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.

Deciding how to present Evaluation Question

Whilst planning our evaluation question, we decided to research into different, creative ways to present our answer. During my research we came across the following ideas:

• One-minute post it note film
• Podcasts
• Behind the scenes videos
• E4 type filmed interviews
• Pieces to camera
• Short film of them cut with bits of their projects and a voice over
• Short film using text messaging
• Annotated presentation uploaded via Scrib’d

After researching into various media presentation sites, many critics Prezi, as it offers a modern, easy-to-use way of presenting information clearly.

Our Ending Music

We were not satisfied of what was on offer for intense, psychological score, for the end of our film opening. So, decided to take the opportunity to make our own music on GarageBand.

GarageBand is a software application that comes on the Mac computers. This music generator allows you to create a huge range of style of sound, from upbeat and fast-paced, to eerier and quiet.

This app enabled us to mix different, obscure sounds with original pieces, we had gained permission from on YouTube.

GarageBand a software none of us had used before, but turned out to be clear to use, and although it took us a few tries to familiarise ourselves with the app, we managed to create the music which suited the intense atmosphere.

Filming and Editing Update

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.

Production Companies for 'The Cellar'

We have researched into film production companies that often create and distribute horror and horror sub-genre films. These production companies would be the most suitable when distributing our gothic-horror film...

Previous films: Paranormal Activity, Insidious Sinister,The Purge, Dark Skies

Previous films: The Grudge, The Boogeyman, The Messengers, 30 Days of Night, Drag Me to Hell, The Posession, Evil Dead

Previous films: Seed of Chucky, Cry Wolf, The Return,The Strangers, The Unborn, My Soul to Take

Projects in development: Half to Death, The Strangers 2,White, Sacrilege, Faces of Death

Previous films: Thirteen Ghosts, Gothika, House of Wax,The Reaping, Orphan, The Apparition

Previous films: The Grudge, Ring 2, Dark Water, Shutter,Quarantine, The Uninvited, 

The Incident

However, we have ultimately used our own film

 production company, 'Apollo Productions', to produce and distribute our film opening.

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:

Our First Draft

Here is the first draft of our film opening:

'The Cellar'

Health and safety side of things...

During the filming, there were a lot of precautions that had to be undertaken regarding health and safety to help keep our actresses safe and also us!

When filming the first scenes in my kitchen there weren't as many hazards compared to our later locations, however there were still some...

- to establish our much needed high angle shots, we had to attempt to balance on a chair - which we had to make sure was stable, to stop any injuries or disruption to the set.

- to make the scene more realistis, we had to surround the room in candles, wine bottles, and a white tablecloth which if caught on fire could be a disaster! 

However, when we filmed our later shots in Milly's attic, we realised that it was not as straightforward as the earlier location. 

-firstlly we had to make sure that the attic was safe to be in with all our our props and equipment. This was checked by Milly's dad before we decided it would be our definite location,

- as we used this particular place to help create the isolation we wanted to represent in our product, in order to get into the room we had to climb a very small ladder...

This in itself had a lot of safety elements to be considered, such as trying to get all of the costumes and props up at once! 

This was, however solved when we decided the best way to do it was one by one, and putting the costumes on after we climbed the ladder to stop anybody tripping up.

When creating Tamsin's costume we made sure that she wasn't allergic to anything we would put other face or body & the same with Grace.

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.

Improvements

Today we showed our film opening to the rest of our year and year 13. When they were watching it we handed out a questionnaire to ask them what they think we could improve on and they said the following:

- background music - to carry the music 

on throughout the whole opening.

- editing

- more 'arty' shots

- building a bit more suspense 

throughout the scenes

we also need to include:

- the panning shot of photo frames etc.

- the transition from the kitchen to the 

'cellar' (stairs)

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.  

Our Logo

We needed a logo for our production company for our film opening, so decided to reflect the theme of 'apollo' by using an image of the earth, including various special effects, we found on google. The picture of the earth connotes our film production's significance and dominance over others.

We will edit this into the start of our opening with a fade transition for the first draft, but look into further editing effects before the final cut.

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.

Costs

In order to create our movie, we had to think about props and costume. These would be necessary to make our opening effective and realistic.

One of the main problems however with providing costumes and props and even location, was the prices.

For our costumes we bought an underskirt from ebay and we also bought a long white maxi skirt for Tamsin's costume. We decided that the main character (grace) would need the most detailed costume.

Tamsin's costume: 

- gloves: £2.99

- veil: £1.99 

- skirt: £6.99

Grace's costume:

- gloves: £2.99

- veil: £1.99

- skirt: £9.99

and then we already had both of their tops and the makeup.

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.

British Film Institute

On Friday, our media class went on a trip to London, visiting the British Film Institute to go to a lecture based on the Film Industry, studying TV Drama. This was perfectly suited for what we are learning at the moment. The lecture was based in this room...

Rob Miller, the main speaker gave us many new ideas and increased our knowledge in the topic, by watching clips and analysing them using advanced key terms. 

Following this, the Producer, Richard Stokes, of both Torchwood and Broadchurch, gave us a realistic and fascinating insight into the world of film, especially being interactive with the Q&A. 

Overall we found the trip really useful for our growing knowledge of media, as well as personally enjoying it.