1. Asylum Psycho Alien Dracula TheWickerman A clockwork orange The Omen See No Evil
2. The greatest horror and thriller films Britain has ever produced has a new name to add to its list. Best film ever! I was so scared! Footpath 76
3. Types of Horror There are many types of horror films, each varying from the others. The type of horror we feel our film comes under the category of is ‘Psychological Horror’. Psychological horror tends to be subtle compared to traditional horror and typically contains less physical harm, as it works mainly on the factors of mentally affecting the audience rather than the display of graphic imagery seen in the slasher and splatter sub-genres. It typically plays on archetypal shadow characteristics embodied by the threat. It creates discomfort in the viewer by exposing common or universal psychological vulnerabilities and fears, most notably the shadowy parts of the human psyche which most people repress or deny.
4. Horror films We researched into the psychological horror film genre and its typical conventions: Gender Age Setting Death & Gore Mentality Antagonist Protagonist
5. Representations of groups and class. Our film represents many groups and class systems found all over the world today. The main groups we represented were: Youth Upper Working Class People with a split personality
6. Film Progression From our preliminary task to our final piece, a lot of improvement was made, both technically and mentally as a group. Not only did we improve our filming and editing skills, we learnt a lot about the importance of being organised and learnt lessons from the inevitable mistakes we made.
7. Preliminary Task The brief for the preliminary task was a: 'Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom he/she then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. The task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.‘ Here is what we came up with. Preliminary Task The main skills we learnt from this task was the 180 degree rule, shot/ reverse shot, and the importance of continuity via match on action. We learnt the necessity of using multiple shots to tell the story, instead of just leaving the camera rolling throughout. As you can see, comparing this to our final piece, we have greatly improved.
8. Dealing With Issues As with most groups, we didn’t get through this without a few hitches along the way, some avoidable, some were just bound to happen with the lack of experience we possessed between us. The first problem we came across was a simple one, and we dealt with it swiftly. The two characters we had cast for the roles didn’t have enough chemistry for it to be believable, although we were fortunate enough to have the perfect replacement who was kind enough to step in. We had a few organisational problems too; on many occasions cameras were forgotten; cameras were uncharged; tripods were broken and props were not brought. But over time, we became more experienced and made sure to double check we had everything before every shoot. One of the main issues we had at the start of this process was that the Mac we were working on suddenly lost all of our work one day. Admittedly it wasn’t much, but it was a real blow at the time.
9. Getting Better As time progresses and more experience is gained, it is inevitable that a person becomes better at the task at hand, and this project proved no exception to that rule. As shown by our attempted shots in our preliminary task, we didn’t have the greatest skill when we started our journey as a group, but we learnt to use the technology well and came out with a good final piece. We didn’t use too much fancy technology, but it still took us a while to get to terms with the Macs and the applications on there, iMovie being a prime example. Looking back now, it’s almost laughable how much we struggled with the programme, as we have become so much more proficient at using it. The cameras themselves were the only other main piece of technology we used, and it didn’t take us too long to get the hang of them, but we just learnt to be patient, and not expect miracles. The main thing we learnt about this technology is that we shouldn’t rely on it fully, because the manual work, such as getting the right shots, is just as important. Edited finale
10. Influences We were shown the opening to the film ‘Se7en’ which had abstract and ambiguous clips edited in to it and we chose to take some inspiration from it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZK7mJoPLY Fast cuts • Blood Close-ups • Non-diegetic sounds Photos • Flashing We also found the film ‘The Butterfly effect’ to be a great influence on our plot line and an influence on how to use psychological state. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5dVQfzjDS4 They both lose a loved one They are both tormented psychologically (by past and through dreams) Because of our horror films psychological thriller aspects we felt that a film distributor such as “Hammer Film Productions” would be appropriate.
