Final Ideas For Characters

After gaining feedback from our target audience which type of characters would be most effective in a horror trailer we decided to use two girls as the victims and one girl as the scary figure.

We decided to use a female as the scary role as after looking at existing media products this is very conventional. We though this would also be most effective as It creates a very frightening image to the audience. Due to the long hair for example, the ring and the grudge, it causes confusion to the audience as they can't quite tell what it is and in affect causes fear as one of the thing that is feared the most is the unknown. We decided to dress her in an old fashioned victorian style outfit to allow the audience to distinguish that she is from the past and to clearly show the movement of time within the trailer. To show vulnerability in the character at the beginning of the trailer (when she is drowning herself) we decided to use a teenage girl as the ghost, this also will attract the target audience who are of a similar age. It was essential we made her look scary therefore we chose to make her skin pale white to show death and pain. We then using make up drew cuts around the lips and eyes , whilst also using brown eyeshadow to portray a bruised look around the eyes. We then also made the hair of the ghost cover her face so it is hard for the audience to tell what it is, allowing her to appear more scary. The overall affect of the hair and make up was to make her look soulless and scary, so this would make the audience jump when she appears on screen, typical of a horror trailer.

For the two victim characters we initially liked the idea of using one boy and one girl to act as the victims, as we thought this would be affective in targeting a unisex audience. However when receiving feedback from our questionnaire it seems the majority of boys and girls of our target audience thought it would be more affective if two girls were acting as the victims. When seeing this i realised that it would be more effective due to the fact the audience would really be bale to relate to their fear and worry which girls very well. Where as the story of a young teenage girl haunting a boy may seem a bit unrealistic as they a sterotypical male character would try not to act scared. Despite the male audience not being able to relate to a male character within the trailer, it will seem more believable that two females are running and screaming due to the haunting of a ghost. We decided to dress the two girls in ordinary clothing to make them look like normal everyday teenagers. This allows the target audience to relate to them and feel further engrosses into the trailer, this makes it more frightening for the target audience as they will put their selves in the characters position. We decided to dress them in dull clothing yet still dressing them in fashionable items. This way, the clothing would still fit in with the dark genre of the film, yet the fashionable clothes allows them to appear as just ordinary teenagers yet again.