the string, we used more strands of it attached to more areas of the chair. This worked but it was quite a struggle to pull the chair because it felt as if the wire was going to snap. It snapped a few times but we just tied more wire to the chair to take the strain off each of the strands. Whilst we were practising this, we realised we could make the chair rock loudly without noticing someone was pulling it so we plan to use this in our trailer because it looked more supernatural than the chair just being pulled across a room. This is one of our first attempts.
We also used the fishing wire to pull the jam jars off the cupboard. We did this in a way so it looked like the jam jars were being thrown at the characters but smashing right in front of them before they manage to hit them. We considered dropping them down the stairs and filming them from the bottom of the stairs but we figured that pulling them off a cupboard would look more supernatural and would make people wonder how its being done as opposed to just dropping them down the stairs which is obvious that someone is upstairs dropping them. We then realised that we had no cupboard that looked old enough to use for our trailer apart from the one that was already in the abandonned house but we didn't feel comfortable smashing things in there because we didn't have permission to do so. So instead, we placed the jars on a wall and pulled them off there with the fishing wire.
We also used the fishing wire to make a mug look as if its moving on a table.
We set this up in this way because we thought it would look as if someone had been in the abandoned house and set it up themselves as if they were sitting down to have a cup of tea. We tied some fishing wire to the handle of the mug and pulled on it to make it look as if the mug was moving itself.
This is what was left of the mugs that we practiced smashing.
Once we had practiced smashing some mugs, we noticed that they smash quickly and if we held the camera by hand then you couldn't see enough of the smash because we couldn't garentee where the smashed parts would fly in the room. Because of this, we decided to set the camera up on a tripod in the corner of the room so we would catch the jars smashing on camera.
Below is the video of us pulling jars off the wall.
These are the stairs that we ran up and down to make the sound track of the footsteps.
We bought a nightie from the local charity shop because we wanted an old fashioned one so that the 'abandoned' girl looked like she'd been left in the house years ago. We wanted an image for our poster and we thought if the girls legs were hanging from somewhere high thenthat would be a good image to start off with. Because we used Matt's little sister to be the 'abandoned girl' and she was at school at the time, we took it in turns to put the nightie on and hang from the top.
This idea didn't work because Matt couldn't hold onto the wooden surface long enough for someone to take a picture and I wasn't tall enough to reach the top.
Amy and Charlotte were videoing and taking pictures so they didn't try the nightie on.
Because this idea for our poster image didn't work, we had to try and think of something else.
