Throughout the process of making our film opening my group and I faced lots of challenges which often forced us to change our original ideas, these changes I believe were made for the best and very much helped create our opening into what is it now.
Before beginning to create our film opening we had to do a lot of research into our chosen genre, which we decided was going to be horror. In order to get a good feel for this genre we had to analyze other horror film openings, we decided to do this for a selection of types of horror as this genre can vary and take many different routes as it’s quite versatile. After analyzing many different types of horror such as action based, jumpy and gory, we decided to use a combination of gore and shock tactics in order for our opening to be successful. As a group we believe that we stuck very closely to the conventions of our genre. Not only did we stick by the conventions of the genre horror but I believe developed them also. Our film opening could be compared to other horror films such as Physco, Halloween and even Scream, I believe in doing this we have stuck to general conventions and developed them by combining the three with our own ideas. Our bathroom scene reflects the classic horror film Physco, we have only followed certain conventions from this film such as showing blood going down the bath plug hole and the murder taking place in the bathroom as we felt it fitted our opening well and worked effectively in order to create tension. Our film opening also follows many other general horror conventions such as the victim being vulnerable and naive to the intruder that’s come into her house, the victim is very much unaware of her fate. We’ve also followed conventions as the audience does not get a full view of what the murderer looks like, this is typical for the start of horror films, often the murderer is revealed later in the storyline in order to keep the audience guessing who it may be.
Even within the camera shots we have used we’ve followed many conventions, such as using point of view shots for the murderer in order to keep his identity hidden. We had to choose the camera shots we used very carefully as this is vital for creating tension within our opening. We believe we created tension effectively by using shots such as an establishing shot of the house to start with, this helps set the scene of normality which later will be disturbed with a killing, by doing this the audience can relate to the normality of the scene therefore creating more horror for the viewer personally.
The switching between the victim and murderer is a convention often used in horror films in order to build tension as the constant switching between the both shows that in the end the two will meet, I believe we have done this effectively as this is what builds the tension within our film, particularly with the use of the soundtrack on top as the two together create a tense atmosphere.
Our soundtrack too follows the conventions of horror films as it starts off quite and not at all noticeable until action is taking place and the music becomes much louder and more intense. In order for the soundtrack to work in the right places we had to try a variety of different soundtracks and then watched the film and debated between us whether we thought it worked or not. We had to try a few different soundtracks before finding and using the one we did, even then we have used two different soundtracks in order to make both the tension and the murder work. I believe we have done this effectively as the soundtrack change helps create both atmospheres of tension and horror when it is needed. The first soundtrack starts off slowly with only quiet instruments being played such as the piano in order to create tension and give the start a creepy feel. The second soundtrack is very much opposite, it uses very loud instruments in order to foreshadow that something bad is going to happen, we have even timed the soundtrack to the film so when incidents such as picking up the weapon(the scissors) and standing outside the murder scene(the bathroom) there are loud bangs, this I believe is a very effective way of creating tension and getting the audience prepared for the murder. I don’t feel that we as a group have broken any conventions of a horror film in our opening as I believe this would be a difficult task to do when trying to be in keeping to the genre.
The social groups with have covered in our film opening is both youth and gender. Our victim obviously fits into both. Within our film opening we have very much shown males and females to be opposite. In a sense our film shows women as the ‘goodies’ and men as the ‘badies’. We have shown our female character to be the vulnerable victim, who seems to of done nothing wrong in order to deserve her fate. Whilst our male character is shown to be the brutal murderer, who’s been watching his victim, and is fully aware of his actions and wants to kill. This is a very typical way to show men and women as often it is a male who is the killer or the ‘badie’ within a horror film. We decided to choose a girl as our victim as this is a convention horror films use, it is often the weak fragile girl who dies as if it were a man being killed the male would normally put up more of a fight.
Generically horror films are targeted to a teenage and adult audiences and I believe our film opening reflects this, our targets audience is very much around the older teenage age group. This is because generally teenagers tend to watch and enjoy horror films more than the older audiences and certainly more than younger audiences as it would not be appropriate for anyone younger to watch this type of film. We had to be very careful when deciding out target audience as the gore shown in our film opening could disturb some viewers. I believe we have aimed it at our target audience well by having out victim at the same age, this way the audience can relate and sympathise more with the victim, also by having the victim at this age it will scare the audience more as they are just as vulnerable as her.
Through the process of making this film opening I feel I have learnt a lot about technology, particularly when filming. Our group faced many challenges when it came to actually recording our film, this is because we had to undergo many changes. To start with our film was a totally different storyline to what the end product is now we were at first going to be doing the majority of filming outdoors. Our original idea was to have a horror film that took place outdoors with a girl walking alone at midnight down an alley way. The girl was then going to see someone had written on the floor ‘I’m watching’ this was then going to trigger her to have a flashback of when she was in the shower and saw someone had written the words ‘ I’m watching’ on her walls. The film would then go back to the present where the girl would be terrified and receive a phone call with a voice saying ‘you know you shouldn’t stay out after midnight’ then the girl would turn around scream and die with the title then appearing ‘after midnight’, after this we was then going to have an end shot of the victims hand and then phone call still running. This idea failed as after we had filmed multiply attempts of outdoor scenes we realised the lighting was just not clear enough. At first we did not want to give up on our original ideas and so attempted to film outside when it was lighter in order for the footage to show up clearer but still the scenes were not good enough. We then tried to adjust the lighting and brightness on the software we were using to make the footage useable but this distorted the shots even more. We even tried using additional lighting in order for our idea to work but still the quality of the filming was not good enough this meant that we had to change our opening completely even down to the title we had chosen. As soon as we changed our idea and instead had the majority of the filming indoors we saw a significant change in the quality of our film, in having to go through this we learnt that lighting whilst making a film is extremely important and ideas don’t always go as first planned. I also learnt a lot of editing skills in making this film opening, I had never experienced editing properly before and found using the Apple mac imovie software challenging in places. Making our preliminary task enabled us to play around with the software and get a feel for what it is like. I believe that this task helped us a lot with our skills and now feel confident when editing as I learnt how important this process is when making any type of film. So when we eventually got round to editing our main task it was easier for us to use.
Looking back to our preliminary task I believe that we have learnt so much and our skills in filming and editing have developed dramatically. We can now edit and add in effects which are needed when making a film successful. Our preliminary task shows our improvement as it is not nearly as good as our main. We learnt that using other props such as tri pods are very important as many shots in our first task were very shaky and didn’t run smooth at all. We have also learnt that being organised is a key part in making a task like filming successful, when recording our preliminary task we were very unorganised having only a script and our own improvisations to work with, neither of which worked out successfully. I believe this is why our main task came out so well as well we had learnt that preparation is key in producing a task such as this, this is why we made sure we knew what we were doing before filming and the time and effort needed in order for it to work out as planned.
Overall I feel we have all worked well as a group and made the improvements needed for our ideas to be successful, if we were to redo our film the only way I feel we could make it better is by using a better camera as the quality of the filming I feel did not do it justice. I have thoroughly enjoyed making this film opening and I feel very proud of our end product, we have received amazing feed back by putting our film opening on the internet in the form of YouTube and other various social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Many said they thoroughly enjoyed the watch and some were even scared which was what we had hoped for. I feel we could not have achieved any more in making our film opening and I am extremely pleased with its outcome.
