DEADLINES DEADLINES DEADLINES

There are now only 2 and a half days to get this project nailed on the head.

Tomorrow will be the 14th and we will be finsishing all the editing and completing the film.

There will also be a group meeting where we will discuss our experiences of making this film. After which this blog will be updated with all information about the film including how we made it, what programs we used, and what we'd do next time and what we wouldn't. It will also include the story board.

You can expect this post over the next few weeks.

Our Group

Adam Ridsdale aka. Rizla

Olivia Mottershead

Bruce Parkes

Contact - brucewparkes@yahoo.com

Lure

Setting:

We used Adams house as our setting. We wanted a suburban styled house which is a setting in most slasher films. We thought it would work with our style of film. The suburban house for us was fun to use because our film is different than your average slasher as the story-line takes the viewer away from prediction as you expect the man holding the knife to stab Liv, when she suddenly turns around with a gun and shoots him. We thought having all this drama going on in a nice country house would make it interesting to watch as you're left wandering what's going on and wanting answers.

Characters:

Liv - Woman with gun

Adam - Man in black with knife

Special guest:

Ollie Bolton - Man in tracksuit with gun

Inspiration

Here are a few of the Thriller films we took some inspiration from:

We used Scream for our inspiration because here we have a film that uses a woman as the main victim. This shows woman to be innocent and almost powerless so in our film we turned it around and made the woman the stronger character. In one part of our film we have Adam coming up behind Liv all dressed in black holding the knife. However, we put the focus on Liv, emphasizing her to be the more dominant character. She gives an expression of control showing she knows what is going on and is not naive. Naivety of a scenario is a common feature for victims in slasher films so we changed it around to give our piece more variety.

The opening to Scream is a fantastic build of suspense. We took impiration from this clip and wanted to use some of the ideas and conventions in our film. In our film we also have the blonde girl on the phone in a suburban home. We also took the use of costume and props (the knife)from this clip and used the same convention of a slasher in our film.

Other films that inspired us:

Here's a clip from Physco which I find to be the pinicale of a slasher moment. Me group and I took inspiration from this from not only what happens but the camera work too.

Genre & Error

Our film is a Thriller. We have a mysterious character entering a woman's house. We think he's about to killer when the film takes a turn and a twist leaves you wanting more. We've almost finished it now, we have a poster left to do and a few more tweaks in the film but otherwise we're close to it being complete.

We finished most of our filming the in the 2009 summer half term break, although we did use one weekend after to get some more footage to make the film longer. So far a problem for us had been lighting. We had originally wanted to shoot at nighttime so it would have been dark. However, we shot the film during the day and this caused us problems later when we were editing. We wanted to try and make it darker to create a more eery atmosphere. Unfortunately the film ended up being slightly green when we tried to make it darker. This also increased the noise of the film, making it blurry. We eventually decided that we would just use the fact that we shot in daytime and not try to make it anything else. Next time I film I will use more initiative and film at the time of day necessary.

Title

Our Film will be called,

Lure

Questionnaire

We had to do a questionnaire before we began making our film to get a better perspective of what people like and what they don't.

This is what we found.

Do you enjoy Thriller (genre)?

Yes: 9 No: 1

Do you like blood?

Yes: 2 No: 3 I don’t like it but I’m not bothered by it: 5

Do you relish is a tension build up?

Yes: 10 No: 0

Do you like murder in your films?

Yes: 7 No: 3

Are you a fan of dramatic irony?

Yes: 2 No: 5 It doesn’t enhance the movie, whatsoever: 3

Do you like scary movies?

Yes: 7 No: 3

Do you like scenes inside or outside?

Inside: 5 Outside: 3 Woodland areas do not make a movie good for me: 2

Do you like it how a girl dies and not a man in most movies eg, Scream

Yes: 5 No: 1 I have no strong feelings either way: 4

From this questionnaire we learned that people do tend to like horrors and thrillers. We asked five boys and five girls aging from 15 - 20 when carrying out this questionnaire. We can also see from this that horrors/thrillers 'lure' in a relatively younger audience. Also the only people from the questionnaire than weren't so interested in horror and gore where the girls we asked which goes to show that perhaps these kind of films are designed for a more boyish audience. The information we gained from the questionnaire promoted us to have the genre of our film a thriller. We also used an attractive blond actress holding a gun as the main source of interest to bring in male audiences.

Preliminary Task

This is the first film we ever made together. The idea of this task is to learn about how the angles work and how continuity errors can make a film look just awful. We wanted to get the sound of Livs footsteps in order without there being a distortion in the sound and we accomplished this by editing the shots so they lined up perfectly. We didn't want a boring film so we threw in some bizarre dialogue.


This was filmed in the Berkhamsted School Art department building.

Click here to be taken to the Berkhamsted School Preliminary Task Playlist.