Film Logo

We decided to name our film 'Silent Night' because it goes well with the Christmas carol 'Silent Night'. It also works well with the horror aspect of the film, as it's quite creepy; the weird 'silence' is something that is quite often associated with horror movies. The word 'silence' also makes you think of mystery, of not knowing what is going to happen next. The word 'night' reminds you of darkness and is something alot of people are scared of. Putting the two words together gives you the feel of being alone in the dark, there is no sound anywhere, you can't see anything, and your just thinking of what could suddenly appear. This goes against the festive feel of Christmas and rather than feel warm and cosy, you actually feel scared an lonely.

Here is the first draft for the logo done by Tom on Photoshop.

The colours on the logo are quite dull, which is something that is not usually linked with Christmas. The Christmas tree shows you the Christmas aspect of the film, whereas the gothic writing, with the dripping blood shows you the horror side of it. Both of these put together create an interesting juxtaposition, because Christmas and Horror are two very opposite things and are not usually linked together.

Silent Night Animatic

Weekly Update

Seeing as we had Media on Monday for flexible learning we decided to complete as much work as we can before the Christmas holidays so we can start filming after the holidays.

Me and Levinia worked on the storyboard, and after we finished with that we decided to start on the animatic which we done on Final Cut Express.

Tom and Dean edited the video footage for the interview that we recorded and Tom put all the information gathered from the questionnaires onto graphs.
Things to do...
We still need to complete the production plan and do some work on the production name and logo for our film.
We also need to do some location scouting and sort out the props were going to need and then, there should be a few more things left to do before we can start filming :)

Interview Response

Here is the video for the interviews that we carried out. To gather the people that we were going to interview, we used random sampling, and then we asked then a set of questions related to the trailer we are making. The results will help us as, we got more detailed opinions from our target audience.

Questionnaire Results

So as you can see from the video above, in which Levinia spoke about the results of the questionnaires that we carried out and the analysis, they are going to help us with what we are to include in our production, so that it is something that our target audience will want to see.
From analysing the results we know that we need to:

• we also found that having the film set mainly in the forest is something that nearly 75% of our target audience would rather have compared to a house/neighbourhood or in a derelict building. 
• more than half of the target audience said that they would prefer a female role to a male, and also by looking at examples of other films from the same genre, we discovered that the lead role is predominantly played by a female. But as there was only a slight difference between whether the target audience preferred a male or female role, we have decided to go for a male lead, as it's something different.
• although special effects, suspense and mystery, were said to be some of the most important elements of a horror film, we found that music was a bit more important to the majority of the target audience, as it helps create suspense and mystery and also helps set the mood of the entire film.
• including violence/gore is something most of the target audience wanted to see, but it has to be used in a way that prevents the film from looking over the top and tacky.
• from the results we found that the most important element of a Christmas movie is Santa, which fits in very well with our idea, as it is focused on a twisted version of the story of 'Saint Nicholas'.
• when asked about the preferrd horror sub-genre, there wasn't really one that stood out the most, as the video above shows that the target audience liked a mixture of different sub-genres. But if we did have to focus on one, it would have to be thriller, as it had a few more votes than the others, so including some elements of thriller may be something we have to think about.
• as seen from the results in the video above, most people had seen and enjoyed all of the Christmas and horror films, so to be successful with our production, it would be a good idea to use some of those films listed above as inspiration for ours.
• although we have decided on having a male playing a lead role, we may need to think about whether we should have to develop our female characters so they play a more important role.

Weekly Update

Within the next week we plan to have the interviews and the questionnaires done.
We also hope to have the storyboard completed by the end of next week, including the images and shots of what we hope to be filming.

Interview Questions

1. Describe what you would say is a typical Christmas day...

2. What's your favourite horror film and why...?

3. What's your favourite Christmas film and why...?

4. What do you expect to see in a horror film and why...?

5. What do you expect to see in a Christmas film and why...?

6. Do you think music plays an important role in a horror film and why...?

7. Do you think music plays an important role in a Christmas film and why...?