Brief

As apart of my Media A2 course. The task was to create an advanced portfolio on an online  blog that aimed to demonstrate the stages a marketing campaign -for a low budget slasher film- would take. This started from the research stage, to planning, construction and then  evaluation questions to explain the steps, decisions and difficulties that were found.

 The research enabled me to gather information which would then guide me when constructing the three ancillary texts; poster ,magazine and trailer. All of which are aimed  to promote and raise awareness of one film. The trailer was to be conducted in a group consisting of about three people whereas production of the poster and magazine had to be done individually, allowing us to have our creativity and skills put to practice and developed. In researching I had to gather both qualitative and quantitative data in order to find and therefore recognise my audience’s wants and needs. This was done through a site called QuestionPro.com, it allowed me to create a survey quickly and effectively. I was able to distribute this through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by copying and pasting the link, this permitted me a quick response and large response rate as it was passed around. I also had to research into existing texts for the genre I was looking into e.g. other slasher based poster, magazines and trailers that have been produced.

 It was vital to consider and understand  the institutional factors and context of independent films, as they have a  limited amount of resources available to them. In comparison  to mainstream blockbuster films, such as; Avatar. They do not contain a large budget that will help with production, and therefore essential components of making films like studio time and technology could be a struggle. However, by doing a genre film I know I have an audience and the fact that it is a slasher means that it is fairly cheap as well as effective and successful. An example of this would be ‘The Blair Witch Project’ which was attracted an audience through heavily promoting that it was based on true events.  

I also did some research into the genre itself, looking at the history of horror and the influences over the years that encouraged its development. From German expressionism, Film Noir and then to Modern day horrors, and the way in which sub categories of this genre was formed to create the slasher genre amongst others.

 Further more , researching, planning commenced and casting calls were administrated to recruit actors that would appear in all three ancillary tasks. A storyboard was produced that would give the film a sense of direction was created. In order to maintain a structure and keep everything running on time for the shooting of the film, a call sheet and shooting script was also made.

Finally to avoid any accidents a risk assessment sheet that looked at any possible hazards was constructed to sustain health and safety precautions for everyone involved in the production stages
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