Lighting Sheet

Shot List

Script

Storyboard for our horror film

These are the storyboard sheets which explain our ideas and thoughts.

Location Photographs

Test Shot/Character Design

This is our second test shot using the actress who we will be using in our film.

Recce Sheets 2

Film Outline

This is a table to show the outline of our film, what shots we will be using and the action content within each section. This would become useful to refer back to when deciding upon our ideas.

Release Form

This is the release form which was filled out to ensure that our group members and cast gave permission to share the work we have produced with the Media and Film department.

Health and Safety

This is the health and safety form which we had to fill out to ensure that we did not use any harmful or dangerous props.

Textual Analysis Grids

These are the textual analysis grids in which we watched a psychological horror and wrote about the different aspect that we need to look at when producing a horror film such as music/sound and lighting.

We did these textual analysis grids so that we knew what camera angles and lighting looked effective which would influence us with ideas for our horror opening.

Final Film Project

After many lessons of editing we have produced our final horror opening.

Media Project 17.3.11

We didn't think that our first shooting was very effective as it lacked the appropriate lighting as we shot in daylight and it also didn't include scary things such as the book falling off a shelf. Therefore we needed to re-shoot the opening to improve it.

The re-shoot was a lot better and much more effective as we made sure that we filmed at night so the lighting was appropriate. Also we used a lot more close ups to add effect to the shots and show the fear of the protagonist. We also included other, more scary events that happened in the opening of the horror film such as a hand banging against the window which fits into our ideas as we wanted the threat to be hidden from the audience.

In the lesson now, we are uploading the opening of the horror film to the Mac and currently editing it. We need to add more sound to the bang on the window as it wasn't loud enough on the original filming. We also need to add the music to the opening.

- Shaun

Practice Project

This was our first attempt of filming our opening, which has given us a clear idea of what we need to improve on and include to make our opening more effective.

One problem that we found was the lighting was too bright while filming, which made the footage look washed out and out of focus.  We had initially planned to film at night and so this is what we will do in our final project.

Another problem was that we did not use a very wide range of shots, for example there were hardly any close ups to show the character's emotions and create tension.  This is another thing that we will try to improve on.

Our original plot idea was too basic and so we need to work on this to make the opening more dramatic and scary.  

In conclusion, our practice filming highlighted many alterations that we need to make.  

Lesson review 3/3/11

For this lesson, we divided the work load between the three of us, with two of us starting to edit the final production and me adding to the blog.

Charlotte and Rebecca began to cut up the clips and because we filmed many shots of the same clip, they viewed them all and found the best one to edit and improve. They improved the clips by cutting them to make them shorter and therefore much more effective. They also tried to lower the light contrast as we filmed with a lot of light in the room. Realizing this, we decided to change the colour of our film to black and white however the phone will still be in a very stand-out red colour to add effect. Such effect is used to highlight the importance of objects in famous films such as "Schindler's List". but afterwards we decided not to do this.

I meanwhile spent time editing and adding to the blog adding such things as a poll to see from the public if the soundtrack for the opening is effective or not along with the soundtrack from the opening of the horror film, the changing of the logo and adding a video bar to the side of the blog. I also spent time writing two evaluation questions and then adding them to the blog.

Film soundtrack

This is our first version of our soundtrack for the opening of the horror film

Evaluation Questions Part one

Question 1

1)     My group is going to make the opening of a horror film.  We have researched existing films in this genre and have watched them, particularly looking at the openings.  This gave us an idea of the conventions of a horror film and also what rating to give it.  Our initial idea is of a young girl alone in her home who starts getting phone calls and having strange things happen around her, such as lights and her television turns off.  This is because of a ghostly presence, most likely to be a poltergeist.  We were inspired by the film ‘Scream’ as the opening also has a young girl under threat.

My group consists of myself, Rebecca and Shaun.  We have found this to be an effective relationship as we can easily divide the workload between us.  We have worked through problems by helping each other in areas that we may individually struggle with, such as filming or storyboarding.

-Charlotte

Question 2

In what ways does your Media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real Media products?

The forms of our Horror genre are the psychological genre and some examples of the films that we have studied are: Scream and What Lies Beneath. We have used these films to get ideas for our horror film by studying the age of the Target Audience that the film “Scream” was aimed at which was Males aged between 15-24 and this is the Target audience which we wanted to aim our film at so this research was very important We also looked into the age range of “Scream” and “What Lies Beneath” to determine what we would include in our film as if we set the rating to 1 then we couldn’t put in any blood or gory scenes to research on the ages was very important in determining our research

Question 3

3)    After looking at the IMDB website which gives us information about the certificate of films, what these films contain and which audience each film is aimed at, we decided that our target audience should be fifteen and above and to set fifteen as the certificate of our project. 

We decided to aim our opening at teenagers around our age, so that they can relate to the ideas that we have chosen and hopefully enjoy what we have produced.  Beforehand, we chose to make our horror a psychological horror, so that we wouldn’t have to make our certificate too high as it wouldn’t contain blood or gore, but we also thought that this would be a good genre of horror to experiment with.  Also by researching films that have inspired us in deciding upon our ideas such as ‘Scream’ we can identify what sex and age group this film is watched by the most, which then gives us some idea of whether we want to use the same audience as this.  From ‘Scream’, the results show that under 18s were keen to watch this film as it was shown to be highly rated by them, which indicates that this is what teenagers want to see in a horror film, therefore we used similar ideas when it came to making our project. 

  Similar results were found in many other films such as ‘What Lies Beneath’ (another film that inspired our group) which again states that under 18s gave horror a higher rating.

  I think that teenagers, particularly males, are associated with watching  horror films, because they are the most popular age range and audience to watch this genre of film.  In addition the majority of horror films are set at a certificate of 15 or 18, therefore I think setting our certificate at 15 would be the most suitable, so that it fits with the contents of our opening and attracts the audience that we are hoping to aim for. 

-Rebecca 

Question 4

Our Horror film traditionally represents social groups such as the teen social group. This is because we wanted to choose and actor which was aged between the Target audience age (15-24) and we needed to choose a woman which is dominantly seen as being a more vulnerable person

Our Horror film accommodates these represents traditional female teen social groups bye mise-en-scene as the victim was wearing a white top which states her innocence as white does suggest that women are pure and young which is what teen female social groups wear.  We also made sure that in our film the main protagonist was a female, which accommodated to the female teen social groups 

-Shaun


Question 5

5) We initially did a lot of research regarding getting ore knowledge for who our indented target audience would be. This is shown in question 3 as we did some research and found that for Scream, the most watched member of the audience was Teenagers. Which shows that as we are doing a similar film to Scream, it would make sense to mould the Target audience for scream to our film. I think that we did target the audience very well as we made sure that the actors that played the main protagonist was a teen which means that the target audience would relate more to the character and therefore it would give a sense of realism to the target audience as it would seem like they are a part of the film if the main protagonist in the film is also a teen. We also made sure that mise-en-scene attracted the audience as we made sure that the protagonist was wearing white and this is seen by today’s teen audience as representing innocence and therefore the audience can again recognise with the main protagonist. 

-Shaun


Question 6

6) British film companies may distribute our media project. One of these British film companies is called Hammer Film Productions. This is because that Hammer Film Productions, although went out of the music industry in the 1970s, have recently come back and rebranded themselves as a serious horror film production company.  Hammer Film Productions have also contributed to the production of similar films to ours such as “Let Me In” (2010), which features a protagonist in his house and being threatened by an antagonist and also they produced “Wake Wood” which is also similar to ours as ours features a protagonist who is alone in her house and is being frequently targeted by a antagonist.  I think that the Hammer Film Productions Company would do a lot to enhance our films reputation as having a serious moviemaker behind the distribution of the film by a company that has produced many successful films that are similar to ours.

-Shaun


Question 7


7)  Throughout this project our group have used a wide range of programs to help us complete our   film, such as Imovie, Blogger, Garageband and the internet.
Using Garageband helped us in creating our own soundtrack in the way that we wanted, as we could change the pace,pitch and create a piece of atmopsheric music that would fit our horror film.
Imovie was the programme that we used to import and edit our clips. This was very useful to ensure that our film consisted of continuity editing and was in the correct order. Also within Imovie we used some of the effects to enhance our title sequence for effect. This gave us an opportunity to make our clips more creative rather than just the raw footage we filmed.
Using Imovie helped us strucure our film more clearly, as we decided to intergrate out title sequence into our film and this was easy to do on this programme and we thought this would be more interesting rather than a series of credits, then the whole opening.

As well as this, we used the internet to research successful horror films which relate to our ideas, find out the target audience and gender that this attracted to influence us upon our decisions.


- Rebecca


8) Looking back on the preliminary task that we did back in January was our idea for the opening of the Horror Film. The main differences between our preliminary film and the final one was that we had no clear idea of how we were going to integrate the titles in the opening so we just left the Black wall blank with the torch whereas in the final movie cut we added the titles in by cutting out the letters by hand and sticking them to the wall. I feel that here we have learn to use some initiative and simplistic thinking as originally we had the idea to edit in the titles which would have been much more complicated. Also I feel like we have learned how to incorporate different shot types as when we first shot the final film we were told that we didn't have enough close ups so therefore we went back to reshoot and we did more close ups which improved our Horror Film. If we were to do this production again, I would have included more dialogue between the man on the phone and a lot more shots however as this is just an opening, I believe that we did a good job in creating a threat that was unable to be seen by the audience.

-Shaun

Practice Opening