Planning - Storyboards

Research - Moodboard

This is my storyboard. I have used a lot of disturbing and scary images from previous films to get ideas for my own poster and to show what genre I am aiming towards. However, in my trailer I will try not to include gory images and scenes because this is not my aim. My aim is to scare the audience and attract them to my film without using gory images. I want to use more questioning and suspicious content in my trailer to entice the audience without giving much away. 

Planning - Our Narrative

Possible Titles of Film:

- The Night that never lived

- Slaughter Reborn

- REBORN (chosen name)

We found the title 'Reborn' to be the best fit for our plot as 'slaughter reborn' gave the wrong idea to our target audience suggesting blood and gore when our main story is more about ghosts and spirits. 

Characters: 4/5 ghost hunters, a ghost, church caretaker.

Settings: City of London Academy classroom and a church. Most of the trailer will be filmed in the church. 

Narrative: based on a true story, the Charles Manson murders. 4 or 5 ghost hunters looking for the ghost of Charlotte Manson, a mass murderer of South London, Bermondsey in the late 1960s (based on Charles Manson). Rumours say that the spirit of Charlotte Manson is trapped within the church that he body was buried under and this is the church we will be filming at. Her spirit possesses one of the ghost hunters when they enter the church (Sophie). Sophie starts acting differently towards the others. Whenever they make ghost jokes she doesn’t laugh or respond in anyway. Her face begins to turn paler as the trailer goes on showing that she is clearly possessed. The spirit is now fully REBORN within Sophie's body and starts killing the other ghost hunters. The spirit of Charlotte Manson is trying to recreate the murders of the late 1960s.

Tagline: Charlotte Manson is back…

Editing Styles or techniques: We agreed that we were going to use a handheld camera throughout the trailer to give the effect of realism and illustrate that the ghost hunters within the story are amateurs.

Props/Clothing: Within our £0 budget. Everyone will wear their own clothes nothing extravagant. Dark coloured casual clothing will be worn by all the characters within the trailer. Props include fake blood, Charlotte Manson's previous murder weapons, etc.

We have also developed our story boards and filming schedules for our group. We created our filming schedules so that every member of our group knows what things they are doing and when they are doing them. These filming schedules list the dates we are filming on, director, actors, setting, camera shots/angles, lighting, actors costume for continuity, etc.

Research - Narrative Theory

Todorov 's theory -


Bulgarian scientist Todorov, proposed a basic all narrative structure. In his theory, he suggested that every story had an equilibrium or a 'calm period', a disequilibrium which is the disruptive factor and a new equilibrium to restore the 'world of fiction'.  


Five stages of a narrative (according to Todorov's Theory) -


1. A state of equilibrium - all as it should be 
2. A disruption of that order - by an event
3. A recognition that the disorder has occurred
4. An attempt to repair the damage - of disruption
5. A restoration of a NEW equilibrium




Propp's theory -


Vladmir Propp's theory suggested that in all narrative's, there were eight types of characters:


1. The hero (seeks something)
2. The villain (opposes the hero)
3. The donor (helps the hero, providing help)
4. The dispatcher (Sends hero on his way)
5. The false hero (falsely assuming the role of the hero)
6. The helper (giving support to the hero)
7. The princess (the reward for the hero but also needs protecting from the villain)
8. Her father


According to this theory there are only eight different character types, and only 31 different things they ever do. This is easily related to a lot of stories/narratives today. 



Claude Levi-Strauss' Theory -

Levi-Strauss looked at narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of media texts. An example would be GOOD and EVIL – we understand the concept of GOOD as being the opposite of EVIL. Levi Strauss was not so interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in the plot. He looked instead for deeper arrangements of themes. For example, if we look at Science Fiction films we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative:

Earth - Space

Good - Evil

Human - Aliens
Past - Present
Normal - Strange
Known - Unknown

Slaughter Reborn Poster Draft

Planning - Typography

Here are some examples of fonts we would consider using for our poster. Each one has a 'horror' or 'spooky' feel to it. I got these examples from www.dafont.com under the 'horror' themes.

Planning - Images