Evaluation Activity 7

Compared to the first preliminary task that we filmed, I believe that our filming, camerawork and editing has improved greatly. We recorded our preliminary task at the beginning of the topic, with little preparation and only one lesson to film it. We used a limited amount of shots, like close ups, long shots and mid shots. We didn't really use any camera techniques, instead we used a tripod the whole time and the camera stayed stationary. Cuts were the only editing we did.

Our preliminary task was pretty messy, and some of the cuts were jumpy with speech missed out. This was because this was the first time we'd tried editing a film, and we had used the razor tool to cut the film and accidentally deleted part of it and didn't know how to get it back. I also hadn't had much practice with cameras, at school or at home, so the whole filming process and taking photos was new to me. Our horror film obviously improved as we used a much greater variety of camera shots than the preliminary task. Long shots, mid shots and close ups were used throughout. We had panning and tracking shots, which look much more interesting than the stationary shots in the preliminary task. Editing was greatly improved too, as we spent much more time on it and knew where and how to add things, like a colour contrast when the sky was too light and I wanted the scene darker, and included many special effects and sound effects that were never used in the preliminary task.

The camerawork was a little shaky in part of our horror film, but not in our preliminary task. This was done on purpose though because we wanted to create the effect of a monster chasing the characters, especially as we combined it with a tracking shot. In editing, I used ghosting was one of the special effects added, and it made the hand at the end of our film look supernatural and not human, to give the effect that the person behind the door is a predator. Colour offset is another thing I added because one of the photos I included in the film wasn't the right colour, so the colour offset tool changed it to make the writing on the sign in the photo red and bold, which means it stood out and is more noticable to the audience.

The 180 degree rule is a technique I learnt in the preliminary task, which is where you stick to one side, 180 degrees, of the characters so that it doesn't confuse the audience by switching sides and keeps continuity. As our film had many shots and cuts, we didn't need to worry about this rule, but we would need it in a tv drama similar to our preliminary task. Overall, our horror film was successful and we learnt a lot about technology and camera techniques during our topic, so from the time of our preliminary task we gained a lot of experience which helped our horror film look more proffessional.

Evaluation Activity 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We didn't use very much equipment during our filming, only the basics. When we went out to film we took a videocamera to film and a tripod for some of the shots that we needed to be steady, and also a normal camera to take pictures of the process. 

We used various programmes during the editing process though. Adobe premiere was the most important as this was the programme we were using to edit our film. Before our filming, I had only used it a few times so I only knew the basics, but through exploring and trial and error, I worked out how to cut parts out, add music and sound, change scenes around and add effects etc to make the film look how I wanted it.

Another programme I used was Adobe Photoshop as there were photos we had taken before and during the filming that we wanted to include and they weren't the right size or they needed some editing. Our logos were images we found on Google and edited on Photoshop to make them our own. To create our logo, we had to use tools such as the magnetic lasso tool which allowed us to cut out the part of the image we wanted. At times, it was quite difficult as it didn't want to go along the edges that we wanted. The rectangular marquee tool was used to cut and paste the 9 images together so that I could display them on my blog.

Lastly, I moved my film into Windows Movie Maker. We imported the video into the programme and waited for it to be compressed, and then saved it to our computer. We needed to do this because as we were putting our films onto the internet and blogger, so the file size was too large to go on without problems occurring, like it freezing or skipping. The compressed video was then placed on my blog and works fine.

We used another piece of technology when recording our voiceovers called 'ESI Rekord M'. This device was used so that I could record my voice clearly when talking about production and distribution of my film opening. I learnt that it's best to have it sitting on a surface in front of you instead of holding it right up to your mouth, as doing this can make the sound muffled and unclear. The device was useful because it was easy to use and the recording time was displayed on the screen, so I could try and make the speech length the same as the video length.

 

 

 

 

Evaluation Activity 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Below is the link to my opening to a horror film, Chasing Shadows, with annotations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbzbxOiFwc

Evaluation Activity 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

To understand who my target audience is, I decided to ask a group of 10 people with different ages, gender and backgrounds about their film preferences for my target audience research. I asked them about their favourite genre and what kind of films appeal to them. I used the answers they gave me to get a better understanding of who my film would be aimed at, the kind of people that would come and watch it and what they would want out of it.

I had decided that the film would have the age certificate 15, due to the fact that the violence and horror is implied instead of shown, so while it doesn't have the more extreme parts of horror films like gore, younger viewers may still find it scary and therefore making it unsuitable for those under 15. Also, the characters that appear in the film are all 16-17, so that would likely be the age group that would go to see this film as they can relate to the characters and their experiences, which makes the film more realistic and enjoyable. The main characters are all female, so that could possibly mean that the target audience leans more towards females, but males may also enjoy it.

My research has shown that it seems females would probably enjoy this film on average more than men would. It turns out that gore and monster genres of horror are watched more by males than females, while psychological thrillers such as our film are watched more by females.

Evaluation Activity 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Notes:

The production company is a group of people responsible for creating new media, like tv programmes and films. They can also be responsible for gathering money to fund the production. The production company can be both small and large, like its products.

Film distributors are companies that take a film thats been produced and release them for public viewing. A distributor would have to either have to own distribution networks, like theatres, or contact a distribution network and work with them. Anthem Pictures, Brain Damage Films, Darclight.

20th Century Fox
Lions Gate
Paramount Pictures

In most films, the credits will show the names of the actors first. They would usually be the most famous people involved in the entire film, including production etc, so the general audience is likely to want to know their names more. Smaller jobs like photography that have a smaller effect on the outcome of the film would come after.

Evaluation Activity 3 - Script

The name of my production company is DreamScream productions. We got the idea of the name of the company from the popular production company DreamWorks, and changed the name around a little by adding the word scream, which is associated with horror. This makes the production company specific to horror, like Twisted Pictures.

A production company is a group of people who are responsible for creating new media, like TV programmes and films. They can also be responsible for gathering money to fund the production. The production company can be both large, like Paramount Pictures, or small, like Brain Damage Films whic deals with more independant films.

Film distributors are companies that take a film thats been produced and release them for public viewing. A distributor would have to either have to own distribution networks, or have connections with distribution networks and work with them.

In most films, the first names you will see in the credits or title sequenc would be the main actors and actresses, so I revealed Emily and Helen's names first as they appear the most in the film. Other actors came in after because they appear for a shorter time. The directors and film crew came next because their jobs are also important, but the audience wouldn't be as interested in them as they are less publicised.

A small film like mine would likely get funding from other film companies or funding from the government. DreamScream Productions would start off as a small production company and get sponsors to help fund the distribution of our film. FilmFour is an example of a financer that would give money to films, like British film Shaun of the Dead. Our film is similar to Shaun of the Dead genre wise, so FilmFour could be the kind of financer we use.

Idea of the Hand

The idea of the hand on the windows came from a few different places. I've seen a few horror films that use this technique to shock and scare the audience, especially when the hand slams against the window after quiet music, possibly making the audience jump. The hand at the window shows that something is there, something is to fear, but you don't know who or what because you don't see their face. Fear of the unknown is common, solike my mask research shows, people are scared of things or people when they don't know their identity.

The film 'When a Stranger Calls' does this as they have someone phoning up and talking to the main character, but don't show his identity apart from shadows until later into the film.

Evaluation Activity 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The character that Helen plays in our film is quite stereotypical. She acts as the typical teenage girl in most horror films, not too intelligent and the damsel in distress. In our film she is seen screaming and running from an unknown entity and shouting 'help' for someone to save her because she can't defend herself.

The female character from When A Stranger Calls is similar to Helen's character. The similarity of both characters is that they are both the lead roles and are both struggling to survive. Both are young, slim and have medium length brown hair. The plain and normal clothes they both wear means that you pay more attention to their face and expression, since facial expressions are important to portray the characters emotions. Also, the plain clothes builds fear and tension because it shows that they are normal people and the situation they are in could happen to anyone.

The characters are slightly different though. The main character of When A Stranger Calls is alone in someone elses house, whereas Helen is in her own house and with a friends for some part, so she has a level of comfort that the other character does not. Helen doesn't try to defend herself properly in our film, instead she struggles a little, but eventually gives up and gets taken, while the character from When A Stranger Calls, maybe because she is a little older, grabs a knife and defends herself, and in the end manages to survive.

Evaluation Activity 1

1. Editing - We created our own logo, editing an image we found on google so that we could make it our own and add the production company name onto the logo. Editing was important to the film because things needed to be changed, such as the contrast and brightness on some scenes because when we filmed it, the day was quite sunny so we got a little too much light to convey the pathetic fallacy of horror.

2. Story and how the opening sets it up - This frame shows how the story sets up because you can see the characters running, but you don't know what from yet so it drags the audience in as they want to know what is going to happen. A lot of horror films usualy cut straight into the action without giving the audience an explaination, showing them an interesting part of the film which would make them want to continue watching.

3. Setting and location - We decided to use the generic horror film setting as our first scene, in a forest at night time. We used a forest because its quite isolated and enclosed, meaning that anything could be lurking there and nobody would know. Thoughts like these cause tension and fear for the audience, which is what we wanted straight away.

4. Genre and how the opening suggests it - When we filmed the opening, we made sure that some of the things we were doing would be done in a typical, conventional horror film. The setting of a forest, imags such as danger and screaming and running straight away let on to the genre of the film being horror.

5. How the characters are introduced - The characters and their personalities don't get introduced until the second scene in our film, because in the first scene they are too fearful to do anything other than run. We wanted to make the audience bond with the characters and feel sympathy towards them, as they know what is coming in later scenes because they've already seen a glimpse of what happens to the characters. Having the tension building right away means that when it switches to the second scene, the audience are already anticipating the rest of the film.

6. Special effects - We had taken photos to possibly include in our opening sequence. On one of the photos I added the special effect 'colour offset', as it made the colour of the lettering much bolder and more noticable in the short time it appears. I also had a few other special effects like 'ghosting' on the hand because it makes the hand seem less human. Special effects are important in horror films because you want to give the audience a hint of the supernatural.

7. The title of the film, text and style - For my title screen I chose to have several of the title flashing in different places to add interest. I used the font chiller because it fits in with the horro genre and isn't neat, like someone had quickly scrawled the words because they were running out of time, but I kept the rest simple and decided to leave the background black and keep the text white as this was the usual classic colour scheme for most film title sequences.

8. Costume and props - The frame shows the second scene, where many people standing and sitting around in a house. They are wearing normal clothes and look like average people. This is a complete contrast to the costume and props we used in the first scene. In the first scene, Helen and Emily have dried ketchup, dirt and leaves rubbed into their clothes, in their hair and on their face so that it looked like they had been attacked, hence the blood-like ketchup, and while trying to escape have injured themselves and fallen down in mud as they are running so fast to get away.

9. Camerawork - This camera shot shows a close up of a hand to signify how important it is to the story. We tried to use a lot of different camera shots, such as panning around a characters face to convey their emotions, tracking so that it looks to the audience like the character is being chased and establishing shots to show the setting of the dark forest. The shots we used were to help build tension and make it seems like something is lurking in the forest.

Final draft

Font

The font I used throughout my film title sequence is called 'Chiller'. The name of the font attracted me first, as it relaetd to horror and the feelings you get from watching that horror film.

After looking at the font, I realised that it would be perfect for my title sequence, such as names and titles. I kept all writing in the same font for continuity, and I think it looked better that way instead of constantly changing things round. The writing looks like the sort of font you would get in a horror film, as the lines aren't straight and the size of letters change, like someone writing something quick and carelessly because they have other things to worry about.

Graph

Feedback Questionnaire

1. Does the music increase the tension?
2. Is the story easy to follow?
3. Is the contrast noticeable between light and dark atmosphere?
4. Does the start of the film make it clear it is going to be a horror film?
5. What do you think about the way the credits have been placed?
6. What would you rate our film out of 5?
7. Were the characters appropriate to horror?
8. Is our title appropriate to our film?
9. Would you want to watch the end of our film?
10. What changes can we make?

First draft analysis

Looking at my first horror movie draft, I realise that there are still many things that I can improve on. I believe that the by posting it and watching it all the way through, I will be able to spot some weaknesses in the film.

After watching it through, I believe that while I have improved from my basic and short preliminary task, there are still things that could have been filmed better or things that need editing. One thing I noticed was that the title screens were too short, so the names passed too quickly. This could be because I used many title screens for just one name, to look like its flickering, and when the file was compressed, it couldn't keep up. I could easily solve this problem by making each title screen slightly longer.

Another problem was the non diegetic sound that went with the title screens. As the names were passing quicker, it meant that the 'flicker' music, which I thought sounded like typing, became out of sync with the film. If I do what I said about making the title screens longer, the problem should fix itself.

There are a few points in the film where the film gets stuck, pauses, or something goes on for too long. Again, these could be compression problems, or things that I've simply missed out on the first time. If compression is the problem, I could save it again and hopefully it would be okay, or look into it on Adobe and make sure I cut parts properly.

First draft

Below is the first draft of my opening to a horror movie, Chasing Shadows. I have uploaded this so I can feedback from other people and see what needs to be improved.



Plot Change

After completing the story board and planning out both scenes of the opening, we decided that the second scene may not work as effectively. We were planning on doing the second scene in a classroom, which could have worked because the characters are around the age of year 11 to 13's, but it would be difficult to get all the footage without some kind of noise pollution. There aren't many free classrooms, and those that are usually have people next door. Also, there is a shot where the character are walking through a hallway, and with so many people in the school, there would likely be people in the background making noise.

We had another idea for the scene, which was to create a house party and have lots of people hanging out so that you can see a contrast in the characters and situations. Parties occur a lot in horror films, because you see the characters enjoying themselves, letting themselves go and letting their guard down, so it would be much easier for something bad to happen to them.

Story Board

1. Character running into the sunlight, contrast of light scene.

2. Characters running across bridge
3. Two different paths, characters split off from each other and run in different directions. Long shot helps to show this.
4. Mid shot of one character shouting the name of the other character. Camera pans around character.
5. High angle long shot of other character running down path, looking over her shoulder -red filter

6. Back to first original character who is still shouting the other's name. Other character screams.
7. Other character is being dragged along muddy path -cut, make it choppy, speed it up.
8. Two girls walking down school corridor, girl on left appears to be paranoid, something's wrong.
9. Both walk into classroom where third girl is sitting waiting. They join her and sit down.
10. Close up on girls face, sense fear, paranoia

Script



As well as creating a story board so that we can understand how the characters are going to move and act, and what we are going to do with the camera, we also had to plan out any dialogue. From the beginning, we weren't planning on putting too much dialogue or diegetic sound in because it was the opening of a film, and we felt that tension building music might be the best choice for the introduction in case it gave away too much information about what happens in the film.

Filming

Houses in Horror Films

One of my first ideas was to film part of our film in a house. A lot of films take place in houses because thats a place where people feel most safe, and it is scary to think about something coming into our comfort zone.

The films 'When a stranger calls' and 'The strangers' both take place in houses and centre around the subject of an unknown person trying to enter the house while the unknowing victim goes about their business, and this was going to be the basis of part of our opening scene.

Although the house in When a Stranger Calls seems a lot more isolated, the house we were thinking of using for our horror film is detached, so there aren't any neighbours around which will give the audience a sense of insecurity.

Masks in Horror Films

In our research, we noticed that a lot of horror films seem to use masks in their films, such as:

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• Saw
• Nightmare on Elm Street
• Hannibal Lecter films
• The Strangers
• Scream

All these films have masked character, but its not just the facial expression on the masks that scare us, but the fact that the face of the character is hidden - like the girl from the Grudge. We are frightened by masks because they hide the true identity of the character and their emotions. The unknown strikes fear in many because people want to know what they are acing so they have a way to deal with it.

Masks make people devoid of emotion and this makes them powerful. Masks make it so that the audience can't sympathise with the person wearing it, so it singles them out as the bad character. Since masks hide identities, it leavesthe film open for many plot twists because it could be a character thats already known and has a strong relationship with the victim.

Own Title Sequence

There are many things we have t think about when it comes to our title sequence:

What will it look like?
How many second for each image?
Fades/dissolves between images?
Font style, colour, size?
What text?
Actors/actresses?
Film title - font?
Images - link to your film.

Psycho Shower Scene

In lesson, we looked at the film 'Psycho' and its infamous shower scene. The scene took a whole week to shoot, and in the end was about 45 seconds in the film. They used many different cameras to create the effect they wanted, which made it look quite realistic as you can see the scene from many different angles.

Two interesting facts about the scene is that the blood that swirls down the drain at the end is in fact chocolate sauce, and the famous noise of the stabbing which is used for spoofs etc these days was created by 'violating a Turkish melon'. Its clever because they used such simple techniques to create a realistic looking scene, far ahead of its time. The realism of the film is probably what scared the audience of that time so much.

Se7en Title Sequence

The film Se7en's title sequence is an extremely good example for a horror film title sequence. There is a lot going on, so I'm going to go through it and list the different changes of scene each time.

1 sec - Old, crumpled book - pages being turned.
6 sec - 'New line cinema presents' - writing doubles and flickers.
7 sec - Distorted writing, doubles up. Black backgroun with white lettering and it twitches, like a bug. Mirrored text switches back to normal.
9 sec - Sketchy distorted hands surrounded by dark shadows.
11 sec - 'A film by' is in block letters, but names are in a font which looks like handwriting.

12 sec - Lots of cuts of a gun being loaded.

15 sec - Very quick cut of random numbers, like a subliminal message.
16 sec - More hands - dirt and darkness.
20 sec - Lots of cuts - photos and equipment like an ortopsy or crime case.
24 sec - 'Se7en' flashed and duplicates behind. The two flicker in the top right hand corner, flashes larger in the centre of the screen and then returns to the corner.

27 sec - Scene comes into the background of a hand picking up a book while 'Se7en' stays in the corner.
30 sec - Name in wonky writing on shadowed part of the screen. More paper and flashes of red.
32 sec - Handwriting while bottom of the screen is in shadow. Shot is duplicated over one another to look distorted. The shots then blend back into one.
38 sec - Everything goes red - photos being developed. No natural light is used so far, only low key lighting and unnatural flourescent lighting.
40 sec - Cutting negatives in darkness. Everything is shadowed.

There are many elements that make this recognised as a good title sequence. The non diegetic sound of the song 'Closer to God' by Nine Inch Nails furthers the feeling of horror.

Horror films