Group 1 - Foundation Production

Saturday, 28 February 2015

Feedback:

We have tested our film opening on our target audience asking for the strengths and weaknesses
The majority of our feedback was positive and people seemed to think it was an effective opening
We have had to make a few changes for our final cut
We have cut a shot which prevented a continuous edit in the sequence
We have also added a drone soundtrack to the back of the sequence as this makes the suspense and tension build up more before the girl begins to appear

This is the final cut after our changes were made

Questionnaire Results

To get these results we used a ranking question and asked for the fonts to be placed in order of favouritism in order to help us select the best one to use as a main title. This shows that the most popular font was the first one by 13%.

However, we have decided that the appearance of the 2nd font suits our location and plot better than the first so we have decided to use this. As it was the second most popular we feel that this has still taken our results into account.

These results from the semantic differential question were very helpful for guidance when we came to cast the young girl. The actress we are using meets all of these characteristics except for hair colour.

We believe people felt that dark hair would have worked better for an antagonist, however, that is not the character we are attempting to portray as the girl was a victim herself so we would like her to have a slight innocence to her.

Furthermore, blonde hair makes the binary the girl and the two boys more evident.

For these results we also used a rank question, this data confirms what we felt to be the best location so we will, therefore, be using the abandoned house for our setting.

We had a similar method for this question as the location one, using a rank question.

After testing various props in the centre we actually decided that we weren't extremely pleased with any of them.
We then had the idea of using old jewellery and after testing this decided that it was more effective.

We have taken this into consideration and have placed the main title at the end of the sequence.
However, it is typical for the cast and crew titles to be positioned at the beginning so we have done this in our opening shots.

In Evaluation...

It is clear that the majority of people believe that the undead girl should be short, with dark hair, reasonably young and extremely pale.

After reviewing this we still believe that she should be blonde, because the idea with the plot synopsis is that this girl isn't an evil entity, she is the younger sister of one of the male protagonists, and the blonde hair gives her an essence of innocence because she is more of a victim than an antagonist.

There was a lot of discrepancy over which font was the best for the style of film we are shooting. Due to this we may have to review which font we use.

The location of an abandoned house was extremely popular, which means that we made the right choice in choosing this as our main location, and we won't be changing it.

We may have to consider adding some gore to the opening, as although many people said that it didn't really matter, there were a few who thought it was quite important. So we might add an element of gore in order to cater to a larger audience.

Shots that went well:

Breathing - effective to see the breath of the actors when they are chanting as it creates more of an eerie atmosphere
The appearances of the girl around the room create fear and tension
The dialogue is emotional and relevant to help showing the narrative
The current after effects are effective - colour

Things to work on:

Needs cutting down as it is currently too long
Maybe remove some more of the shot reverse shots as there is a large amount of these that they may not be needed
After the girl appears once she can just start appearing everywhere and the chanting in between isn't necessary
Consider colour grading to black and white when the presence of the girl is apparent so give the feel that she is sucking out the colour - this will help to further build suspense and show a binary between her and the male characters by contrasting the shots
We also need to finish working on our sound, we will consider layering the chanting so it creates an echoed effect to build suspense faster

We looked at various different fonts that we thought would be appropriate to use for our films titles.
To gain a better idea of what is commonly used for our chosen sub-genre of horror, paranormal, we each did an analysis of a title sequence from a film of the same genre.
This gave us a far better understanding of the importance of colour, positioning, font, size and animation.
We took inspiration from Insidious (Wan, 2010) for the animation of our main title and have decided that we will make it flicker at the end like candle light as this links with our production and has connotations of summoning.
After taking inspiration from The Conjuring (Wan, 2013), we have also decided that the font will be white on a black screen as this is clear to read and the darkness connotes fear and mystery which is appropriate to this genre.
Furthermore, keeping the main title black and white creates an eerie atmosphere.
After choosing some different fonts which we thought were suitable we came to a final conclusion on the one we intend to use after receiving our questionnaire feedback.

Crimes Times Six

We thought this would be appropriate as it has a scratched effect on it which connotes violence and fear.

Nightmare

We felt that although this would be appropriate for a horror film, it wouldn't be as fitting to our particular sub-genre.

October Crow

We thought that this font also had a scratched effect to it which would be effective for this sub-genre.

Northwood High

This is the font which we have decided to use for the main title of our production. We felt that this was fitting for the location of our film (an abandoned house) and the faded effect is appropriate to our genre.

The purpose of the risk assessment was to ensure that everyone who was involved in a shoot was fully aware of the possible risks and hazards within a location which could occur
The risk assessment above shows what we believed to be the greatest risks to us and we were able to plan how we intended to reduce this as best as possible
This meant that on the day of our shoots we were more aware of our location/surroundings and were careful where necessary.
Since we wanted to film near the smashed glass so we had to take extra care but our risk assessment helped with this