Brand Identity

 

When creating a horror franchise, it is essential to establish a brand identity. This is how your brand is recognized and how it becomes famous. Examples are things like Jason Vorhees' hockey mask from Friday the 13th, or the ''Billy'' puppet from the Saw franchise.

  A brand identity for the Slender Man is not a difficult thing to get ahold of because of its viral nature- the Slender Man effectively markets itself. However it is important to dissect what makes it so instantly recognizable and popular.

  To outline this I have created a presentation using an ergonomic and professional tool called ''Prezi'', which allows you to create a dynamic animated presentation of a sequence of steps or a ''drawing together'' of ideas.

Interviews

After my trailer, poster, and magazine cover were finished, I interviewed several people and asked them their opinions, such as what they thought was effective about it.

I then used Final Cut software to remove the green screen background (using the Chroma Key function and altering the colour settings from here) and replace it with relevant images such as my poster and clips from the trailer.


 

Making Use of Horror Conventions (Analysis of Modern and Historical Cinema)

Stephen Prince -The Horror Film

Stephen Prince writes that ''Like other genre movies, any given horror film will convey synchronic association, ideological and social messages that are part of a certain period or historical moment.''

This is very true and I have based my choice of theme and antagonist on this. Our time period is defined by the internet- wide and easy access to information of all kinds immediately. This makes the creation and propagation of urban legends incredibly easy- people will believe or at least willingly suspend disbelief with regards to things told to them by friends or friends of friends. Urban Legends are a staple of horror in the 21st century thus far, and the interactivity and ease of creation by anyone with an internet connection make them personal to those who make and experience them. Because of this, outstanding ''creepypastas'' become memes, and popular memes become urban legends. The Slender Man made these transitions in the 3 years since the creepypasta originated, and now is a common name in horror and already very popular.





The Abandonment of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1968 was a turning point in cinema- the code, which had been in enforcement since 1930, was a set of rules and guidelines for the display of explicit content in films. The list covered censorship of obvious things like violent and sexual content as well as some interesting historical artifacts such as ''sex relationships between black and white races''. This sort of censorship placed on films shaped the history of horror films, and several distinct trends can be seen. The most obvious of these is the trend for overly gory B-horrors in the 1980s, as this was a time when technology in prosthetics had advanced, and the censorship preventing such graphic violence was disappearing. Examples are films like ''The Evil Dead'' and ''John Carpenter's The Thing''.



Since the removal of a lot of censorship resulted in an explosion of graphically violent horror movies, this became a mainstream trend. However, in horror, the most effective horror movies are ones that break trends because that in itself puts the viewer out of their comfort zone by giving them something they don't expect. This has led to a bizarre reversal of trends in horror- the strict censorship resulted in subtle horrors relying on atmosphere and suspense (e.g. ''Psycho''), and then the removal of such censorship led to shock horrors and exploitation movies, and now in an effort to be different and fresh there are more subtle and atmospheric horrors again (''Sinister'', ''Dark Skies''). My movie, The Slender Man, attempts to be a part of this most recent trend while it is still in the height of its popularity. I have attempted to use the convergence of online media propagation, fluctuating theme trends, and a postmodern focus on urban legends to create a horror with the maximum possible audience and collective interest.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

  RESEARCH AND PLANNING

  The internet is an invaluable resource when it comes to researching a project. The main sites I made use of when researching for my trailer were Metacritic, IMDB,  and tvTropes.

Metacritic

  Metacritic is a review site for movies, television programs, games, and all sorts of media. It averages critic and public reviews for a product and gives a score based on this. It is incredibly useful for determining the popularity of a film and of entire genres at a point in time, and thus was invaluable for deciding what kind of film to create in order to appeal to a large audience and to ''cash in'' on current trends. Here I learned about the rise in popularity of subtle, suspense based horror thrillers like Insidious and Sinister, and more recently Dark Skies.

IMDB

  The Internet Movie Database is a site giving detailed information about films, from release dates and casting, to random trivia and public message boards. This website I found useful for researching techniques used in movies, as well as following individual director's trademarks and style. The message boards are very useful for collaborating with other film fans and for discussing horror theory and current subgenre trends.

tvTropes

tvTropes is a website that documents genre conventions, or ''tropes'', used in TV and Film. This site is a personal favourite, as it meticulously lists and explains genre conventions in a theory-solid and humorous way, listing films that make use of them, directors that favour them, and then providing a list of similar conventions and lists of films that deliberately defy those conventions. Here I did research on subjects like ''Breaking the Fourth Wall'', ''Found Footage Films'', and other relevant horror tropes.
  These tropes went on to be used in my trailer, for example at the very end of the trailer when one of the characters accompanied by the Slender Man stare directly at the viewer.

CONSTRUCTION

  The trailer and ancillary productions (interviews and suchlike) were produced using Final Cut Express, an ergonomic and professional piece of editing software. It allows easy rearranging of clips and sound, as well as many filter and transition effects, such as the ''Chroma Key'', which allowed the insertion of images into the background when using a greenscreen, and distortion effects, which were used extensively in making the classic interference effects that are associated with the Slender Man.





  The sound editing portion of Final Cut allowed me to cut down on irritating and distracting background noise in the forest scenes, using the 3 Band Equalizer to reduce the high pitch sound (leaves crackling) while keeping low pitch sound the same (footsteps and suchlike). The software also allows setting keynotes at precise times to lower or raise the volume, and this provides a very easy way to control which layer of sound is dominant at what time.

  LiveType is another program used in the production of the trailer; it allows easy manipulation and animation of text and the addition of motion backgrounds. LiveType was used to create my ''Forbidden Pictures'' production company; first the text was given a flame animation and blurred slightly, and then set against the chains moving background. The result was then placed during the trailer. LiveType was also used to create the title shot in the trailer, this time also adding movement to the type itself, causing it to shudder and jump around.

The Trailer

The finished product.

Slender Man Magazine Cover

Part of the task was to create a magazine cover featuring my
production. I chose to create an ''Empire'' magazine cover so as
to demonstrate photoshop skill in creating as close a replica to the actual magazine as possible.

The original image was first airbrushed- this is done by creating a duplicate layer, blurring (''Gaussian blur'') the bottom layer, and carefully erasing appropriate parts of the top layer. This was done on the actress's face to eliminate skin blemishes and on the Slender Man's face to eliminate the woven fabric pattern on the mask.

The Slender Man's head was marked out and copied, then pasted in the same location so that the magazine title could be placed between the two layers, creating a 3D effect which contributes to the professional look of the cover.

The ''Bloody Mary'' film is one of my fellow media student's productions, and this was included because Empire magazine often features upcoming films in addition to the cover story.





Here is an image of an actual Empire magazine cover for comparison:

As you can see, the side panel of ''Bloody Mary'' and the text about Jessie Campbell closely mimics that of the ''Batman vs Bane'' and ''Nolan Talks'' text. These are placed here as the eye is naturally drawn first to the top left of an image because this is the way English language reads.

The right hand side of the cover is used for additional article titles, specifically here about the Oscars.

Research into Horror Cinema (Conventions and Cinematic Idioms)

The task for my media studies A2 was to create a promotional package for a horror movie, and as such it required research into horror as a genre as well as the typical audience for a horror movie. This included checking trends in horror sub-genre online, interviewing friends, and using genre convention to maximize audience.

AUDIENCE

The largest audience a horror film expects is the 15-25 year old male, and the typical horror film caters to this by including several conventions such as:

-The protagonist is often a sexualized female (see Clover's ''Final Girl'' trope)

-Violence and direct physical conflict

To cater to the largest possible proportion of this audience, the age rating to aim for would be a 15 certificate, allowing the film to include the nudity or violence that this audience enjoys (consciously or otherwise) whilst also not cutting off a large section of the audience as would happen in an 18 certificate film.

USE OF EXISTING HORROR CONVENTIONS OR ''TROPES''

The largest horror trope made use of in my horror film is the ''Urban Legend'', which displays the story or elements of the story as originating in the real world. My promotional package is for a movie about ''The Slender Man'', which has been one of the most popular horror icons of the past 3 years, and specifically drawing from Marble Hornets, which is a cult Urban Legend video series on Youtube.

The ''Urban Legend'' is effective in film because it adds another layer of realism and draws the audience into the story more, and this works very well in the case of the Slender Man because of the large amount of ARG's (alternate reality games) established on Youtube, with Marble Hornets' ''Totheark'' puzzles being a good example of this. The producers of the show made an alternate Youtube account pretending to be the character Totheark from the show and posted enigmatic puzzle videos for fans of the show to solve, drawing them further into the Slender Man mythology and increasing its fanbase from simply a cult following to a full horror trope of its own.

The Slender Man as a concept even goes as far as to "Break the Fourth Wall'' and engage the audience directly on some level- the classic screen distortion effect whenever he appears adds yet another layer of engagement as not only is the Slender Man interfering with the film's characters but with your own viewing of it. This was also seen as the plot of the recent horror movie ''Sinister'', where the main character finds videotapes of the villain, and later it reveals that the tapes literally *are* the villain.

The film ''The Last Horror Movie'' also taps into the idea of interactivity as a method of drawing in the audience- the set up of the movie is that a serial killer has recorded over the dvd you rented, creating a ''meta-horror'' movie fairly similar to the ARGs of the Slender Man found on Youtube.

The end of my horror trailer attempts to create a ''Leaning on the Fourth Wall'' moment, as the trailer ends with one of the possessed characters looking directly at the audience as the Slender Man stands in the background and the camera distorts wildly.