Filming diary

Friday 18th December (arrived at 2.30pm left at 4.30pm)
The first day we went to the woods we went for walk through it just to get a feel for the woods and find the most appropriate place to start filming. We went to the woods straight after school but by the time we had done Hannah's make up it was about 2.30pm. During filming, as we were in a public place, we had to make sure that there were no people around, making it more difficult to film.  We included shot reverse shot during the head turning which also took a few attempts as we were cautious of the 180 Degree Rule. The reason we stopped filming at 4.30pm was because of the change in lighting and would have been too dark to continue.


Wednesday 23th December (arrived at 4.30pm left at 5.00pm)
Due to other factors, we did not arrive at the woods as early as we had originally intended to, resulting in it being too dark to film anything. Although we did not film any footage we decided to use this opportunity to discuss when we would next be filming in order to have the correct lighting.


Monday 4th January (arrived at 3.30pm left at 4.30pm)
As the second part of our opening two minutes we wanted the lighting to be noticeably darker to allow the audience to work out that time had passed, we arrived later. When we got there we had the correct lighting but had to be very quick when filming as it started to get dark quick. We experimented with several high and low shots to see which one would create the best effect. Also we filmed several different sounds to edit over the on top of our opening, like birds etc.


Wednesday 20th January (arrived at 3.00pm left at 3.45pm)
After editing we realised that there was several shots that we should had included in order for it to make more sense. When the antagonist had killed Hannah we thought there should be a shot of the antagonist walking away and leaving the body which we had not previously filmed. Also we filmed a tracking shot of some feet walking as we were intending to include it in our opening.

Storyboard

Interview with characters

Transcript

walking though the woods listening to music 

stops to texts her mum to say she'll be home in 10

carries on walking 

looks at watch

antagonists grabs her 


[SCREAM]

Antagonist slits her throat, disposes of the knife and walks away.

dissolves into the next scene

Mum picks up the phone

Chloe: (shaky upset voice) 'Hi, have you heard from hannah?' 

Friend: 'No sorry Chlo, why?'

Chloe: 'She texted me two hours ago saying she will be home in ten minutes and I'm really quite worried'

Friend: 'Okay I'll be right over and we will go looking for her'

door bell rings 

answers the door crying

Walks into the woods

comes across a scarf with blood on it.

Mum- this is Hannah's (crying)

Camera pans from the mum cradling the scarf up, when the viewer can see a dark silhouette of the antagonist standing in the woods.

Consideration of Stereotyping

We decided to work on the idea of the 'damsel in distress' in order to make the audience feel sorry and pity for Hannah. Also as just under half of the people interested in the film are female they could relate to the situation. They may relate to feeling unsafe when walking home and the feeling of helplessness if anything was to happen. Also as Hannah is of a young age it appeals more to our target audience as they will also be in the young adults category. This is very stereotypical of a female in a horror film as we tend to think of them as the ones getting into danger and needing help.

Typically the antagonist is a large strong man but we wanted to subvert to this and use an ordinary person who could be anyone. We wanted to illustrate that anyone could be the antagonist because there is a dark side to everyone. Although we didn't use a man as the antagonist we still used someone taller and stronger than Hannah so the opening stayed realistic. With the other two characters we tried to convey the concern and upset that any mother feel if her daughter had not returned home. We wanted her to appear visually upset to the audience but this was difficult to achieve while filming. This is very stereotypical of mothers in films as they are portrayed as the ones who worry for no reason but in this case there was a reason.

In the majority of horror films, especially older ones, it will always be a female who gets into a situation where they shouldn't be and inevitably ends up getting themselves killed, so we wanted to stick to this idea.

Soundtrack reasearch

Non-copy right music
This is when you can use the track on your own openings without having to get permission from anyone to do so. You can find copy right music on the internet but is more difficult to access. In our opening two minutes we will use non-copyright music so we don't have to get permission.


Copyright music
This is when a track or piece of music is owned by a person/company it would be illegal to use this music without their permission. In independent film making you tend to avoid the use of copyright music as it can be expensive. We will not use copyright music in our opening two minutes and will research different types of non-copyright music in order to create the scary atmosphere.


Diegetic sound
 This is when the viewer can see the source of where the music is coming from on screen (the sound is visible to them) For example dialogue would be diegetic sound as you can see the person that is speaking.


Non-diegetic sound
This is when the sound that the viewer can hear does not have an on screen source. In other words the characters can not hear this sound. For example a voice over or a sound track playing over the top would be non-diegetic sound.


In our opening two minutes we intend to use a mixture of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The diegetic sound will be the noise of a text message sending, heavy breathing and a conversation between the mother and her friend. However, when the scene becomes more tense we will use a sound track over the top of it in order to create a much more tense environment making it more scary. Non-diegetic sound tracks are commonly used over the top of horror films as it makes the film much scarier for the audience, without the use of non-diegetic sound the film would not be as scary. An example of this is 'Drag me to Hell' which starts the film with spooky music playing.

Result of questonnaire

From the result of our questionnaire we gathered many key ideas for our opening two minutes. We were un-sure on what location and props to use but used the results to gather that it should be set in a woods and the main props should be blood and a knife. Also from doing the questionnaire we were able to see that they majority of the age range that is interested in chosen genre is 16-20 year olds allowing us to adjust the theme for them.