Spoken Evaluation

This is a spoken Evaluation in which both me and Ryan contributed towards and answered the questions for our final 2 minute Horror Film.

Question 9 - Ryan Oldham

What was your contribution to the process during the planning, production and post-production stages?

For the production of our horror film I helped do various tasks to advance our planning for the best results in our final horror film opening. I looked at numerous locations that would be suitable for our horror film and produced to reccee sheets to go along with them. The chosen location can be seen in the first horror extract that we produced. I found that it would be best set in a normal house, this would have a large convenience for filming and would also make our horror film seem even more realistic. All of our pieces were filmed inside a house with a naturalistic feel to the surroundings. This is present in our first assessment piece (Seen here) final film (Seen Here) and in our reccee sheets (Pictured Below)

  

I also helped research what would make our horror film effective and dramatic to keep the target audience interested and on the edge of their seat during our horror opening. Through use of camerawork, sound, editing and mise en scene. I explored how making shots longer than the average 3-4 seconds can build tension and how I would apply it to our final film. I also made use of the fact that low lighting can enhance a threats you have less senses to rely on. This is present in our final theme as the threat only causes disruption when the light goes off and visibility becomes low. Our soundtrack is naturalistic and blends into the background of the film well, low organs are used to create a bass tension building sound, the influence of this in our final piece came from the research I carried out on Poltergeist. Seen Here

Other research that I took part in recording was for what age rating we were going to give our film as appropriate to our target audience. We decided on a 15 rating as it did not include any strong material in, such as nudity or strong violence.

This allowed our target audience to have a larger spectrum and allowed a crucial part of the target audience (15-18 year olds) to legally see the film upon release in the cinema. Even at post-production stage we still feel that the 15 rating was appropriate and has been strict to regulations.

I helped to decide on how long each shot should be and what would be suitable to create the most tension possible to keep the audience interested in our film. This can be seen in our Film Outline (Seen Here)(Part 2 Here). These gave us a good idea on how long the film would be and what footage we would have to cut down in time accordingly.

I helped choose the appropriate lighting for our horror film by using the lighting design sheet to see what would make the threat in our film seem the worst. This work links back to one of the first research pieces I did where I studied Poltergeist and analysed how lighting was used to convey different levels of threat towards the audience.

I helped put forward initial ideas for our horror film, I thought it would be effective for the lights to flicker on and off, similar to in our first assignment piece as it would be a good distraction for the threat to create a strong disequalibrium in the narrative. I also thought it would be a good idea to create as many close ups as possible to show constant reactions to what is happening so the audience are as immersed as much as possible into the storyline. (Click Here) for a larger image.

I illustrated the lighting design on the location and reccee sheet. This gave us a clear idea of where it would be suitable to have the threat placed and where the victim should be sat at the time while everything is going on. Other than one torch we only used the lights that were previously around in the setting for our final outcome. Natural light from the windows and the light bulbs on the ceiling were sufficient enough for what we needed.

I designed the title design for the opening sequence of our horror film called 'peek-a-boo'. I made the title relaxed with curves to give it a 'ghostly' and unnatural feel, this would represent the narrative of follow the conventions of horror films.

I wrote the first half of the script. This involved creating the correct composition of writing for the script and clearly describing stage directions and what was happing with the active props.

I wrote the step outline for the sound in our horror film this can be seen (Here) and decided what needed to happen along side the narrative for the sound to create an effective amount of tension, that would hold the audiences attention for the entire opening sequence of the film.

I created the first minute of storyboarding including the title sequence up until she puts the toy clown back on the bed. This gave me a good idea of how the process of storyboarding worked and equally shared the work between the two of us. (Here) for larger images.

                                        

Whilst shooting the film I controlled the background elements to the film, such as continuity, composition and lighting. This ensured that we wouldn't have to re-shoot our footage over and over because of small mistakes. Once we had done shooting the film, we both shared taking part in both camera and sound aspects of the editing. Although I was in charge of editing towards the end of the production process whilst Georgie produced the sound.

Question 6 - Ryan Oldham

I think a british company that would be willing to distribute and market our horror film would be Film4. Film4 have marketed horrors before such as 28 Days Later and The Exorcist. (Found on the Film4 website) Although these films are different sub-genres, they run similar conventions to that of our horror film. For example there is a young female victim in The Exorcist although a lot younger than the target audience and it is set mostly inside the house.

They would use our horror film as it is targeted at an extremely wide audience, that would be able to draw in viewers if the Film was then played on TV. The 15 rating that we have given to our horror film opening would make the text more suitable and viewer friendly opposed to something with an 18 age limit. This also means that the film would be able to be played at an earlier time as the curfew will not be as strict for a 15 rated film.

Film4 would promote our film to a much wider audience and draw more people in to watch it. This would result in a rise of money made by the film to cover things like production costs and taxes. A good film would give the company a good reputation and create a group of loyal followers that would expect them to keep the standard of films high that are being distributed.

Our film relates to other british films  production process as it is shot on location and has a low budget. This stays true to the british industry as it has less money in it and films have to be made on much lower budgets than that of the US, for example. An example of a British horror would be The Descent (2005) (£3,500,000 budget) compared to a US horror such as Saw 3D (2010) ($17,000,000 budget) showing that british horror is on a smaller scale than that of films made in Hollywood or the United States.

The Descent

Saw 3D

Question 5 - Ryan Oldham

I feel we targeted our audience well by follow the conventions that we found present in the other horror films that we researched. By using the young actor we will successfully market our film to the younger side of the target audience as they will be able to relate to the age of the main character in the narrative. The mise en scene will also be typical of somebody from the younger part of our target audience (Decorated like a stereotypical innocent 'blonde' girls room would be). We also used an innocent threat that the target audience would have present previous in their life, in this case a child's toy clown. We got the inspiration for this from the film 'Poltergeist' as a clown doll is featured various times to frighten the small girl.














We researched our target audience well as our audience audience feedback agrees that it should be a film aimed at both genders and would have a 15 rating. We decided as it would be a film marketed to both genders as the male audience would be drawn in by the generic conventions of the character we used and the female audience would be able to find the film more frightening as they would be able to empathize with the victim as she becomes trapped in her house by the clown 'entity'.

Audience Feedback Sheet.

Evaluation Question 4 -Ryan Oldham

Question 4

The horror genre reflects the target audience's age group as the narrative can reflect the persons everyday life, for example the younger audience stereotypically gets in trouble often and are most likely to be the victim of a event that is present in a film, this is most often a female character. They tend to be stereotypically the 'blonde' stereotype with good looks to draw attention from the male audience. This can be seen in films such as The Ring.

Our extract followed this convention as we used a girl as the victim and set her in a bedroom so that the mise en scene represents what the male audience want to see. (Seen to the right). 

The audience feedback was positive for the representation of age in our film. It said that they thought the film was targeted at both genders which is an aspect of planning that we both agreed would be suitable for our horror film. It also said they the use of stereotypes followed the conventions of the horror genre and the gender roles were commonly found in other horror films. This would result in a success in drawing attention to our extract from our target audience.



It also said that some shots in our horror film were to long, resulting in a drop in suspense. To overcome this we cut down these shots (Walking past the bed to put the clown back) to try and keep the narrative of the story at a fast pace.

Final Horror Film

Evaluation Question 3 - Ryan Oldham

The target audience for our horror film would be young adults and older teenagers, around the age of 15-30 years old. I know this as the most frequent age of people that go to the cinema to see horror films fit into this age bracket, the youngest anyone would be able to see the film would have to start at 15 as this is the age rating that we agree'd to give the film. An example of other films that we looked at that had a suitable 15 rating would be Poltergeist and The Grudge. 
















This bar chart shows the ratings for The Grudge and the frequency of people who went to see the film. Typically, the under 18's rated the film higher than people older however there was a lot less people seeing it (518) as opposed to people aged 18-29 (23,154). The gender seemed to be more popular in males however the figures were still relatively balanced.

The dominant ideology shows people aged 15-30 are often a lot more adventurous and take more risks than people older than this age bracket, resulting in them being the main target audience for the films as they are the ones who are willing to push their limits and sit through the high tension within a horror film. The majority of the male audience are thought to watch horror films as one of the main conventions is the victim being a desirable young female role that will keep their attention. This can be seen in films such as The Ring, an example is the picture to the left.

We will use this information to our advantages by basing many of the conventions around this age group. An example of this would be that we are going to use a female of the same age as the audience for the victim role. This will help the audience become more involved in the film narrative and exaggerate the emotions that will be conveyed.

We will also use points from reviews of other films, in this case The Grudge. As quoted above "What makes it scary is the way the ghost is presented (Kayako Fuji) is presented. Those Eyes." shows that we need to focus on how we use make up for the threat in our horror film. We will also put a lot of enthuses on the eyes so they stand out in low light.

Evaluation part 2 Georgie Holmes

7. During the process of our practical in Media, creating this short introduction to a horror film. I have learnt many news forms and skills using different technologies for example; Blogger, Imovie and Garageband. Using these different technologies have helped to create the atmosphere and tension for my film, for example Garageband was great for creating a horror soundtrack which is played in the background of our film. The use of soundtracks like the 'string instruments' and 'Base' really work well to create a tense piece of music with the use of high pitch cords that sound like a 'scream'. Although we felt that having unnatural events we wanted to use instruments in the Synth Textures, as they were interesting. Listening back to the soundtrack it is effective as it keeps you on edge at all times, creating the ghostly atmosphere intended.

Throughout creating our soundtrack I was fascinated with the Synth Textures- Izmir Ambience, because when I was playing with the different keys, I felt that this was perfect for our Ghostly feel. I changed the cords a lot to get both a lower and higher pitch to make the track more tense.  

This is a screen capture of the process
of making my music track for our film
using garage band. 

Working with Blogger helped me and Ryan to keep in control of our coursework (planning, research, evaluations, etc) as it was a very easy and quick piece of technology to organise and 'blog' your work. It has been great to work with and I would be more than happy to work with this website in the future for many different reasons as it is extremely helpful.
Imovie was good to work with as it gave you the opportunity to create a film using the different edits like; 'Fast/Slow speed' and 'colour balance midtones' these are a couple of edits that we have used in our film. As well as the editing, getting on track with the cutting and splitting of each shot was extremely easy and quick to learn and I enjoyed trying out these new skills. Imovie was good, but near the end we did have a few problems with it as it began to crash and loose work that we had previously done. But with these faults it helped us to learn from the problems that had occurred and make sure that we were saving every time we created or changed something, which was ok.

This is what we used for editing, to make
the pace for the title sequence run faster
keeping the audience on edge. 

On here I have shown what we used for editing our film, to make it the correct length and how to cut the shots from one to the other, at a fast and slow pace depending on the atmosphere being created. The majority of the time, we used the cut key and the Split to tidy the shots ready to edit and create a ghostly film.

Using these technologies to create our horror film helped us to improve our control over the work we were creating, as it kept us in an organised structure as we kept on track of everything we had done. Making sure that we were taking everything one step at a time. At first after shooting our film, we spent quality time organising our film and starting to cut it to make sure it was just under 2 minutes.

8. Working with both our production and the preliminary task there were a few differences for example, with the preliminary task it was both mine and Ryan’s first time using Imovie and Garageband therefore we struggled and had to learn a lot of new skills ready for creating a film of our own. It didn't take long to learn how to use to technologies and software on the Macs and was easy to work with.

This was the scribbely writing that
inspired our Title sequence from the
Preliminary Task.

The preliminary task was a great advantage for me and Ryan as it gave us ideas for our initial ideas, we liked some of their ideas, we took them on board and briefly used them to change and improve our own ideas and designs for our film. For example, with the preliminary task, their title sequence was very interesting with the scribbled writing which links in to horror as it seems quite un natural and surreal, this inspired us to create our own design with the victim writing the title and other information, to help you as the audience be aware that she is not all there anymore as something has made her turn the way she is. As well as that doing that practical before creating our own, helped us to achieve the skills we needed and improve on our work, to eventually make a thrilling horror film.

If we were to do the production again, I think the first thing I would change is our plot by making it more interesting and frightening, not giving to much away keeping the audience wanting to know more. As well as the plot/storyline. I would like to have worked in a scary, older and grand house, as this would have been a stereotypical place to film but you could do so much with it, and the shots being used. I would make sure we use a lot more close ups to attract the audience, getting as much detail in the threats body language and facial expressions as we could to increase the suspense.

This was the location we filmed at and as you see if doesn't look quite as affective as if it was set in an grand, old and frightening house. With using a bigger house it would be more realistic and scary. The positive side about using a modern house in a horror film, is that it is unexpected and the audience will feel tense and nervous at the idea of it happening to them. But to make ours more dramatic we would change the location,

9. My Contribution towards the Practical.

In the process of the practical, we both took the time to contribute in the work, to make sure that we would come out with a successful film in the end. Although we both took the time to work, I took on the role of the leader and made sure that I completed everything that was set. I organised when and where we were going to film and meet for planning. As I am a very organised person, we both felt that it would be best if I found locations that in the end we could both agree on the final place.

In my spare time, I took these photos for our recee, so we could physically see where we would be shooting which was good to make sure we were prepared. 

   During the planning, I said before, I found the location to use, both in the production and preliminary task. We both shared the planning but discussing our work together after we had done it to make sure we were both happy with everything. Along with the recee I did the lighting as they were both included in the similar task. I looked at what natural lighting we could use and what lighting we had in the location and this was very useful for our final filming.

This was the lighting sheet that I filled out. 

In the process of writing our script and developing our story board we shared the work out evenly, to make sure it was fair and that we were both bringing our ideas together.

These are a few of the sheets that I did to put towards the planning of our film. I completed all of the shot list, after we had put the work together.

   In the production, I did all the filming and make up, while Ryan looked after the storyboard and shot list, making sure we were on task and preventing continuity errors and focusing on the lighting and sound. It was interesting and fun to work with the camera (filming) because when we did the Preliminary task I didn't really use the camera, as I was more the director, but I was able to learn new skills and gradually have improved. This time I was both the cameraman and Director making sure that everything was running smoothly.
 After filming at the location, we made sure that we both worked hard on the editing and sound, Ryan worked well on the editing, and was very successful. I worked on the sound and came out with a good result. We both thought it was important to learn new skills.

Re-shoot Editing

While editing the re-shoot we have identified that we need to use a wider variety of shots to keep the target audience's interests. We felt that filming more close ups of the victims face and body will help have a huge impact on the audience keeping them in suspense as we come to the climax. 

Title Sequence ideas

This is our brainstorm for the title sequence to introduce our film, we wanted it to impact the audience by making them want to know more, about the victim and her troubles. We brainstormed ideas which could create a 'ghostly' theme, helping link to our pyschological horror. We kept it 20 seconds because we felt any longer would be too long, but long enough to attract the audiences attention. 

Title Research

At the beginning of our practical in preparation for film making. We watched a few introduction clips to horror films to help us brainstorm ideas for the title sequence that we would be making in the future. We wanted ours to have a ghostly but confusing affect to keep the audience wanting to watch more.

Storyboard sequence

This is our storyboard which we are using to help create our short horror film. While creating the storyboard the two of us really wanted to focus on how we can attract the audiences attention. We decided that using a variety of shots like Long Shots and Close Ups, will affect the audience, as they are able to focus on the body language and fear of the victim, making them feel like they are in danger, like 'Ellie' our victim.