Evaluation Questions 6,7 & 9

6. Looking at common British horror films, there are not many that are very similar to our project, the only similar ones are low budget, self published titles, so they did not really make it into the mainstream society to gauge the audience research, instead they are short, online films. None of these videos I would not use the similar techniques they have to distribute the film. The best footsteps to follow in are Paranormal activities. They gave a clear indication as to audience reactions and essentially challenging people to NOT be scared by the film, using the audience reactions in the trailer. Doing this would hopefully have a similar effect on our film, challenging the audiences to not be scared. I would use paramount pictures if any distribution company, because they have the right idea to ensure people go to watch our film, for the right reasons. Other companies would not understand horror films like paramount do, and may give off the wrong signals of our film, making people see it because they might find it funny, not scary. Giving the wrong signals of this film would not only damage the reputation of the film and our production label, but also attract the wrong type of audience, meaning any audience research carried out would be invalid data for what we would intend to use it for.

7. Making this film, I personally have learnt a fair amount about the simple, basic elements of the technology used. Firstly, the camera. The video camera we used, I had no clue on how to use it to begin with, didn’t have a clue on how to white balance, focus, zoom, anything. Putting the use into practice making this film, we quickly picked up on the techniques on how to do these things, and do them well. During the editing stage, I personally was sceptical as to how well this could be with the default mac software iMovie. I had originally thought it would be very bad, considering it came built in with the mac for free, it was clearly not professional software. To my surprise, there were so many effects and transitions on offer. Giving us a wide range of tools and SFX to use to improve on the video. Garageband offered a wide range of ready made sounds for us to import straight to imovie to our film, but none of these were really the sound we were looking for. Luckily, we learnt how to create our own music track with the on screen keyboard, controlled by the keys on the computer keyboard, and it even allowed to to change the octave for an amazing sound of mixed pitches. I did not know anything about garageband before using it for this project, but since using it now, I feel it did allow us to be a lot more creative with the soundtrack, as the tracks on offer in the database did not fit our sub-genre of horror film.

9. With just 2 people in our group, the work could be split much easier between 2 people rather than 3. me and alex decided to try and split the work as evenly as possible. The planning was simple enough, he did the script, I did the storyboard, and the rest was as evenly split as it could have possibly been. The filming was a little trickier. With our first attempted film, the one we had abandoned, alex did a lot of the filming. But on our final piece, we had split that even aswell, doing a shot each, constantly conferring with each other to see if we were both satisfied with the shots. Editing was difficult. Because alex was a much better editor than me, we decided to let him do the bult of the cutting, and placing of the clips, while I sorted out the transitions, added sounds, and the final touch up on the edits, to be sure it was as smooth as possible. The soundtrack was composed by alex, but I had recorded one of the instruments while he recorded the other for it. And because we struggled to find out how to import the piece to our film, I decided to spend half an hour figuring it out. So all in all, the work was as even between me and alex as it could have possibly been.

Evaluation Questions 1&4

1. Originially, the group that consisted of me, Alex Parsons and Laura Mossendew had planned to create a zombie film. At this point, we already knew it would be incredibly difficult, anticipating the actors being uncoordinated unreliable. With this idea we found we would have to rely heavily on the actors enthusiasm, and since they did not get a mark out of this, this was very difficult to predict. We could not decide on a plot to our film as the majority of zombie films have incredibly similar plots, For example Dawn of the dead and Resident Evil, Both plots involve avoiding dieing by going to a safer area, many other zombie films do the this commonly used plot idea. Unfortunately, Laura had left the group, but luckily, it was at such an early stage, me and Alex had the opportunity to completely change the film. In the end, we had decided on a Ghost/Slasher Genre of horror film, where a girl wakes up in bed, hearing knocks on the door, goes to get a glass of water, not noticing the shadowy figure moving closer and closer to her, while she is oblivious as to his existence. Eventually she hears a noise on the stairs, gets quite a lot more scared than she was in the first place, rushes to her room, while the door to her parent’s room opens by itself. Originally we planned to use a younger child, but we did not know anyone of a younger age to use as the actor in the film, so instead we decided on a teenage girl, which still shows a level of vulnerability, but not at the same level.

4.              This horror genre that we are using for our film is very commonly seen amongst groups of teenagers, as they can see themselves in the situation created, and teenagers always look for ways to challenge themselves at anything, especially getting scared, so watching a good horror film late at night, then hearing noises, if the teenager gets scared at all little noises in the night, you would know the film was a great success. In our film, we supported this by using a fairly average setting, very normal, average props around the house. We didn’t go excessive with what we could use, because for this film to be slightly believable we had to use the kind of stuff the majority of people would have around the house, for example, in our film we had a plug in outside the room, coats on the stair rail, all the normal family stuff, nothing was excessively cleaned or perfectly neat, if it was, the realisem of our film would have been dropped almost instantly, as the teenage audience would not be able to relate as much subconsciously with the character in the film, causing the film to instantly be much less scary. I feel the realisem did find a great balance in our film, considering the highly unrealistic threat, the storyline can be seen as believable for the small detail in the mise-en-scene.

Finished Alex and Joe media film

This is our final film edited, we are glad we had finished and edited it by the deadline.

Evaluation from class

we ended up editing the second video we filmed and it got a 43.5  on average out of 60 from the class with a lot of comments mentioning the lighting and needing to improve continuity.

Horror Film

currently having trouble uploading the video, the internet keeps crashing as i upload so it doesnt go up. i will fix it soon. hopefully before the deadline.

MAJOR PROBLEMS

after shooting what was to be our first base of the film, disaster struck. The owner of the location came across some personal problems and since then, we haven't been able to film there. by this point. we had edited the shots we already had together, and soon realized we needed to re-film some shots. the only way we had to get around this is to COMPLETELY Re-film everything at a different location. which, 4 days before the deadline is a risky move. but it's the only option we had.

Filming Problems

Recently we had planned to go filming, so we got the location sorted and equipment, but the actor was already being used that day for a different film. Because we already have footage of her as the character we could not have used an emergency actor. This is a major downside to using a popular actor amongst the projects.