Nighthawks: Film Distribution Project

    Entry 2: 2/7/22

  Out of everything we have done this year, I will first talk about the film distribution project that I worked on with Ana and Biana. Basically, we were given a story from the creative writing students and we had to create a trailer, teaser, poster, and presentation for a film as if we were going to actually distribute the piece to the public. Ironically, we chose Brett's story, a student in our AICE media class, out of the three stories we were given!

  Here is the beginning of the outline that we received from Brett. At first, I was conflicted with this piece. I was not sure how we were going to be able to access an older man to play the character of Otis and the idea of having to animate a whole light monster, the Nighthawk, seemed out of my reach with the time limit we had. I honestly urged my group to not pick this story because I was stuck on the fact that Otis and the Nighthawk, two fundamental pieces to the film, would not be attainable. That was until I talked to our teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, who brought to light that this project was just a trailer and a teaser, which meant that technically, we could just find another way to show the characters without actually.. showing them. This part was HARD, I can not even lie it took me a bit to think of ways in how to create the scary effect of the Nighthawk and the importance of Otis without them appearing in the piece. 

  So my group used our researching part of the project to figure this out. We looked into "A Quiet Place" and "It." I personally found "A Quiet Place" to be the most useful film we researched because the entire feature heavily relies on sound. This came to our advantage with our film as when we were editing we tried several different approaches with the Nighthawk screech. "It" was more so to see how they constructed the horror of their film in their teaser. Even though "A Quiet Place" came in clutch for the trailer and the distribution presentation, "It" really helped with developing the way we filmed our teaser and how we played with the Nighthawk throughout the trailer. The two films together, although, were a huge help on the key art.

  After we researched our two films, I can confidently say that it only took my group a class period to have an exact idea of how we wanted the trailer and teaser. We had a rough shot list done for the teaser in 10 minutes and an overall outline for the trailer in 30 minutes. By the end of class, we had both outlines/scripts done and we even decided that we wanted to do a voiceover throughout the trailer. To fix my concern of the film originally, we found a solution to both the Nighthawk and Otis. For the Nighthawk, we would only portray it through red lightning and its infamous screech. For Otis, we only showed shoes and a cane walking through a door playing over his voiceover. The decision for the two character honestly took so much weight off our shoulders. The voiceover writing took minimal time because Brett actually wrote dialogue in his original outline so we were able to use it.

  Before we even filmed, Ana took some pictures for the key art with her LED lights and her brother, who plays the main character Chance.They captured perfectly how we were trying to portray our film so I wanted to share them here because I really liked it. Ana edited it on Canva and if you have never used Canva, like myself, I have to say that after this project I will certainly be using it more. It has a variety of templates, effects, frames, and a ton of cool stuff to make presentations, posters, anything you need.

  Filming and editing was an experience. We met two days to film because the first day was focused on the fundamental pieces to the film and the second day was used to record any filler footage or things we missed. It was honestly all very new to me to film because I have never gone towards the horror route, but I am glad I did for this project because I learned a lot when it comes to clothing, setting, lighting, and camera angle. At the same time, I was having a lot of fun learning with the group as we tried to figure out what shot looked best or what would be best for our film. I had never worked with Biana or Ana before but I had a lot of fun doing so. Also, the boy who plays Chance is Ana's brother so it was hilarious trying to direct him into being sad or scared. He did an awesome job though. After we filmed, editing was next. I can not say I am a huge fan of editing but this time I had a blast doing it. Every second of the trailers, I was playing around with sound, the shot we used, how long the clip stayed, if I should include a drop in music, etc. It was honestly an experiment and I was just testing around and seeing what seemed best or what worked the most in our favor. I am not saying we did not have a plan but playing around with the effects on Premiere Pro is just so fun.

  The last major piece of the project was the distribution plan and presentation. I really liked the look of our presentation and I think it matched our genre well. We also included several stills throughout the piece including the light under the door scene. Our distribution plan also came out pretty good because we thought through our genre and figured out what would work best. For example, our distribution date would be October 13, 2023 because it will be a Friday the 13th. We also said that it would be a limited and digital release since we are independent but if we were go get a big distributor, it would be Blumhouse. Obviously since it has my last name.. kidding, Blumhouse is known for horror and their independent films. We would also try and acquire a scary house at Halloween Horror Nights to attract our target audience of college men. Besides that, presenting in front of the class was super cool since we got our classmates feedback and mostly everyone enjoyed our piece. 

  Overall, what a project. Only a select few say that they worked with another creative component class to create movie trailers and "distribute" them. I had a great experience working on this and I learned A LOT in terms of the horror genre, movie trailers, and especially distribution in the real world. I am super excited to talk about the next project so stay tuned for that!