Evaluation of Film Opening.
I think that generally, our film opening ‘The Unseen’ follows the general conventions of a real film of the horror genre in many ways. My group and I did lots of in depth research and analysis of real film openings of the horror/thriller genre. Looking at genuine media products really helped us in terms of creating a narrative and a story board before we began the production for our project. One film we researched was the opening to The Ring, involving two young girls who are home alone when all of a sudden a creature comes out of the TV and kills one of them. This is very similar to ours as it begins with a young girl, of roughly the same age as the girls in The Ring being killed in her home; juxtaposing the safe environment of a home and in tern, emphasising the impact of the murder. Many horror films also use young girls of roughly the same age as the girl in ours such as The Ring and Sorority Row; this particular genre plays on the naivety and innocence of the stereotype as usually something bad happens to them, which is something we wanted to come across to the audience of our film. Also in many other horror/thriller films we researched, the beginning of the narrative starts with a murder. We used this idea as it is a common convention in a film of this genre and also creates tension straight away and leaves the audience asking questions that they hope will be answered in the following storyline.
Many of the camera shots used in our film are common to those used in professional horror films. An example of this is the establishing shot used at the very beginning of our film to establish the setting. This is also used in Sorority Row; giving the audience a hint as to where the horror will take place. I don’t think our film opening challenges any conventions of a normal horror film in terms of story, setting and camera work. We mainly wanted to use and emphasise the techniques already used in horror/thriller films and I think we were successful.
I think in our film, it emphasises the stereotype of particular social groups; mainly age and gender. The girl in our film is 17 years old which I think is an appropriate age for the actor to be. I think our film emphasises the stereotype of a young adult who is naive and slightly oblivious to the dangers around them. I think if we had chosen an adult to play the part it would not have had the same impact as it would have lacked a sense of innocence; which is a contrast to the horrific situation about to occur. Also because of the age of the girl in the film, the audience feel more sympathy towards this person which is the desired effect we wanted on the people watching. Gender in our film is also represented very stereotypically as it depicts females as fairly helpless and more likely to find themselves in a dangerous situation. If we had used a young boy rather than a girl I don’t think the audience would feel the same sympathy as they would towards a boy, simply because girls in horror films and generally in the media are depicted as the victims whereas males are portrayed as heroes. To get the best audience reaction we wanted to play on the stereotypes already created in the media; therefore we thought that using a young girl would fit the genre, suit the narrative and have a more dramatic effect in terms of sympathy and shock on the audience.
I think the audience for our film would be teenagers and young adults; roughly the same age as the girl in the film. The fact that our audience is aimed at people of the same age as the actress makes the film very relatable; many teenagers are left in their homes on their own and the fact that they can apply it to reality adds tension and thriller for the audience. While receiving feedback from teenagers who we wanted to aim our film at, someone commented “genuinely made my fear of bathroom that'll bit worse”. Young teenagers may have irrational fears that are challenged in horror films which is also something we wanted to achieve to leave the audience in genuine fear. Also perhaps a fear of the dark and being alone are phobias that may challenge the audience in our film. I think that our film both appeals to boys and girls. Girls can probably relate more the narrative where as boys are more interested in the bloody aspect of the film and the fact that part of our film involves a girl in the shower; which is also a common convention used in horror films to attract a male audience as well as female.
While taking part in this project, we used some technology that we were all very familiar with and used some software that none of us had any experience in before. I found using the video camera fairly easy as I have used technology similar to this in the past, after a few times of using it and becoming more comfortable with it I was very confident when using it to film. The only consistent difficulty we had was attaching it to the tripod as sometimes it became lose but we soon overcame that as well. To edit our film footage, we used a software called imovie and worked on Apple Macs. This was a new experience for all of us as we had never used one or the software on it before. We found the Macs easy to use however at first imovie proved to be fairly challenging for us. We found it difficult to add effects at first and soundtrack as we did not know how to import sound or add the effects available on imovie. However with the help of our teacher we became more aware and comfortable with the software as time went on and found the right effects and soundtrack to fit the horror genre. The aspect that we found most challenging of all was uploading our footage on the camera to imovie. When filming, the footage saved to the internal memory of the camera rather than the memory card we used, when we realised this was the reason we were unable to upload the film we had to move the files from the camera to the memory card and did this every time we filmed something new.
I think our film would be distributed by corporations such as Lions Gate entertainment. This company has a reputation of distributing films and television series mainly of the horror/thriller genre. Lions Gate has also distributed films such as Saw, Hostel and My Bloody Valentine. All of these films are of the horror genre and similar to our film opening. I think Lions Gate however aim their films at a more older, mature audience as some films such as Saw are very gory and not suitable for a younger audience; therefore maybe not appropriate for some of the teenagers our film is aimed at. I think if people are going to watch a film/TV series produced by Lions Gate, they have a general; idea of the genre and the content that will be in the film or television show. Our film meets these expectations and think ‘The Unseen’ is a film this company would be interested in distributing.
I believe that since producing our preliminary task, we have gained so much knowledge. When filming our preliminary task, many aspects went wrong and we were completely un-aware of how time consuming the filming and editing process is. We also did not plan our preliminary task very effectively and filmed without a story board or script. When it came to filming our main task, we wanted to ensure we were much more organised and left plenty of time before the deadline to edit the footage we had in case we needed to re film anything. We also learnt that for our main task we shouldn’t have much dialogue or acting because if this was not portrayed effectively, it may ruin the tension built up through soundtrack and other various techniques. We decided to not have any dialogue, as in many horror films conversation between people only occur at times when not much tension is built up. Also when producing our preliminary task, we did not spend much time editing or re-filming and parts that were not effective. For our main task we spent hours editing and re-filmed some parts countless times until we were a hundred percent happy with the content.
Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of this project, including the planning and research. Horror films are of great interest to me and filming and editing my own was a very exciting experience. The feedback we received from Facebook and Youtube was generally very positive and appealed to our target audience; some were also very scared which proves our film had our desired effect on the audience. One piece of feed back that suggested improvement was that the girl in the film should have not worn bracelets in the shower scene, as in some shots she has more bracelets on than in others. Apart from this continuity error everyone else seemed to enjoy our film and couldn’t find any major faults with it. I think that our hard work has paid off and our final outcome was worth the hard work.
