There are many different editing techniques uesed in cinema, in order to create a full cinematic experience for the audience. These editing techniques are emloyed to make the film very proffesional and can help in delivering the story to the audience. Continuity editing is a very good editing technique, used by most film makers, which allows for the audience to clearly follow what is happening from shot to shot. Features included in continuity editing are the 180 degree line. This rule states that when filming two characters and you decide to use close ups on the characters face, you cannot cross the imaginary 180 degree line.
Another continuity editing technique is the match on action. This rule says that when cuting from one shot to the next, the action a character is performing in one shot, should follow through into the next.
Shot reverse shot is the final feature in continuity editing, whereby during filming a conversation the camera will cut from one charaters face to anothers when one is speaking. This is to show who is speaking in a conversation or the other persons reaction.
Here is my individual film poster design. I have took inspiration from other psychological horror and thriller film posters, which often have the main character zoomed in on the poster, to drawn attention to their face, for example: The Insidious film poster, which shows a young boy in the centre of the poster.
From my research into other psychological horror and thriller film posters, I have included the title of the film, as this is what can draw in the audience's attention. The title is in a bloody red font, which suggests that the film has horror themes within it. I have also included 'From the makers of The Cards and Full House, which are the titles of two films, done by members in our group in the first year of A-Levels. This is to allow the audience to see something the production has already done, as many people may see films if the same producers have also done other films they have liked. I have included a review of our film on the poster, along with a star rating, as this gives a short snippet into how the film makes you feel, as allows you to see what someone else rates the film. At the bottom of the film poster, there are the film credits, which outline that YouTube is the distributor, the production company, the main actors and 'Experience the horror coming 2017', which tells the audience when the film is going to be released, and also the tagline 'Experience the horror' can make the audience feel excited to see the film.
She is a student at Sixth Form college, studying A-Levels.
Chloe used to be very sociable and had quite a few friends, however in the film she is seen slowly losing her confidence and becoming more and more of a loner.
She has quite a sweet and innocent personality. She is very friendly and is quite sensitive when it comes to getting emotionally hurt.
Chloe is the main character in our story and therefore has the biggest purpose. At the start of the film she is seen being haunted by her dead relative, who she begins to see more and more in her every day life. As Chloe begins going crazy and is extremely confused, she decides to visit her cousins grave to get closure. This is when she then realises that it is actually her who is dead and not her cousin, Amy.
When Chloe is in college, she is wearing a My Chemical Romance t shirt, black jeans, black Doc Martins boots, and a college badge. She also has a Living Dead Souls cat bag.
The first influence that has affected our film is The Others. The Others is a Spanish-American supernatural gothic horror, with elements of psychological horror. The film has a similar storyline to our own film. The Others is set in the aftermath of World War One in Jersey, where a mother lives with her two children, who have a rare disease that means they are sensitive to light, in a big mansion in the countryside. Throughout the film, one of the children says that there are 'others' living in the house and so, the family believe they are being haunted, however, there is a twist at the end of the film which reveals that the mother and her two children are the ones who are dead, and the 'others' are the current occupants of the mansion.
Our storyline is similar to The Others, and is therefore an influence for our own film, because our storyline is about Chloe, a student at a sixth form college, who is tragically killed when she and her cousin and best friend, Amy, come into an altercation with a robber at a house. However, Chloe does not realise that she is dead, and throughout the film, she believes that Amy was the one who died on that day, and believes that she is being haunted by her. Towards the end of the film, when Chloe goes to a gravesite, she has a flashback of what happened on that day and realises that she is the one who is dead, when she sees her name on the gravestone.
The servants at the house are also dead, however, they are fully aware of this, and so the gardener covers up graves at the site, with leaves, as the mother has not yet realised that she and her children are dead. She finally finds out that the servants are not alive, when she finds a photo book, which includes photos of the dead.
Orphan is also an influence for our film. The film is about a couple who adopt a 9 year old girl, after losing their unborn child. However, as the film progresses, it is revealed that '9 year old' Esther is actually 33, and had spent time in a mental hospital, as she suffers from a condition that stunts her physical growth. It is revealed that she has killed many people, and usually tries to be adopted by families, as she will lure the father of the family in to try and advance on him sexually. Orphan is an example of an influence in our film, because there is a twist towards the end when the mother finds out that the 9 year old they adopted isn't actually that age. Our film also has a twist in that it is revealed that the main character in the film is dead.
Another influence on our film is the M. Night Shymalan film 'The Sixth Sense'. The film centres on a young boy who encounters ghosts and with the help of child psychologist Dr Malcome Crowe (Bruce Willis), the child attempts to help the dead he encounters and let them be at peace. Towards the end of the film, it is revealed that Malcome Crowe is dead, as he was murdered at the beginning of the film, and didn't realise that he was dead. This is a significant influence as Chloe, the main character within our film is also murdered, however, she does not realise this, and believes that it was her cousin who died. She also goes about her life, unaware, in the same way that Malcome in the Sixth Sense does. This film has a very large influence on our film, as the focus is on the dead and how it is dealt with by people. It also focuses on being haunted, this being the title of our film, and in turn has a very interesting and unsuspected twist involved.
Another influence into our film is Easy Rider in the grave yard scene. For our film, we want to portray some distortion which this film does well. In a their grave yard scene, they have used several effects to create a distorted atmosphere, however they use it to emphasise drugs. For our film, we want to use this technique to emphasise, that our main character Chloe is imagining things and is actually creating a false reality in her head. We want this scene to convey her coming to the realisation that what she thought was true, is in fact false. Similarly to Easy Rider, we will also film this in a grave yard which will create quite an eerie/creepy atmosphere to add to this effect.
Another influence of our film is Shawshank Redemption. In the scene where Andy walks into the prison, he looks up at the prison and then under an arch doorway which conveys the prisons power and intimidation on him. We would like to do a similar shot to this in the grave yard scene in our film. As Chloe walks into the grave yard, she'll walk under an arch and look up as she's walking through to emphasise that the grave yard is intimidating to her and that she is powerless to what she is about to discover. In this clip, the shot we are influenced by is the very last shot.
Another influence of our film is Stranger Things. We really liked the Stranger Things title and how all the letters mover together and zoom through them into a scene. This is why we thought we would try and do a similar thing. So at the end of our title sequence, all of the letters of our title move together and then we can zoom in on a letter which will take us to the first scene. However we know that this may be difficult to do as we don't have the same advanced technology as Stranger Things.
We will be filming a huge chunk of our film at the house and graveyard (which is near the house) which we decided would be best to do during the Christmas holidays. This is because we don't want to rush these scenes as they're our most important scenes.
For the house scene we will need a dairy (that looks used), some photos of Chloe and Amy together and picture frames to put the characters in (which will go on Chloe's desk), some fake blood and a knife, and a ski mask (for the burglar).
For the graveyard we will need some more pictures of the characters together (some picture frames too), and some flowers.
For our film, we need various other Characters in our film. Our main characters, Chloe and Amy, will be played by two members in our group, Louise and Amy. The burglar (which is a small part) will be played by Owen, another member in our group.
Rebecca and Owen will mainly focus on filming and getting the right shots. This means that we also need other actors in our film as we can't have Leah (Amy) in shots where she is not meant to be as it would confuse the audience.
Therefore we first need to get two actors to play Chloe's friends in the Canteen scene. This gives us the opportunity to use various techniques, such as shot reverse shot, which our film would be lacking if we were unable to get actors.
We also need other extras for the classroom scene. This requires a somewhat full class to make the scene believable. We have decided to ask someone in our Media class to play one of Chloe's friends in the classroom scene, when Chloe goes to ask for help but is again ignored. The rest of the people in this scene will be people in our Media class as we will film during lesson, this will help create realistic background noise as well as creating a realistic scene.
I decided to use dark colours (red and black) to convey the eerie, horror concept of the film. The lines going through the poster represent brokenness and cracks, connoting that the main character slowly becomes more and more broken as the film goes on. The red colour of the text illustrates blood, conveying that our main character is brutally stabbed.
My next poster idea does not include a billing block as this would not be our main poster. Many films have multiple posters to which there may only be one including all the information and the others are just used as teaser posters and extra posters for advertisement. For example, The Avengers had separate character posters. For this poster, I used a shot from our film as this gives the audience a much greater insight into the film itself, the characters and the atmosphere. As well as this, I also used red font which again conveys blood, violence and death.
We filmed both in and outside Barnsley sixth form college on the 23rd of November, for the scenes where the main character is attending college. On this day we brought the camera, tripod, the correct costume for the main protagonist and the script, along with all the necessary props (college bag, etc).
Some of the shots we took were long shots, close ups, and medium long shots. We used the editing technique of match on action to maintain continuity.
We enlisted the help of Connor to be an extra for our film, and also to assist in developing the stories mystery. We needed Connor as he would push the revolving doors so Chloe didn't have to (since Chloe's a ghost and can't).
Firstly we filmed a long shot of Louise (playing our main character, Chloe), making her way to college. We then filmed a medium long shot of Connor and Louise entering the college through the revolving doors. The sequence of the two characters walking into college is continued with a medium long shot from inside the college.
There were various risks on the day we filmed. There were risks of the cast and crew slipping, due to the weather conditions on the day we filmed. Another risk was the general public, cast and crew tripping over equipment.
Shot 1: Camera pans across Chloe's desk, showing her diary and a photo of her and Amy.
Shot 2: Camera continues panning to reveal Chloe in bed, she's sat bolt upright and looking terrified.
Shot 3: Medium shot of Amy staring at Chloe. Chloe believes that Amy is dead. Amy says "I miss you".
Shot 4: Medium close up of Chloe looking scared.
Shot 5: Close up of Chloe waking up scared, keeps seeing her cousin who she believes is dead.
Shot 6: Repeatedly sees her "dead" cousin.
Shot 7: POV shot of her seeing her cousin. Loud intense diegetic music, diegetic sound of her breathing.
Shot 8: Long shot of her at the bus stop, on her way to college.
Shot 9: Long shot of Chloe walking to college.
Shot 10: Long shot of Chloe's friends. Camera zooms in on them. Chloe walks over to them.
Shot 11: Shot-reverse-shot between Chloe and her friends. Reaction shot from of Chloe as her friends suddenly leave.
Shot 12: Her friends walking to class and leaving her as they ignored her.
Shot 13: Medium long shot of Chloe walking into class.
Shot 14: Long shot of the classroom.
Shot 15: Medium close up of Chloe sitting alone in class.
Shot 16: Camera pans, following the teacher as he talks. He asks a question and students put their hands up.
Shot 17: POV shot from the teacher. Teacher ignores Chloe. Medium long shot. Chloe-"I know Sir"
Shot 18: Close up of Chloe looking upset. Diegetic sound is muted out and you can hear her heart beating.
Shot 19: Medium shot pans and tilts, following Chloe out of the room as she storms out panicked. No one notices.
Shot 20: Shot cuts to a medium close up of Chloe looking flustered and panicked in the toilets.
Shot 21: Extreme close up of eyes, everything's distorted. Loud isolated heart beat-goes out of focus.
Shot 22: Medium shot that shakes, pans and tilts as she gets stabbed.
Shot 23: Canted angle/medium shot as Chloe is sat on the floor, curled up and very distressed. Fade to black.
Shot 24: Establishing shot of graveyard.
Shot 25: Long shot of Chloe walking to the graveyard.
Shot 26: Medium close up of Chloe bringing flowers to the grave. She bends down and places them in front of the grave stone.
Shot 27: Chloe looking sad as she mourns her friend.
Shot 28: Close up of Chloe moving flowers and pictures to see the name on the gravestone.
Shot 29: Close up of Chloe looking at her name on the gravestone.
Shot 30: POV shot. Scene goes back into a distorted flash back. Chloe looks and sees it's herself being stabbed and looks around and sees Amy watching.
Shot 31: Extreme close up of death date, camera pans to a picture of Chloe (on her own). Fade to black.
Shot 32: Credits.
We decided to do an online questionnaire as we would reach a wider audience. This allowed us to share it online, on social media, and get friends to share it with other friends. This was also much more easier to distribute as a physical questionnaire is much harder to hand out to a lot of people and copies are limited.
The first question we asked was their age. This is because we want a good variety of ages, especially those in our target audience to give us feedback. This is so we know which feedback to prioritise as our target audience are the ones who will most likely watch our film.
We then asked the gender of our respondents. This again is so we can have a good variety of results to see if different genders would prefer different things. This will overall enable us to produce our film aimed at both genders, with no bias towards the other, as both genders are in our target audience.
We then asked how often our respondents watch films a month. This has allowed us to see which age groups watch films more. From this we found that generally all age groups watch films, however teens and young adults tend to watch them more than the older generations.
The next question we asked was what genre of films our respondents generally watch. We found that there was a huge range amongst all ages, and there tended to be no relationship between age and the types of films people watched. However, we did find that more males watched action and adventure films more often, and there was also slightly more males who had a preference for horrors and thrillers (but this was not by much). By this we can conclude that since our film is targeted at both male and female, that both genders are likely to be interested.
We also asked our respondents where/how they most commonly watched film. We found that people most commonly watch films online (legally), this is an advantage for our film as we our distributing it onto YouTube which means our film will have a wider demographic as a lot of people watch films online. However, we also found that the second most common way of watching films is at the cinema and this is a disadvantage of our film because we are not distributing it to the cinema. Therefore we might have to reconsider where we distribute our film to. We will have to be careful of people pirating our film as the third most common way of watching films is by illegally streaming.
We also asked if our respondents understood our story line. This was important as we didn't want our audience to be confused while watching the film as this would take away the thrilling affect we want our film to have. Majority of our respondents said that they did understand our story line and the one respondent that said they didn't said it was because they "didn't understand how the girl thinks she's alive when she's dead", this is only a minority opinion and therefore based on this question, no major changes will be made to our story line because it is impossible to create a film that suits everyone.
The next question we asked our respondents was what age certificate they would give our film. We asked this as we wanted to ensure that our film was producing a thriller affect that most people would deem unsuitable for younger ages. Based on our responses, majority said they would give it a 15 certificate which is what we think is suitable for our film. However almost a quarter of our responses said they would give it a 12 or PG certificate which suggests to us that when filming and editing, we need to ensure that there is thrilling scenes.
We then asked what genre they would say our film is. The most common responses were horror, thriller, mystery and drama. All of these genres could be applied to our film in some way and since we gave our respondents the option to tick multiple boxes, we are happy with these results. Based on this, we believe that our film is giving off a thriller affect and our audience can recognise this from the description of a story line as horror and thriller were significantly higher than the other options.
The next question we asked was what music our audience would expect to hear. This was because for a thriller film you would generally expect to hear music that conveys the thriller aspect and so we wanted to ensure our respondents understood what would best suit our film. The most common responses were intense music, eerie music and orchestral music which is what we expected and is what we will be using in our film.
We also asked our respondents what age groups they thought our film would most suit. We asked this because we wanted to know who to aim the film at. From the results we found that it was majority older teens and young adults who our respondents believe our film is best suited for. Therefore we will be aiming our film as this age group.
The next question was one of the more important questions we asked, which was what improvements they would make. We got a wide variety of answers with many saying "nothing" or "I don't know" but some gave us some really good suggestions. Many people said we should show how the girl dies, which we are now going to do, and others say include a star cast. Unfortunately we are unable to have a star cast as we only have a small budget. Other suggestions says add more characters and make it less predictable. In our film we will be having more characters however we didn't state this in the description as we just gave a brief outline. Also we will try and make the thriller scenes less predictable by hopefully creating a constant build up of tension throughout the film and a large amount of tension and suspense in the more thrilling scenes.
We also asked our respondents if they would watch our film, majority of which said yes. This is good for us as it means our storyline is appealing to a lot of people, thus gaining interest and hopefully a guaranteed audience.
We then asked them why they answered what they did to our previous question as we wanted to know what they thought. People who said yes said things such as, because it's interesting, it sounds intriguing, and it's an unusual but interesting idea. Those who said no said for reasons such as, they don't like horrors, or the film doesn't appeal to them. We expected some people to say no as it is impossible to have a film that appeals to everyone.
We are currently getting some actors/actresses to be extras in our film, ready for us to start filming some more scenes next week. We are also planning on filming scenes at the house next week and should hopefully be finished with filming completely mid December.
We are also getting our props together ready for filming. We have just ordered a ski mask, which is one of the props we need for the murder scene.
We are also going to get some fake blood and a knife for the murder weapon. This may be difficult as sometimes fake blood can be hard to make look realistic, and we'll have to put it on the knife and surrounding area to give a realistic look.
There are a variety of props that we are going to use while filming Haunted. The first prop we are going to need is a diary, which Chloe uses when she goes home after seeing Amy while in her media studies class. She uses the diary in order to express her feelings with the events that happen in her day to day life, and how she feels about always seeing a friend that she presumes to be dead, Amy.
As Chloe is a student at a sixth form college, we will also need paper and pens as props for when she goes to her media studies lesson and takes notes about media regulation. As a student, she also has a backpack with her to carry the various things that she needs for college.
As there is a murder scene within our film, we will also require to have a knife, fake blood and a ski mask. There is a flashback scene involving Amy and Chloe, in which a robbery takes place in a house, and there is an altercation between them. The robbery turns into manslaughter when Chloe is stabbed by the robber and then dies.
For the scene at Chloe's grave, we will need to a fake grave headstone, and also flowers and a photoframe, with a picture of Chloe and Amy in it. During this scene, Chloe visits the grave, of who she believes to be Amy, however, at the end, it is revealed that it is, in fact, her grave.
A final prop is on Chloe's desk in her bedroom, she has a variety of different photoframes and pictures of herself and her friends, including Amy. These are used in a scene, to allow the audience to know that Amy, and the girl she keeps seeing in random locations, know eachother, in order to establish a relationship to the audience.
For my first draft of our film poster, i decided to use an image of someone placing their hand on glass and showing a shadowy silhouette. This creates a sense of mystery, as the viewer is unable to recognise who the person is. This theme is typical of a thriller film and is why I have chosen to include this in my poster, so that the theme is conveyed through the poster and is instantly recognisable to people, due to its iconography.
This is our initial title sequence shot list. However, as we go through the filming process and get audience feedback, some shots may be added or changed.
