Evaluationnn :-)

The opening of our film is set in typical suburbia, showing a house. Inside the house is a young babysitter, looking after a small child. After this, the film would go on to show the boys parents returning home from a night out, only to find their son has been kidnapped and the babysitter has been murdered. Adding to this, they discover they have to perform a series of tasks in order to get their son back and to make up for their neglect.
There is evidence of a shot steady part way through our piece, when the murderer leaves the bedroom and walks across the landing to the other bedroom. In our establishing shot is from far away to show the setting fully and to show that the babysitter is in the house alone as the murderer breaks in.
The opening scene shows a shifty character entering the house and climbing the stairs into the son's bedroom. A scream is heard and so the babysitter leaves the room she is in to check what is happening, only to see the murderer leaving the child's room. In a panic, she hides, only for the murderer to see the door closing. Suspicions raised, the murderer enters the room and the shot moves to the perspective of the babysitter, peering through the doors of a wardrobe. After passing the gap, the murderer comes back and crouches down to stare at the babysitter, after a zoom in to a close up of the murderer's eye the scene cuts to titles 'I Found You' and the murderer is heard saying these words.
A piece of music is played over the entire scene, while recorded chanting is played in certain places, to heighten the atmosphere and to create an eerie feel to the scene.

We use some typical horror conventions in our piece, such as some different, quirky angles. We carefully placed our angles to create an atmosphere of mystery, we used a birdseye and a wormseye view, these hid the murderer's face, therefore meaning the audience didn't know who they were or what to expect, therefore creating tension and suspense. This developed upon normal forms and conventions of the horror genre. We also used eerie music to heighten this atmosphere, the piece consisted of echoing bells, which eventually got louder until they reached crescendo and stopped abruptly. This helped the atmosphere as they could give connotations of the church, which could link to death and in addition to this our titles are red, which connotes blood, which is normally played upon in horror films. The setting is used to mahe the audience think, also building upon usual media conventions, we have used it to make the audience feel uncomfortable, as if these events could happen in their everyday lives as we have set it in a home.
We did, however, go against the typical horror stereotype of murderer's being male but our babysitter was female, almost sticking to a stereotype.
We had two representations in our opening. One was of a typical suburban life. This is shown through a large, detatched house, the nice decorating throughout the house, with plenty of spacious rooms (4 bedrooms in total), it just looks like a typical family home. The babysitter could be seen as a representation of teenage girls, having a job of a babysitter to get some money, but not wanting to be theire as when the child screams she assumes the child is just messing about, this is shown through her facial expression. The babysitter helps to show a horror stereotype, as she is the first victim and is a 'young, naive and helpless girl', normally targetted by the villain in most horror films. Also, the babysitter helps to represent family life, as it shows the parents are busy, as they need a babysitter to take care of their child when they cannot.
The media institutions I think would be interested in our media product would be Warner Bros. Pictures, Dark Castle Entertainment and Ghost House Pictures. I think this would make sense as all have been involved with many horror films, especially Dark Castle Entertainment as they formed the company with the intention to produce near enough all horror films through their company.
Our target audience is 16 and 24. This is because we think the film would attract them more as they could put themselves in that situation. We picked our audience then conducted a survey of which film genre they prefer and would like to see, our results were horror and so this aided our decision as we knew what poeple in our age range were wanting, so we could appeal to them more.We used our character of the babysitter to aim at younger poeple of the age range, to make them think and feel uneasy. For our the older of our age range the characters of the parents were a possible relation, but they did not appear in our opening.
From constructing this piece I have learned a number of things. I have learned how to use a sound recorder and then how to place non-diagetic sound onto a piece of footage, editing it, time stretching it and basically fitting it to the piece I wanted. I have also leaned how to put titles and and text onto a piece of footage using Adobe Premiere. We did learn how to use Audacity to edit a piece of music we placed onto our footage, however, the file type was not compatible with Adobe Premiere so we could not use it.
From making our piece I have learned how to avoid continuity errors when filming and how to make our piece cohere and flow.
Again, we have learned how to record sound and place sound/music onto a piece, as well as how to use Audacity, the only other thing we could elarn is how to convert a file type.
For our research we decided on a target audience then surberyed some people of that age range on which genre of film they'd like to see in cinemas. The results came up as comedy and horror, so we decided on horror as ir felt like the one that would present abot of a challenge and we had a better chance of being more creative. After doing this we created a storyboard, camrea shot list, script, a list of proprs and a shooting schedule so we could be oragnised when it came to filming and so we had something to follow whilst filming to make things easier on us, our time management was kept in check by our shooting schedule. In producing our piece we used Adobe Premiere, MP3 recorder, microphone and Audacity.
There is evidence of framing a shot in our opening shot when the camera is focussed on the window on the top floor of the house from the garden outside, this was ysed to create tge feekubg of being watched to make our piece feel more uncomfortable and then we hold a shot steady when the murderer is levaing the child's room to walk across the landing to the other bedroom. A variation of shot distances are used in our piece and the two main examples of this are our establishing shot, which is from far away, then our final shot, which goes from mid shot to extreme close up. We used a camera, micrphone, MP3 recorder and a tripod for filming.
Our mise en scene was mostly typical home like surroundings, so we didn't really use many lightings effects etc. We had the landing light on for our filming on the stairs and landing, we did the same with the kitchen, so the house just looked lived in, the bedroom lamp on, to create a dimly lit atmosphere and then placed a lamp in the cupboard so the camera could focus. We made sure Charlotte's costume was all black so she fitted with the symbolism of black being evil and also to make her look more mysterious and suspicious. My costume was just a t-shirt, jeans and a cardigan. My costume and the setting were used to make the audience feel as if this kind of thing could happen in their own home as they could relate to these easier, as they are things they would see almost everyday.
We used quick, short and snappy cuts from each shot so as to disorientate thw viewer, to create discomfort, but not so much as to ruining the viewing. We used to fade up to open our piece, just as it fit better in comparison to a sharp opening as there was no music and it just seemed badly thought through. We used creepy music to set an atmosphere and put the viewer on edge, which slowly grew and grew until it hit crescendo when the shot zoomed into Charlotte's eye, reaching it's climax to then cut to a bang, then a short silence and then we recorded Charlotte saying "I Found You" in a childish manner. We used this as the music built up, mirroring the tension in the scene, so we felt this was appropriate, also having the bang made our viewers jump, making them feel more on edge and Charlotte's voice more prominent and odd. On top of our music we recorded Charlotte and I chanting a children's rhyme and this was played throughout, this also added to a creepy, childish theme and make people feel slightly uncomfortable.
We had to fit the music and chanting to our piece so it cohered, so we used Adobe Premiere to make sure we inserted clips in the right places. Our titles were in a grey and very pale purple, they grey looed almost like shadow and they faded in and faded out. We thought this made them look quite eerie and mysterious, fitting with horror stereotypes. Also, the grey could be seen as ghostly, linking to death and possibly the supernatural. For our main title we used a messy font, which could almost look like child's writing and we made it red that faded to grey, linking back to the shadow idea as well as the red to symbolise blood, death and danger, commonly used in the horror genre.

Who did what? :-)

Editing from 3rd, 4th and 6th March :-)

We recorded our extra sounds to be put on our piece to continue our editing. As all our scenes are in order all we had left to do were the sounds. Once we had all of our footage we ordered them correctly and edited them so they were coherent with the clips on our timeline. After playing the piece through we realised the acoustics were different on some clips compared to others and so had to re-record some and upload them onto the computer to out onto our piece once more.
All of our sound clips had to be split in order to get rid of a muffled, buzzing sound.
We downloaded a piece of music (Broadway) from freeplay.com to play over our piece, as well as our chanting and other sounds. We attempted to edit this with Audacity but it wouldn't work when we tried to upload it onto our footage.
Instead of Broadway, we decided to use a piece called Floatate, an eerie sounding piece consisting of bells. The song was too long for our piece however, so we had to edit it down and make it shorter for it to fit our footage correctly and to make it flow.
As well as being to long, the sound clip was too loud and our chanting could not be heard properly. To rectify this, we need to edit the volume on the clips so that you can hear both pieces comfortably and effectively.

More filming

We had to do more filming as we found some problems with certain scenes. Charlotte took the camera home and re-did the scenes we needed and we are now workong on piecing together our text so it is coherent and fluent.

'Dreamcatcher' opening analysis :-)

Institutions: Warner Bros. Pictures, Castle Rock Entetainment and Village Roadshow Pictures.
Warner Bros. Pictures are associated with other horror films, as are Castle Rock and they are famous for their involvement in the horror genre.
The opening of Dreamcatcher consisted of only the titles.
I didn’t think the opening reflected a lot of the horror genre; at all.
The colours were greys and whites and patterns were made in the background that resembled skulls of animals and there was a background pattern that was just teeth. This created a creepy, uneasy atmosphere which fits slightly to the horror genre, but this was all that was done.
Music was played while the titles were on screen, trance like music with a strong beat, but slow tempo. This, I feel, did not link to the horror genre, it created no atmosphere and seemed rather out of place.
I also feel that the opening titles were far too long, this made me bored and uninterested in watching any further. Most horror films are quick paced, jumpy and full of movement, to almost disorientate the viewer. This film was slow and didn’t pick up the pace, even after the titles.
Overall, I feel quick disappointed, as there was very little horror iconography, mise en scene, sound etc at all.

Editing#2 (Y)

We carried on editing our piece, Wednesday 11th Feb. We looked over what we had from the previous week and realised we had some errors. After rectifying these, we looked into what else we could do with the text. We then put the scenes into the correct order and played about with the time stretch on another piece of audio. We noticed one massive error while doing this and so had to re-do a part of the text. After this, we then had to edit the last couple of scenes for the ending. We were unsure as to whether we had enough light for these scenes during filming, so we checked and found out it wasn't bright enough to see. We then played about with the brightness and contrast to make this visible.