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.