-Today we filmed a short sequence. The three requirements were that we had to keep to our areas we were given and it had to be a certain genre. Somebody in my group (Liam) decided to shout out action. The main requirement was we were aloud to do no editing to our short film. We filmed it quite quickly and made good use of an actor we borrowed for it. Using Matt Say meant we could use his moped which helped us to make our film more action based. We will be reviewing our film in a few days but hopefully we did a good job
-Today I watched the opening of SAW and posted it onto the horror ideas page. I will most likely be watching quite a few of those soon and writing about them so be sure to check out the horror ideas page.
-Today we looked over our videos that we filmed a few days ago. Some of it was a mess due to us not being allowed to edit. However considering we had the tricky genre of editing due to someone shouting it...*ahem*Liam*ahem*. We cleverly cast Mathew Say who over the summer had obtained a moped which we used greatly to our advantage. We then looked at the DO's and DONT's of filming. You can read the full list of our DO's and DONT's of filming on the drop down menu under planning. We also received feed back about our last scene which we were told was "lazy filming" so theres something to improve on last time.
-Today we decided to make the website a bit more personalised. I decided to set my top banner to a picture of one of my personal favourite horror movies: Freddy Vs Jason
-And on the fifth day they learnt how to use final cut! Today we edited our video and made it much better. We faced some difficulties though because to fully improve it we needed to film more shots but we couldn't go back. If theres one thing I learnt today its always to take multiple shots of everything just in case
-Today we filmed a preliminary task. All it had to do was have at least 2 lines of dialogue. We quickly came up with a simple concept: an argument over...Irn-Bru! We filmed 2 versions of this: one how to do it, the other was how not to do it. The how not to do it edition had bad continuity and broke the 180 degree rule
-Today I have been editing our preliminary task to make it smoother and remove all continuity errors. I am also staying behind in order to help with parents evening, showing potential year 7s all about media.
-On this day we filmed a very short scene. It featured all the commonly used shots in horror and that was our main objective. In it, I played the killer and clara was the victim mwahahaha.
-Today we edited our short horror film. We added in some rain effect and a few other small things just to make it slightly more...horror. Once finished we had a few issues uploading this to youtube but hopefully it shall sort itself out
-Over the last few days I have been doing research to do with locations and the group agreed that my dad's house would be a good location. We also looked at Gloucester Docks" abandoned warehouse but decided this might be too tricky
-It is getting closer to when we are filming so over the next few weeks I am going to focus on doing horror research for the website. Luckily i quite enjoying the research part so I am happy to go in during any spare time to get it done
-We filmed our first bit of footage at my dad's house today. We made use of his long corridor and filmed some good off kilter shots. We don't have any dialogue yet so we will need to film some of that next time
-We began to edit our footage today and will most likely be doing this for the next few weeks. We tried multiple overlay effects out as well but haven't decided on one just yet and are not sure wether we want to use one
-After a couple of days of editing we have finished our first part, to improve it I think we need to make it scarier as I don't think the atmosphere is creepy enough yet
-We filmed a bit more over the weekend, this time at Clara's house. We filmed what should be the opening of our OTS. We filmed a couple of lines of dialogue and used a nice shot of the phone ringing. Once edited this will go in front of our other footage but will not make sense as we haven't filmed our middle section yet.
-We began to edit what we filmed on saturday today. We tried some shots of people in mirrors crying blood that we will probably re-do as they do not give the desired effect. Also from editing we have learnt that our dialogue is too cheesy so we may have to re-film that part and cut it to minimal dialogue
-Today we showed the rest of our class what we had up to that point and here is the feedback we got:
Good Points:
-Good false scare
-Good use of off-kilter
Bad Points:
-Cheesy dialogue
-Bad lighting
This advice we received has impacted my thoughts significantly and made me question how useful our footage is
-We are slowly coming closer to the realisation that we are going to have to re-film most of our footage. Which is a shame as we have spent time editing and filming it but means it will make our OTS better so is a good idea
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Things I have watched and gained inspiration from:
We watched a few examples of some OTS'" near the start of our course. The most notable to me was THE RING OTS. It is quite simple but a good formula. I think it would be easy to copy this formula of 2 female teenagers watching a movie and eating popcorn when they are separated and one dies. We also looked at the intro to the film adaptation of THE WOMAN IN BLACK. This is interesting because there is no dialogue in this. There is a very simple melody and the scene is aiming for shock factor as the film starts with 3 young girls dying. I believe the idea of having no sound and a very simple eerie tune is very effective which could be a possibility for our OTS depending on what works in editing.
Another inspiration for me was Stephen King. Having both my parents being horror and book lovers there is little surprise that I have came across Stephen King. I have read many of his books and seen the film adaptations. He has been doing horror for so long that he knows how to frighten a reader in a few simple lines. Also, he only ever uses his local film company to make his book adaptations so they usually aren't amazingly casted or directed. One thing that always sticks out in his movies however is the story. No matter these restraints due to the solid storytelling these films are still respected. For example look at one of his stories that isn't horror: THE GREEN MILE. Even though it isn't a horror it is remarkable that a short story that was so simple became one of the best films of all time and its all based around a few pages of Stephen King storytelling.
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I also personally gained lots of inspiration from Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. This is due to the fact it is my favourite horror film. I love it because it isn't like a lot of horror films with loud jump scares simply trying to make the audience jump a few times. This horror is focused on story which is all centered around the iconic creation of Wes Craven himself: Freddy Krueger. I much prefer these psychological horrors as they are usually very clever and better put together than the others. This for me includes films like THE PURGE (2003), SE7EN (1995) and even Stanley Kubrick's iconic: THE SHINING (1980).
Overall our main inspiration came from a short story written by a member of my group (Liam Ednie). When tasked with writing a short story with little planning, he wrote about a girl who could trap people in mirrors. This provided us with a basis or core structure for our plot. After brainstorming as a group we decided this story was going to be our basis for our OTS. Had this story not come into discussion our OTS could have taken a very different route. Due to my last point I can see from Stephen King how important a solid story is so having this structure already in mind means we can just keep building on it which will make it easier to create an effective opening title sequence.
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