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.

'I've Found You' Script :-)

Coursework, so far :-)

So far, me and Coop have decided on our genre (horror) and have proceeded to research into this and have written our treatment etc.
We chose our genre by doing a survey of our friends, as our target audience is young people aged 15-26.
We have also looked into the music, mise en scene and setting etc of other horror films to help influence our decisions.
We will be filming very soon as we have written our shot list etc and so are ready to attempt making our opening! :-)

'Gothika' opening analysis.

The opening of 'Gothika', I felt, didn't include alot of the typical horror/thriller genre iconography etc or even camera work.
The title sequence was very dark and eerie, with a black background and wispy, white text, almost giving the impression of the supernatural and ghosts.
The mise en scene is dark and grimy, with lots of greys and metal items, creating a cold atmosphere which was relevant to the genre, as the setting was a mental health hospital and so it seems threatening and unpleasant, however, there is very little iconography used in the opening.
There was simple over the shoulder/perspective camera work used for an interview, which got boring and was only improved by a pan from behind some railings, creating that creepy feel so often used in horror films of being watched by someone unknown, but then returned to the straight forward perspective shots.
The railings could be seen as iconography of a horror film, as the 'victim' is normally trapped and the railings were almost cage like and so created this feeling of being trapped and enclosed.
The sound used for the titles was a very low, minor key piece which sounded quite menacing and mostly diagetic sound was used for the action after the first lot of titles. I rather liked the mix of diagetic and non-diagetic sound for the first lot of titles in the opening, as it split the atmosphere. The music sounded tragic and sad, with lots of higher pitched notes on violins, but with the screams from one prisoner being heard over this music the blend created quite a chilling atmosphere and only added to the tragedy of her situation.
Dark Castle Entertainment are known for their horror films as they are a company wanting to pay homage to classic horror filmmaker, William Castle, and so it makes sense that they were involved, as well as Columbia Pictures Corporation, Warner Bros. Pictures.
I don't think any representations were shown in the opening scene.

Mine && Coop's Coursework Treatment :-)

Treatment – I Found You

This film is based around people paying for their sins – in this instance it is parents paying the price for neglecting their child, missing all 7 of his birthdays due to work commitments or just forgetting altogether. We can tell straight away that the film is going to be a horror due to the tension building music and iconography.
Throughout the first sequence, leading to the title, we can hear slow tempo music in the background – resembling that of a fairground. We can also hear a child’s song, being sung by a young girl, that is sung slowly until the close up of an eye at the end – the song is sung…’1, 2, I’m coming for you, 3, 4, better lock your door, 5, 6, pick up sticks, 7, 8, stay up late, 9 , 10, never sleep again’. The first shot we see is of the back of a house, where it appears that something or someone is lurking in the dark watching – from this angle, we see a young girl closing the curtains in a room and then turning the light off. From here the camera follows a shadowed figure to the door of the house, showing him creeping through doors to the lower landing. As he creeps up the stairs we see a shot of the young girl leaving the room – by a worm’s eye shot – she is a babysitter. As the figure enters the room, which later turns out to be a child’s room, the camera cuts to the babysitter in another room who can hear something happening. She is just about to leave the room to check on the child when she sees the figure walking out of the room; in a panic she closes the door. We are now viewing things from the figures perspective as he enters the room.
The babysitter is sat in a closet trying to contain herself, but can’t help but to breathe heavily. She can see the figure stalk past the slit in the door, then a loud bang is heard and the music slows down. Still from the babysitter’s perspective, we see the figure walk back and look through the slit. As he says ‘I found you’ there is a close up of his eye, through the door, then a cut to the main title – I Found You.

After the title sequence we see a car pull up to the house and two adults stepping out and approaching the house. They walk in to find the murderer sat in their living room waiting for them. He explains that he has taken their son and put him somewhere later to be revealed. He describes the hardship their son has faced due to their neglecting and tells them that they must par-take in 7 tasks if they are to see him again. As reasoning, the murderer decries how the parents have been neglecting their son for his entire life, missing all 7 of his birthdays – and for this they must pay.
The first task the murderer sets them on is to destroy all their technologies, because the source of all their problems lies within their being able to be contacted – they focus more on their work than on their child. To their horror, there is a bomb planted in the power line of the houses electric that, if they do not disable everything, will explode causing the house to burn and them along with it.
The second task starts to get a little more twisted as they are asked to skin their family dog alive. The dog receives more attention and love than the son and so by killing it, they are taking away the main distraction from their son. We see the parents hang their dog, by the legs, above a bath tub; where they skin him and drain all the blood – this task in particular takes the parents a long time to start and finish.
The third task is one that benefits the murderer. We see him ask the parents to cut open their son’s rabbit and re-stuff his insides with cocaine – the rabbit is a gift for their son after they forget his 4th birthday. We see them being forced to drive the rabbit to the airport and set it aboard a plane – all the time, the tasks are taking their tole on the parents and they already look as though they have been through a life time of struggles.
The fourth task is for the work-a-holics to torture and murder their boss, who has been bound and gagged in the boot of the parent’s car – much to their surprise. The murderer takes the parents and the boss down to the basement where he has set up a wheel, where the parents are forced to place their boss and spin him till he regurgitates. We then see them place him on top of a spike; they are then forced to pull on either side of him until he starts to move down the spike –screaming in agony. We do not actually see the death of the boss but are led to believe that he is dead due to the screams; cries of the parents then utter silence.
The 5th task they are to under-take is to cut up the babysitter the murderer killed and cook her. It is then served as a dish to them and we see them being forced to eat it all. The killer reasons that this is because the parents have never cooked a proper meal for their son or the babysitter when she has been round.
The penultimate task is not for them to do. The murderer brings in a very frightened paediatrician and takes him and the parents to the other end of the basement, where there are two chairs set up with retraining straps, next thing the audience sees is the murderer letting some form of gas go into the room then a fade out. During the fade we can hear mumbles and screams and sounds of people trying to get free. It fades back in for us to find the parents restrained but bleeding from their reproductive areas – the paediatrician has performed hysterectomies on them both as he claims that they neglect their child so therefore do not deserve to be able to have another.
After much needed calming tactics to get the mother to stop crying, we hear the murderer tell the parents that the final task will get them their son back. He informs them that he is trapped somewhere with a bomb strapped to his chest that is going to detonate. He gives them a riddle, after he plays them a recording of children singing ‘1, 2, I’m coming for you, 3, 4 etc…’ the riddle reads ‘Cries of abandonment, cries that you’ve caused. Find the cries, find the child’. To help the hysterical parents along he informs them that because they took so long to perform each task, they only have fifteen minutes left until the bomb explodes – killing their child.

After five panic stricken minutes, the parents figure out the riddle; their son is at his nursery. They leave in a hurry and rush down to save their son, but as they arrive they find the door is locked. Being unable to work out how to get to him they bang on the door, shouting and screaming his name, trying to reassure him that they’re here and that everything is going to be okay, while doing this, they turn and realise the only way in is to smash a window. After doing so, the father struggles his way in and retrieves his son, then passes him through the broken glass to his mother. (‘I found you’).
There is then a fade out and when the focus returns the area is crawling with police and fire fighters, who are sorting the wreckage of the nursery.
When they return home, they try to apologise to their son, but as their emotions rise the police knock at the door and arrest the parents for the drug smuggling, murders and destruction. So in the end, the parents lose their son for good as they are put into prison.
The child is sent to live with his Aunt in the backstreets of Birmingham, but he sadly still has a poor home life.
A fade shows an ellipsis to then show the child as a successful adult with a high flying job, but he is unfortunately not as successful socially. He doesn’t interact with other people much and pretty much focuses on his job.
We then cut to a scenario mirroring the first scene, with the camera behind some railings focussing on another house, looking into a window. A light switches off and then all goes dark.