Week two catch up

This week we had our second group meeting, during this session and during our time in class we discussed the proposals we came up with.

This is an extract from my propasal you can find the rest of it on my individual blog, near the bottom.

My idea for the opening sequence was to have a girl tied up and gagged down in the basement and a man upstairs. it is a common girl victim male capturer theme, and these are the main points to the story.

• you wouldnt see the man upstairs but you can hear his footsteps getting louder and louder. As they do so the girl becomes more and more scared,
• the man then opens the door but the shadow is hiding his face.
• he then slowly walks down the creeking wooden stairs until he reaches the bottom,
• he then walks over to the terrified girl and strokes her hair, muttering 'everybody's been talking about you today precious'.
• She doesn't respond,
• he then walks over to the light switch which is providing minimal light to the room, switches off which causes the room to go pitch black,
• then after 4 seconds of silence
• you hear a deafening sream,
• and then the title of the film appears on screen.

The girl would be tied up and gagged, she will be wearing minimal cloths to indicate she is being held as a sex slave. This is the kind of idea i was going for:

The rest of my group liked my idea and gave me some positive feeback, they thought that although the complete 360degree shot as a good idea it would be too hard to perform correctly. Also they thought that it would give too much of the story away straight away, the shot would only take around 10 seconds at most and we would see the entire room and both characters. They thought that we should hold some information back to create suspension. 

This week we finalised our idea, and had to present it to the class, our final idea was initially a girl running through a forest and then running to a car in which a scary looking man slowly winds down the window, she gets in and then you hear screams. We then decided ourselves that this would be way too hard to shoot, so we decided on having an OCD getting home from work, walking into the house making himself a drink then going out to his shed where 4 girls in their underwear were tied up.

Teacher feedback

Our teacher thought that the location we choose for our OCD mans home was not tidy enough to pass for his house, she also didn't like the fact we had four girls in the shed she thought that it would be a gamble for all the girls to turn up, she adviced us on using just one girl instead within our group which would mean that we would be certain she woulnd't let us down. Our teacher also thought having our man coming back from work was unrealistic as the time he would come back was four, she thought we should change it to six as it makes more sense.

This is the location we had originally chosen. This location changed to my house you can see pictures of my house on our group blod under final location. We had to change our idea and then present again the next day to the class. This presentation went much better and we finally got signed off.

see you next week x

Week one catch up

This is the first week of our project, we were introduced to the project brief this is:

‘To produce a 2 minute opening sequence for a fiction film it must include:

• titles throughout

• some form of copyright free soundtrack

• evidence of understanding of continuity editing’

When i first found out the brief i was happy as i knew i had enough experience working on continuity and working with equipment to produce a quality piece of media. Im confident that i will do well in this project due to the group i was given. In my group there is spencer, ciara and india. these are three of my friends so i know i will enjoy the experience ahead but we are all very hard working so im sure that we won't mess around. 

This week we split up into our groups and had our first group meeting, we decided what we needed to do before we could start planning our film sequence we decided we should all come up with our own proposal and present them to the rest of the group. you can see mine on my portfolio. 

Also we decided we needed to do research, we decided to do a horror film so i did some research on the horror genre, you can see this on the group blog.

Finally this week we were shown the 2 minute sequences from last year in class, i thought these were helpful as i learnt about what kind of conventions and features are needed in the sequence, plus i have a few ideas about shots we might use now that i saw worked well in last years sequences.

What did i learn this week?

We havent done much this week so i haven't learnt a great deal, however i had learnt about the film genre of horror, ive learnt that you are able to make a scary film without a huge budget, an example of this is paranormal activity. Also i learnt that in order to make our film scary we need to have a distinctive and freaky main villian, this is something i will urge the rest of my group look into in the upcoming week.

see you next week x

My propasal

When i found out the breif, i wanted to do a horror film, this was because due to our lack of professionals and professional equipent it would be hard to make an ection, comedy or romantic film that wouldn't look like it was done by ameaturs. Horror has a different style to shooting, You can get away with a shakey camera or bad lighting, as it just adds to the effect.



This is 'The blair witch project', one of hte most famour horror movies of all time, yet the camera is very shakey and the lighting is poor, it looks like an ameatur has made the film, but that just adds to the effect.

My idea for the opening sequence was to have a girl tied up and gagged down in the basement and a man upstairs. it is a common girl victim male capturer theme, and these are the main points to the story.

• you wouldnt see the man upstairs but you can hear his footsteps getting louder and louder. As they do so the girl becomes more and more scared,
• the man then opens the door but the shadow is hiding his face.
• he then slowly walks down the creeking wooden stairs until he reaches the bottom,
• he then walks over to the terrified girl and strokes her hair, muttering 'everybody's been talking about you today precious'.
• She doesn't respond,
• he then walks over to the light switch which is providing minimal light to the room, switches off which causes the room to go pitch black,
• then after 4 seconds of silence
• you hear a deafening sream,
• and then the title of the film appears on screen.

The girl would be tied up and gagged, she will be wearing minimal cloths to indicate she is being held as a sex slave. This is the kind of idea i was going for:

The basement will be dark and scary, there will be tribute on the wall of the girl like the man has been stalking her for a long time. there will also be tools and menacing looking objects to show violence. There will be steps coming down from upstairs.

The man i would use would have slick hair with a suit, he would be creepy looking. This is the type of man i want:

The scene would be a bit like this scene from 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', the first part where the men are walking down the stairs which are dark, and the shot of the girl looking scared while tied up and gagged.

Research on Title

I wanted to make sure i planned and reseached our title perfectly so it made sense and it had a link to our film. To do this we did research on some professional horror films titles, we focused on three different horror films.

The first i focused on was 'Hannibal', 

 This title has a strong link to its film, firstly it is the first name of the main character Hannibal Lector, who is the main focus of the whole series of films. The second link it has to the film is it rymes with the word Cannibal. This is an important word as it is the theme of all the films, Doctor Lector is a cannibal and in many of the films he performs act of cannibalism and violence. 

The second film i focused on was another of the Hannibal series, the title is 'Hannibal Rising;, 

This is different to the first title as the first title i looked at was focusing on the name of the main character, this is common with many films for example the Harry Potter films and Marley and Me. However this second film focuses on the theme of the film, it is all about Hannibal Lector growing up (rising). This is a not so common tactic used in films titles one example is 'The Great Escape'.

The final film title i investigated is a completely different type of film, i looked at Mean Girls,

The title of this film is never actually mentioned in the film, it is not anyones name it is not describing an event, however it is not completely abstract. This is also commonly used, it is describing someones feelings or character. An example of a title of a film that uses this tactic is 'Shallow Hal', it is describing the main characters character which is the same with 'MeanGirls'.

Concluding Note

When we come to make a decision on what type of tactic we would use when considering our film title, after my research i think we should use the third tactic, we have decided to make a horror film and in my opinion a horror films title should be abstract as we don't want to give a lot of the plot away.