Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 3

Audience Reactions

Today, we filmed a small group of people who fit perfectly into our expected audience category. This enabled us to see what sort of thoughts and feelings our opening stimulated.

The Cellar - Final Cut

After 6 months of preparing and planning our film opening, we have completed and published our final cut of 'The Cellar', we hope you enjoy our final product.
(Please watch in 1080p HD, for the best quality)

Before and After Shots

Comparing our first draft and final cut, there are now many things that we improved and changed. Below are a few of the things that we altered and you can see the difference between all aspects in the clips.

Nine Frame Analysis

The nine frames above outline our film opening, identifying the key frames allows us to summarise our work easily and analyse the storyline. 
Looking at the image of the nine frames we can see a clear plot and we can also see how closely our finished product fits with the original storyboard we created.

Finalised Storyboard

When looking at our old storyboard we made when first deciding on our Gothic genre narrative, we realised how much our idea had developed and improved since our initial plan. 

So we decided to make a whole new storyboard, specifically following what we want our finalised cut to look like on screen. The details beneath each picture describe what the protagonists and doing, camera movements and special effects.

Concluding our Evaluation Questions

Sound Effects

For additional detail and effect in our opening, we applied special sound effects, which makes the scene more realistic as these are the sounds that would be expected. To create a more subtle effect we lowered the volume, adjusting to the score.

Breaking the biscuit: 

Chewing the biscuit:

Questionnaire Changes

After reviewing the questionnaire we created, we had some different ideas about the questions and how we could improve the overall feedback we got from it. 

By making the questions much more open and asking why we can find out much more information to help us with improving our film opening and it gives us more of an insight to what the audience were thinking whilst watching our media product.

More Improvements

After getting the feedback from the audience we changed many aspects from our first draft to improve and refine our film opening. Lots of  people commented on the sound and music elements, many requesting for music throughout the whole opening. We took this on board as we though it was a very good suggestion and we added more music to the rest of the opening to add tension.

Another popular comment we got was about the sound quality, the dialogue and digetic sound wasn't very easy to understand because of the background noise volume and also because of the echoey nature of our location. We agreed with these comments and we re-filmed lots of the parts where the sound was of bad quality making sure that the actors were projecting their voices effectively and that there was no background noise. This turned out very well and now the dialogue is clear and easy to hear. During the editing process we also changed the levels of noise in order for the actors to be heard better and this made a big difference to the sound quality of the opening.

Questionnaire

We have created a questionnaire which will be filled out by people watching the first draft of our film opening. From this we will be able to find out the audience's reactions and feedback so we can change things that aren't so good, improve our editing and alter other aspects.

Title

After choosing the font, we have created this title sequence which will appear at the end of our film opening. We decided on this specific font as we believed it look almost skeleton-like and appears to similar titles from Tim Burton, our main inspiration for our Gothic film opening.

We have used the heartbeat sound effect to give the impression that it is the twin's heart beating. Using black and white is appropriate as it is classic and fits in with our gothic horror theme. We have made the title flash because it goes along with the beating of the heart and we thought that this looks dramatic and tense.  

Storyboard

Here is the storyboard we have created showing each step of our film opening visually in detail. We have also annotated the storyboard so that we know exactly how we are going to film each scene. We have included details about the types of cuts we are going to use so that we can refer to this during the editing process.

We know that we may need to change the storyboard during the filming and editing as when we get on set and actually film, things will change as we will have to make decisions about what looks best, regardless of the storyboard.

Our title choice

After showing a variety of people the different title possibilities, we found that the most popular was this one:

We are going to use this due to the good response from it and it really suits our film as it looks creepy and fits into our Tim Burton gothic horror style.
Now we are working on how this title will appear during our film opening and which types of editing we can use to make it look really effective.

Title Inspiration

From looking at the work by the directors that have inspired our film opening, we can see the common features of these titles. Black and white is a very prominent theme along with the spikey and eerie fonts. As our film is inspired by this gothic horror genre, we must make sure that our title sequence also reiterates this. We must definitely use a sharp looking font and make sure that it is in black and white. We can experiment with the way the title comes into the opening and make sure it stands out from anything we have seen before.

Title

We have experimented with some fonts for our title. We want it to look gothic to fit in with our horror genre.

To find out which one is best for our film we will show these options to people and see which one is most popular.

Our Title

We have considered many titles for our film but these were the best ones on our short list:

- The Basement

- The Cellar

- Twin

- Till Death do us part

We set up a survey asking which one people preferred for our horror opening. The result was that most people preferred the title 'The Cellar', this is probably because cellars are often isolated and confined, as well as being not often used in horrors.

We think that 'The Cellar' sounds very creepy and captures the scary image that we want to portray.

Props

To create the mood and atmosphere  of our film opening we will use many props. During the first few scenes, frames with pictures of twins in, will set the scene.

Next, kitchen props will be used, a tray, wine with glasses and candles will create the creepy feel of the set and the use of fake blood will scare the audience.

We will also use rope to tie up one of the twins in the last scene.

Preliminary Task

Here is one of our preliminary tasks, filmed and edited at the beginning of the year: