Importance of visual and sound cues to create spectator response

Trailer Animatic

Message behind the film

The cause of the virus in our film is teenagers spending so much time online that they have grown allergic to human contact as they spend too much time in their rooms isolated from the outside world. We feel this makes a relevant comment on society today as this is the 'social media generation'. There are many debates right now about what the effect of large amounts of social media use does. Our film gives a slightly exaggerated effect that will interest viewers.
We also intend for the virus to be a metaphor for terrorism. The way everyone is scared of each other and of trusting each other reflects the fear people have about terrorism. This is relevant to society today because of the recent terrorist attacks. As our original film idea was a social realism film we thought that having this message behind our film added in the aspect of social realism that we originally wanted.

Theorists ideas in our trailer

Allan Cameron
In our trailer we used Allan Cameron's idea of an anachronic narrative which is a discrepancy between the order of events in a story and the order they are presented. We used this concept in our trailer by including flashbacks and flash forwards, our idea of using these was to show the contrast of what love used to be like and what it is like in the time the film is set, but also what it could turn in to. Also showing the different aspects of love shows how large the contrast is.

Levi Strauss
Levi Strauss is another theorist whose ideas we were able to incorporate into our narrative. He says that binary opposites are an important factor in narratives. We used binary opposites in a number of different ways, to start with we used the juxtaposition of a previous happy life and a now sad and depressing life. We did this to show a large contrast in how life had changed since the disease. Another binary opposite we used is old and young as our trailer clearly shows that teenagers are the only ones who can get the disease and this sets them apart from the rest of the population. Finally we also used the opposites of healthy and unwell to show what the disease does to people and to make it easy to differentiate between the two.

Production Company

As a group we decided to call our production company "RACA PRODUCTIONS'. We decided on this name as we wanted a relatively short name and we were able to incorporate all the first letters of the groups name to come up with a suitable name that sounded plausible.

We created a production video that was our logo with an altered background. We wanted to keep it simple as it created a better effect and and didn't take too much away from the actual trailer.

For our logo we decided that we were going to use a simple design of our house for the basic structure of it, we did this as we thought that a house is an item that most people can relate to. Then to suit it more to our dystopian genre we added emergency tape to try and portray the genre of our trailer more. This tape represents danger and possibly medical problems. The  dull yellow colour can be associated with caution, decay and sickness, also the colour black is associated with fear and the unknown. Finally we decided to use red writing over the top so that it would stand out and to signify death, blood and danger. We created out logo to signify all the feelings and mood of out trailer such as sickness and death.

Technology test shots

This is the test shot that I did of the pupils scanning their wrists while walking into assembly. I found a copyright free video of a slow heartbeat that would make it look like when people scanned their wrist a heartbeat came up.

Above is the original video that I found. I edited it so it worked better with what we wanted it to look like. Once it was edited I downloaded it onto the iPad as this is what we wanted to use for the filming. I also bought iPad holders that would be able to hold the iPad up against the wall without it falling. We chose to have them white so that they would match the colour of the iPad and look more futuristic.

Above is the test shot we took. We went into the Sixth Form hub at our school and found 3 people that had Fitbits and were willing to participate. They were wearing clothes that we thought worked. We had to make sure that the people walking were in time with when the heart was beating so that it looked realistic.

Location Recce

Costumes and Props

Make up

The makeup for our female protagonist needed to be very subtle, making her look slightly more ill and tired than in the flashback shots. To achieve this we simply smudged her mascara slightly and added some slight redness.
The makeup on our hospital patient needed to be much more extreme and dramatic to alarm the audience and to clearly show that she is unwell. After looking at many different tutorials we decided that using smudged eye shadow and gasoline was the best way to create the look we wanted.
This was the test shots of the female in the hospital.

Final storyboard