Coursework Evaluation

Callum King

Is the form of your opening conventional?

• I personally believe the form of my opening is conventional for the following reasons:

• The titles in our production were inspired by Insidious (Wan, 2010):

• Similar fonts• Similar use of sound and

animation in the main title (Loud bang, flickering and emboldened font

• The less important titles fade in and out on the edges of the screen much like in Insidious.

• The plot of our piece is also conventional

• The ideas of summoning, troubled teens and undead little girls are stock situations in horror openings

• Our use of character exposition is highly conventional for a horror film

• The two main boys’ faces are not revealed until quite late in the sequence, and their morbid nature and distinct lack of dialogue makes them a great source of enigma for the audience

• The character of the little girl is also very enigmatic , and viewers would want to watch on in order to find out who she is, and her story

• The use of continuity editing makes the sequence seem like an opening rather than a trailer, because a trailer would generally have snippets from the whole film, rather than a single, continuous sequence

How does your opening conform to or challenge the conventions of your chosen sub-genre of horror?

• Character- Stock characters of troubled teens and a creepy undead girl feature reasonably frequently in horror openings

• Plot- The idea of ritualistic summonings is also very conformist to other horror films, for example The Conjuring (Wan, 2013).

• Mise-en-scene- The location of eerie woodland and a haunted house are extremely common in horror films. An example of a horror film set in woodland would be The Blair Witch Project (Myrick, 1999) and a haunted house is featured in ‘The Conjuring’ (Wan, 2013). The use of black costume conveys an idea of death and darkness which is also common in horror. We decided to dress the girl in white, to convey to the audience that she isn't evil, as it makes her appear innocent, which goes against common conventions of horror.

•Sound- Scratching, whispering, eerie drone sound, screaming, chanting and child-like laughter are all major conventions of horror

•Camera work- Mostly steadicam, which is frequently used in horror to give a sense of immediacy, use of close-ups on the boys’ faces, shows their pallid, deathly complexion and their cold, dead facial expressions

•Editing style- Continuity editing was used, which is commonly used in all films, also shot reverse shot was also used to create an effective jump scare. Finally, an increased cutting rate was used to accentuate the action, when the girl was being summoned

• Typography- The font we used for the less important titles was quite spikey and creepy, reminiscent of old witches’ spell books and the like

• The font for the main title is also quite similar to what you would expect to typically find in a spell book, however it is more legible and larger, therefore it stands out more, and draws the attention of the audience, which makes it recognisable as the main title

• The title position and the background is also important, and can be compared to those seen in Insidious (Wan, 2010). As you can see from the pictures below, we took inspiration from these titles, specifically we used a black background for the main title, which helped to draw attention to it, and make it obvious that this was the main title for our piece

• Also, we took inspiration for our secondary titles, as you can see, we used a similar font, and positioned our titles in a similar manner, as it was appeared seamless and professional

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

• The characters represented in our media product are:

• Lower middle class, white teenage boys

• An undead, young girl

• The lack of characters helps to emphasize the seclusion of the house

• Social class and disability aren’t really important to our production, however, the ideologies surrounding gender in our clip could be discussed

• There is only one female character in our opening- A young, vulnerable, innocent ghost of a girl who has been kidnapped and killed by the antagonist in the film.

• The two boys in the opening are trying to contact her in order to avenge her death, therefore they are playing hero-like roles. This could be considered to be patriarchal.

• Therefore, it would be justifiable to say that our production represents more residual ideologies, although this was not an intended ideological construction

• As well as this the idea of the ‘final girl’ is not featured in our film, which could represent an emergent ideology, as the female is not seen as a typical ‘damsel in distress’ type

• There is in fact a male ‘sceptic’ who would be killed off quite early in the film, which makes the victim a male rather than a female, challenging dominant ideologies

Who might your film secure a distribution deal with?

• From my research it is clear that an appropriate media institution to distribute my media product would be Pathé

• Pathé has successfully distributed many independent UK horror films including:

• The Cottage (Williams, 2008)

• Dog Soldiers (Marshall, 2002)

• The Descent (Marshall, 2005)

• All of these films had budgets under £5m, which is exactly where the budget of our film would lie

As well as this:• In the past Pathé has had

symbiotic links with Lionsgate Films in order to distribute to North America as well as Europe, which would broaden the audience for our product.

Case Study

• The Descent (Marshall, 2005) • Country: UK

• Budget: £3.5m

• Box Office:

$57,051,053

• The success of this film proves that Pathé are able to effectively and successfully market an independent, british horror film, like our product, Pathé is a quasi-independent company

Would you consider your work to be in the style of an independent film or would it be produced as part of an industrial model?

• I believe that our film is in the style of an independent film because:

• Use of prosumer cameras eg. Canon 1100D

• Low budget, no use of CGI or big special effects

• No bankable stars• Skeleton Crew

What might be their strategy in connecting your film to an audience?

• The invention of new media technologies, specifically Web 2.0 has made the media landscape more pluralistic, which would make it much easier to market our product.

• One of the main techniques which would be employed to market our product would be viral marketing, and the use of Web 2.0

• Technological convergence would make it easy for our target audience (predominantly male teens, and fans of the genre) to access our content, as the majority of them are positive technological determinists.

• It could be a good idea to use a simultaneous release strategy across all platforms, which would create buzz and allow us to be more competitive with the big six US studios, especially vertically integrated conglomerates such as Warner Bros. This technique was successfully employed in A Field in England (Wheatley, 2013).

• Due to the niche audience, a blanket release strategy in multiple territories would probably be a bad idea, although it could be beneficial for us to link up with Lionsgate Films in order to distribute our product in the US, as was successfully accomplished in The Descent (Marshall, 2005).

How did you use a blog collaboratively?

• We used blogger, which is an e-portfolio, in order to share our work with the world

• Blogger allowed us to upload and share our content and secondary and primary research, comment on and view the rest of the group’s work and communicate our concept in a simple and effective manner

• We were also able to use a main homepage, on which we could view tasks and deadlines, and we were also able to receive feedback from our teachers over the internet

• Finally, it also enabled us to see exemplar work from previous years, and so improve our own work

• For many of our posts on the blog, effective and interesting presentation was needed, we experimented with various forms of media, one of which was Prezi

• One such post in which we used Prezi was our film pitch, as we felt this would effectively and coherently communicate our idea

• I contributed to a number of slides, which I feel improved my ICT skills, because prior to this I had had very little experience with Prezi

How did you actually film your work?

• Equipment:

• Canon 1100D camera

• Two tripods - One light, smaller tripod, and a heavier, larger tripod

• A large sheet of reflective material

• A variety of torches

• We found space was quite a big issue on our set

• We used the smaller tripod for the tighter spaces where the heavier tripod wouldn't fit, however with the heavier tripod we had more control

• Lighting was a major issue in the production of our opening

• We found that although shining torches on the set made it brighter, it also looked very harsh and torch-like, which was something we didn't want

• So instead we shined the torches onto a reflective sheet of material (as depicted to the right) which flattened out the light, and brightened the set in a more realistic manner

• When filming the sequence in which the girl appears, tension was built using a number of shot reverse shots

• The repetitive nature of the shot reverse shot lulls the audience into false sense of security so to speak, making the jump scare all the more effective

• We established the scene within the house using a series of steadicam long shots, originally, many of these were handicam, however after reviewing it was clear that the slower movements were much more effective at building tension

• There were also times when the tripod wouldn’t go low enough to capture the shot we wanted, for many of the low angle shots that we captured we had to take the camera off of the tripod and prop it up using a book, thus we were able to capture the lower angled shots

• Framing was also an issue, as we had to constantly consider mise-en-scene, and shift objects in and out of the shot, in order to maintain good mise-en-scene

How did you edit your piece?

• For our editing we used Adobe Premier Elements 9.0

• One of the main issues with our production was lighting, therefore we were forced to film our production in the day time, which for a horror piece is not ideal

• We got around this in post-production, by utilising the brightness/contrast tool

• Using this tool, we were able to edit our piece to give the impression that the action on screen was occurring at dusk-time (see before and after pictures on the right)

• The brightness/contrast tool also came in handy because it allowed us to make the lighting look the same in all shots.

• This was an issue because over the course of the time when we were filming the sun went down making our set look a lot darker

• The brightness/contrast tool helped to ensure continuity in our editing

• A sound bridge was also used to give the production a continuous feel

• Fading in and out was used at points to show time passing, for example when the pentangle was being made, we saved time and kept up the pace of the piece by putting a fade in

Below is a close up of the sound bridge

• We were also able to cut together our piece using this programme, we added titles and cut together all the separate clips.

• We notably used an increase in cutting rate in order to increase the tension towards the end of the sequence