Editing/ Filming Day Four

Today, Sarah and I decided that before we edited our trailer anymore, we would watch with music what we had so far. Once we had done that, we then watched some trailers for other high school horror films and compared ours to them. We looked at the trailers for the films 'Scream' and 'Prom Night’. After viewing both, we came to the conclusion that we needed to add more scenes, towards the end of the trailer that showed the panic and fear of the characters. Furthermore, we also concluded that we needed to add more bloody scenes and scenes that were more mysterious to give the trailer that dark and almost deadly feel to it. Moreover, we felt that we needed to start our trailer with an establishing shot of the school; this convention is used in almost every trailer regardless of genre. We added this so the audience would not be confused to where our story is set, even thought it does become clear after the written text appears on the screen.
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So after we had decided how to improve our trailer, we went back to filming. We started with the establishing shot. For this shot, we did a long establishing shot on a Dutch tilt and tilted the camera upwards to allow the audience to see the black branches next to the school. We then filmed an additional ending to our trailer. For this, we decided that it would be more effective and even scarier if we use jump-cuts to show Mary-Alice being thrown against a wall, and then cut to her crawling along the floor and finally cutting to her having her leg grabbed as she tries to escape. We hoped that we could achieve this effect during the editing process. Moreover, to add another layer of eeriness to this ending, I would edit her screaming as her leg is grabbed and then cut to the title screen and have the scream fade away as the titles do. (UPDATE: 11^th February 2010: We decided to remove this scene from the final edit. This was because we thought that the trailer had moved to far away from our original ending. In addition, we believed that it left the audience with the feel of ‘What was that?’ rather than ‘that looks interesting!’)
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After that, we then filmed the character Robin, also being thrown against a wall. After we watched it back, we realised that you could not see Sarah's face, so we decided that we could also film Sarah falling down some stairs, as the audience will be oblivious to the fact that it is played by the same person. After that we went looking to find a classroom where we could create our mysterious lighting effects. For this, we decided that we needed to find a door that included windows so we could show the light coming from outside the room shining into it. After we found one, we had this idea of the two main characters (Mary-Alice and Robin) walking into the classroom and asking for "Kevin," but filmed three times from three different lengths away from the door. The first take would be filmed from the other side of the classroom, the second would be halfway between the door and the end of the classroom and the third would be close up to the door.