Off The Leash! is set in a an imagined society where there is great suffering or injustice, in which the public is deprived of the freedom to travel due to a recent outbreak of the coronavirus. From this, a group of young boys protest against the government, asking for freedom, dressing up in animal masks to protect their identity.
The protest group consists of 4 young boys, all with different views on the topic. The set up their protests in the woods and the surroundings, using large placards, flags and flares to show their anger. A news reporter describes them as violent and warns the public that the woods is now a dangerous place and strongly advises people to stay away. The woods is the protestors chosen location due to the fact there is a sense of no laws, being hidden away by the trees, with no clear paths and with no civilisation. The woods are also home to wild animals, which makes the location feel like a natural habitat for the protestors.
For our promo pack, we created a number of different products for consumers. Our products consisted of a number of different T-shirts and iPhone cases. We chose to do iPhone cases because our target audience research concluded that the majority of viewers would have an iPhone device. These products that we are selling 'brands' our film and it gives us good exposure for our production. Having a number of different products on our store meant that audiences have lots to choose from and we can cater for a variety of people. Our independent film companies, Chambers Productions and Mind's Eye Productions respectively have unique company logos and brands which we used throughout the trailer and also through a variety of our social media pages including Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram and FaceBook. These social media pages have allowed us to share and showcase our talent and behind the scenes footage of our filming on set. It allows viewer to get familiar with the characters and build a rapport with them which is key because we want our viewers to be involved and hooked on at all times. Audiences are more likely to stay hooked with the film if they have a pre-built relationship with certain characters.
Our film challenges and uses different codes and conventions. After studying a number of different trailers of well-known films, one convention that stood out to me was intertitles. I took inspiration from this and when it came to my trailer, I added different intertitles. Our film was a thriller / horror film and one convention which I saw a lot in this genre of films were jump scare scenes. This meant that I felt it was necessary to include at least one scary scene in our trailer. After my research, I knew that films are required to produce a BBFC age verified certificate which is what I included at the beginning of our trailer. Trailers also are different to films in terms of continuity. To keep audiences engaged with the trailer, there needs to be a lack of continuity, however it needs to be made exciting and thrilling, especially as ours is a horror/thriller. For us, there needs to be the horror elements involved, like jump scares and fast-paced music. Therefore I added as much thrilling content as possible into our trailer, without giving away the whole plot line. This means that I would make a successful trailer, as audiences will want to come back and watch the full film if they enjoyed the trailer and were engaged. Not only researching trailers, I researched a number of different posters from films like Tenet, Inception etc. which gave me inspiration to make my own and take different techniques from their posters and integrate them into mine. I created a sleek poster with the subject being a man holding a smoke bomb. I felt like this worked well because the protestors in our trailer are seen holding smoke bombs so the poster had a link to the trailer. Billing blocks and awards were also spotted throughout the posters I researched so I took this into my own and added a professional looking billing block at the footer of my poster and spread out a number of award logos towards the header. Another way in which I challenged codes and conventions was the current time period we used for our film. Off The Leash! is set in lockdown where the viewers of the film will be able to create a rapport straight away.
