The document discusses plans for a student horror film project. It will be set in a small village, like the film "The Exorcist," rather than a remote area. The plot involves a teenage girl becoming possessed by an evil spirit, with her parents calling a priest for an exorcism. However, the spirit ends up killing everyone in the house except the girl, leaving the audience with a cliffhanger ending. The document outlines plans for lighting, makeup, costumes, camera angles, sound design, and casting professional actors to help achieve the desired spooky atmosphere and suspense.

1. Media A2 Research and planning

2. Genre and Setting We are planning to make a horror film for our A2 media course. For the film to be strong, and in the genre of short horror films, we need to have a typical horror setting. For example, one of the films I watched was ‘12:12’, and the setting was dark, it may have not been in a remote area but the way it was shot suggested to the audience it was. We have decided not to have a typical horror genre setting, in a remote area. We have decided to have a similar location to one famous horror film, “The Exorcist”. It wasn’t set in a completely remote area but a small village, yet still managed to be a successful horror film. In the ‘Within Temptation’ film, the lighting was really dark as it was in black and white, so in our film, we will make sure it’s filmed at night to get a more spooky atmosphere, and to keep the audience on edge, but we may consider to use the black and white effect at the beginning of our film. This is because if we use it through out the whole of our film it will suggest to the audience that this film was based in the past, which is what we don’t want.

3. Narrative In our film’s storyline, an 16-18 year old girl, Mary, is possessed by an evil spirit. Her parents, Ian and Jenna are seriously concerned, so they have called a experienced priest to remove the evil spirit from the innocent girl. But the priest doesn't know what he is actually facing. When the spirit ends up coming out of Mary’s body, it takes over Jenna, and it ends up killing everyone in the house except Mary, making it a cliff-hanger for the audience, as they don’t know whether Jenna’s instinctive love will overcome the spirit. I have learnt that it is important that the narrative is clear to the audience, as with ‘Bulldog’ there wasn’t any clear narrative which made the audience wonder ‘what is the point in this short film?’ But we don’t want to give too much away as we what to leave the audience wanting more just like ’12:12’ as we didn’t clearly understand why the evil ghost was after him dead on 12:12.

4. Mise-en-scene Lights: to capture the mood of the setting. As in ‘Bulldog’ there wasn’t much thought into the lighting of the setting. This lost the spooky atmosphere to the short film. Hair and make up: we have a wig for ‘Mary’ and make up including fake blood and latex, to make the audience believe that the girl has been possessed for a few days. Costume and Props: Just like in ‘Within Temptation’ the props and costume helped set the atmosphere for the audience. This would help the audience to see which character is playing which part, keeping the continuity and the actors believable.

5. Camera The camera angles are just as important as the Mise-en-scene and sound. We need to add interesting shots in, unlike the film I analysed called ‘Bulldog’. It had a lack of interesting shots which made the film shorter and boring as it didn’t capture the emotions on the characters’ faces. So in order to make this more interesting for the audience we wanted to show the emotions of the characters, and wanted a fast editing pace, to show tension and suspense. As this is a typical horror film, we needed to take lots of close ups to also build tension or to reveal something important to the audience. For instance we built up the first shot of the priest with lots of close ups, but don’t reveal his face until the end.

6. Sound To build suspense we needed to add non-diegetic music, that would suit the theme and give the film more of a creepy feel to it. As if we didn’t it would end up like ‘Bulldog’, not interesting, not building up suspense and would lose the attention of the audience. We are planning to get a second camera and attach it to another tripod to act as a boom mic as we don’t have the budget to get one of these. Like ’12:12’ there is the heart beat that we can hear when the character walks up toward the door, this helped the audience to feel what he was feeling at the time.

7. Performance and Acting We decided to get professional actors as we didn’t want our film to look amateur, like the short film ‘Bulldog’. To also help us achieve the best continuity style, we decided to hold auditions for actors that take drama, so that these better actors would act realistically in each scene, giving accurate continuity. So we looked at various different web sites with advertisements for actors. After posting an add on the site we held auditions to see who could perform best for which part.