Making our titles and sound

The first part of our titles was our production company. We decided to have a jumpy effect on this at the start of the film. The font we used was American with pointy/sharp edges. We decided that throughout our film we wanted to have credits on a black screen and with red font. We thought the red font would be more blood/violent and horror looking if they ran throughout the opening. Then "presents"comes up on black screen as the eerie sound builds and merges with the sound bridge of the train at the start of the film.

We decided to have our title at the end of our sequence to make it more exciting. We made the title bigger than the other titles. At the end we edited a creepy bang for the title when it appears onto the screen. The red font emphasises the blood from the start when the girl is laying by the tree covered in blood, and it also relates to our production name "Blood rush Productions". We didn't put any effects on some of the titles, because we wanted it to be a bang in the audience's face.

Creating the sound was the toughest part for me.

Our group spent about an hour just searching for horror/eerie/scary free to play music, but in the end

we couldn't find anything that we were pleased with, so we had no choice but to make it. The first thing we did was take away any unnecessary sounds from our opening sequence, for example the strong wind sound. We then loudened  the sound of the train, and then began to make our music. To make the music sound horror like, we changed the pitch, at some times the pitch would be higher than others,depending on the best parts which would build tension for the

                      audience.

We wanted our music to suit the action and to fit with it perfectly, we worked really hard to create a scary atmosphere and to get the audience's blood rushing. Our music is non-diagetic and is therefore made to play with the emotions of the audience, and it's to make them feel scared and nervous. We made the sound to exaggerate our action, but as well kept the natural important sounds in the background too, for example the telephone ringing or the girl screaming. I am very proud with the sound for our opening sequence, as it juxtaposes the quiet area that the girl wakes up in and makes it more emotional. The sound we created can often sound calm at times, but when it rises and gets louder  gradually it makes the audience aware that something bad is going to happen when they don't expect it. I am proud with the sound we have created, although it should be much more less repetitive, and perhaps there could be more sounds.

Meeting #10 Finishing our film

This was our final meeting of editing our opening sequence. Getting the shots in the right order and cutting them down took a lot longer than I had expected. The first thing we had to do was to edit it continuity and get the timing right, this was obviously the most important thing to make sure the storyline makes sense. To separate our scenes and to show the time passing me added a black screen with credits on, this was to separate the scenes to make it less confusing and less obvious. To separate time between the actual shots we used a cross fade transition.

The next thing we edited was lighting and speed.
Using the colour balance tool we adjusted the lighting to make certain shots look brighter and others darker. Sometimes we had to speed certain shots up, but we then decided to speed most of the killer house scene because we wanted the audience to see the pace the killer lives his life at, and we wanted the audience to feel as if they were in his shoes. One major problem was the daytime forest scene, this was the longest scene and we decided to cut it out completely as it's not the most important scene, unlike the other three scenes.

Meeting #9 Editing and trying out sound.

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At the start of this meeting my group and I started by testing out sounds/instruments in garage band. We found that the ambient sounds were the best. There was this one called ship ambiance but garage band wouldn't let us loop it. We had many goes at this, and we found it hard to be satisfied. Another thing that we did while editing was take away any unessential sounds like wind/ dogs barking / anything that wasn't related to our opening sequence. Making and fixing the sound was a lot more challenging than I had expected. But we did this with no complaints as we knew how getting the sound right would polish it for good.

Also when making our sound we created a variety of low sounds/high sounds and put them all together on garage band. We made sure that the pace of the sound matched with the pace of the action in the opening sequence.
The pitch rised astonishingly when the victim got closer and closer to the killer until it eventually dropped down again as the next scene began. In garage band we made our sound using one main tune which will play throughout the whole sequence and just added on other sounds in certain areas which could mostly grab our audiences attention.

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Meeting #8- Filming the first scene

When filming our first scene we started off by filming a shot of the train going by. This was extremely hard at the time because it was hard to focus the camera while panning across the train as it went past. We then moved onto the shot of the girl(me) and shot from different distances for later editing. My group think it's really important to take as much of the same shot as possible, but using as many different angles to see what works best. We then filmed a close-up of my facial expressions showing I looked a bit uncomfortable and showed how I felt about waking up on the bench in the middle of the night where nobody is around. After that it was the shot of the phone, this was our first extreme close-up of the text received from Olivia Watson's mum saying "Where are u I am worried" this is effective as it sort of makes the audience question whether there this is a sign that she isn't going to make it home.  I then came up with this idea of a shot of the swing moving to give the audience an idea that someone, somewhere is watching
or following Olivia, and that she is not safe.

Only a few seconds after that the girl straight away turns around and the killer is standing right in front of her, this is effective as the audience must haven't expected it to be so soon, after seeing the shot of the swing moving from behind the girl, the audience would have suspected that the killer was more or less behind her rather than in front. We took these range of shots to shock the audience and to make them jump. The first shot of the killer is when he right away goes at the girl with his knife to attack her, that is the first thing the audience see the killer do. My group thought that it would be interesting to get a shot of the victim up against the tree covered in blood, when you think about it, the audience don't actually 100% know if the victim is dead or not, just because she has blood on her stomach and the shot of her being stabbed quite a bit, doesn't actually prove to the audience, that she isn't alive. This shot sets up a big mystery to our opening sequence, and the office scene which comes after, about the girl missing, makes the audience wonder if they will find her body alive or dead.
                                                               I am very proud with this meeting, because our group just got
straight to work with so many ideas and just got on with it. We took so many shots, which will be helpful later on for our editing as we now have a wider choice.

Meeting #7 Editing our sequence !

Because of a incident that happend
on final cut (our project dissapeard)
our group firstly had to import our
sequence back onto the computer.
So we did this, and then straight
after we began marking the parts
and putting them together in the
right order again.

While editing, we thought about the
feedback we got from our class.
We focused on editing the forest
scene first, because there were 
many comments/complaints on
 that part of our sequence. So we
basically tried shortening each of
the walking shots(of Daniel and 
Alex as detectives). We found that
it looked less boring without the huge
amount of walking, we also decided
that we will be adding more action
to that particular scene. 

While editing, we figured out something
interesting and new. We found out that

you could change the size of the part

and that you could enlarge it to see it 

better. We also discovered a much

quicker way to trim and cut away

middle bits inbetween shots, this

while hopefully make our editing much

more quicker. 

We then moved onto the killer scene.

We decided that the close ups in the

scene would look really effective if they

were to go faster than usual, to show that

the killer is trying to get something done

as soon as possible.

 I really learnt a lot from this meeting and I enjoyed it
very much. The programme final cut is slowly becoming
more and more familiar to me, and as we edit i'm 
learning all kinds of adjustments. In a way i'm glad
we had to start over, this is because what we did
looked better than the first, this is probably because
we knew exactly what we wanted.







While editing we found a passing time 
effect, which we placed between 
certain shots so that the audience
don't get confused.



At the start I was  teaching Alex

how  to cut out parts and I was helping

him and Daniel put it together.

We decided it would be fair if we

were to take it in turns to edit the

shots  etc.


Final cut I found was a much easier and better programme to use for our opening sequence.
Imovie was the first software I used for our
preliminary "Feed the fish" task. I have noticed
my editing skills have improved since our preliminary task.


While editing, me and my group practised 
many ways of editing. We saved our project three times, one using short and fast shots and the other was longer with not so many fast cuts.
We did this just because we wanted to try new ways of editing, but as well as keep the original looking sequence. 




I personally find editing fun and I like learning the new effects of it as we go along. While editing me and my group decided that we needed other certain things to be done.

We found it hard to sometimes hear the
audio/dialogue so therefore we thought it
would be best to use voice overs, also the
lighting in some shots wasn't as clear as 
it could've been, so therefore my group
will take them shots again and then edit them
back into the story order.
We also spoke about ideas for our sound/credits & titles, as we haven't yet had time to get started in these areas, but sure will
in our next editing meeting.

Meeting #6

Our first proper shooting meeting. During this meeting we found some really good places to shoot around the forest. We made many mistakes, but just kept on recording the same shot over and over again, until we were satisfied with it. I was in charge of the camera for this scene, and Alex and Daniel were acting out the scene. We discoverd a high up tree and I decided to film through the branch to get a higher up shot of Alex and Daniel walking. This took a couple of hours, definitely longer than we had expected. When filming we had to be very patient, as many people were walking their dogs in our area, so it took longer. 

When filming this scene, we changed our story a little, as we found new things to do. I am very happy overall with the outcome of this forest detective scene. After filming this forest scene, we went straight to the office to film right away, making sure we had everything with us, we then set it up and then began to shoot. We decided to get a close-up of the article coming out of the printer, to create some diagetic sounds within our opening sequence. We also panned across a whole load of other articles about "missing people" so that it would strongly show the audience that these are important detectives and that there job is to find the missing people, and solve the crimes.

                                                                                  I then filmed the detectives walking into the office, and also filmed shots of them getting ready. My group used a variety of close-ups and medium shots but not so many long shots as we don't think they make as much of a big impact. One long shot of the detectives suit is probably enough. 

To end the scene, me and my group decided to have the sound of the door closing, but we had it as a sound bridge instead, we did this by having the detective pin up the article, and while filming the article pinned up, the audience hear the sound of the door, but don't actually see what the detectives are going to  do next,which raises ideas and
questions in the audience's head.

Meeting #5

In our 5th meeting our group gatherd round the apple mac and opened final cut for the first time. We started to fiddle around, exploring new transitions,effects,fonts etc. We decided to focus on our title and credits to start off with, and played about with the different fonts/colours. This was just a way to get familiar with the software so it doesn't make it harder in the long run. In this meeting we also decided to use the production design that I produced and we tried putting it into final cut and editing it a bit by adding on more words. 

For our opening sequence we are not yet sure if we are going to have our production 
name/design at the start or not. We know that we are going to have credits running through it though. The reason why we made a production company is because we thought that other similar movies of the same genre would be more likely to promote our film.We had so much fun trying out different fonts, trying to find the perfect one to suit our  title of our opening sequence, and of course our genre of our film. We also tried out different colours and decided that we really liked white and red. Our group were choosing  between sans serif font or serif but we are still not sure.                                                                                        

Meeting #4 Our Storyboard

In this meeting this is where our group got together and took pictures of our storyboard and then we spread them out in order into a word document and then uploaded that to our scribd account. After this meeting we then realized we needed to add writing to the storyboard aswell. We also thought that when we're filming if anything changes around, we might produce another storyboard which is exactly like our filming, but this was our first detailed one, we may stick to as much as we can.

Detailed Storyboard for Scribd[1]

Meeting #3

In our 3rd meeting a lot of thinking had been done. We thought about the best order for our scenes and decided all the shots for our opening sequence. We worked together really hard and quickly in this meeting, as we had little time. We all shared ideas for shots and decided on our dialogue/scripts. We then began to draw out the storyboard making the drawings easy to understand our story. We also decided on our credits sequence which we said would run throughout our film,so we also added spaces for this into our storyboard. This meeting was very fun and successful. We used post it notes and just stuck them all together in order, but of course we numbered them
 first to make sure it was in the exact
right order, and that none of them would go missing.

During this meeting I shared my ideas for the
story with Alex and Daniel. I made sure that
my thoughts were heard and that we all had
agreed with the decisions made. In this meeting we discussed our titles/credits &
how we would fit our storyline together.

We decided on having four seperate scenes,
which some are longer than the others, but with not too much dialogue and more action towards our story, to make sure the opening
is understandable and that our audience get
a good idea of what the plot of our story is.
We concluded on a alley scene (where the
girl gets stabbed), an office scene (where the detectives are looking at an article the next morning, a forest scene (where the detectives find the girl's dead body after searching for clues of who the killer may be), this scene will be leading on into the night time, where we will have it cutting between the detectives finding the dead body, and the killer arriving home to commit another murder by getting online and setting up a trap, by hacking onto Olivia's facebook account and arranging to meet up
with her best friend.

Meeting #2

For this meeting we headed towards the forest and alley, our first two locations to practice shooting.

We did this because we wanted to make sure that we could sort out exactly what/where in the forest we are going to shoot at. Our group tested the camera, to see how clear our nightime shots would be, to make sure that it was possible to film there at night. At first we thought that the main areas in the forest were way too dark for the camera and that it would be impossible, so we thought of changing our location. But then Daniel discovered a light on the camera, which helped us a lot when filming our nightime scenes. In this meeting, our battery ran out super quick, so luckily it was just a quick practice with the camera. In our actual filming we will make sure that it is fully charged, and that the shots are clear.

During this meeting I played the character

Olive Watson for our the alley scene of our

opening sequence. We discovered that

Malden Manor forest had a interesting

looking pathway with a river beneath it, 

and a bridge. Daniel practiced shooting

me walk across the bridge and into the

opening of the forest. 

On this meeting we practiced many types

of shots, for example we got Daniel to

do a POV shot of him as the killer watching

me (Oliva Watson) the victim walk across

the bridge. While Daniel was filming this

shot, he made a sound of the branches

ratteling as he was inside a bush in the forest

(the killer's hiding place)this came out 

pretty effective and we may use it in

our actual proper filming.

While Daniel was shooting me sat on a bench,

we concluded that the natural yellow lighting

from the lampost matched really well with the

mood of our opening sequence, so we 

decided this would definitely have to be

a good place to film me (Oliva Watson).

While filming I took all these shots of branches,trees,pathways, all possible

places we could shoot at. We then 

later discussed which areas were most

affective and stuck to them. I think our 

chosen location  is good, as it is very

spacious and not many people are around

late at night, which made the filming a lot

easier. Whilst we were filming we also

made sure people didn't see our props

as they could have been seen as offensive.

Overall this meeting has helped us prepare

ideas for our actual shooting.

                                                                                           

group meeting #1 Storyboarding

In our first meeting we discussed our first ideas for our storyboard/script. We decided that

we're not going to have much of a script, because we don't want our audience to get

bored. We also began thinking about good close ups,long shots,mid shots,extreme long shots, and

all the others. It resulted in us deciding to use POV when the killer's in his room at home, but we also thought it would be interesting to get him on the camera wearing all black. This meeting was mainly just about getting a starting point, hopefully ideas will improve along the way.. =D

Audience Research to Genre

From my research there are so many age groups that like horror/crime movies. But, it's mostly people in their late teens/adult years. The gender for horror movies, there really isn't one as both females/males are just as thrilled by horror movies as each other, but for crime movies from my research they are more popular for males. Horror movies are really popular worldwide,especially in America and Britain. The people who watch horror movies like the idea of being scared, we want to thrill our audience with exciting shots. People who watch horror movies are often harder to please, because they expect to have the biggest reaction when watching the film. The goal is essentially to set up a good number of characters very quickly by purveying racial, sociological, and cultural stereotypes so that the audience immediately knows how to feel the second they see these characters. People who often get amused or entertained by the unusual/unrealistic incidents tend to love horror movies. Horror films are designed to elicit strong emotional reactions from viewers, including fear and dread; and this they do. Nearly everyone reports having been disturbed at some time by an image from a film or television program. Researchers have identified various motives for viewing horror films, including the need for excitement, the desire to feel intense emotions, and distraction from everyday concerns. Although dramatic films can fulfill some of these needs, movies depicting violence and horror have features that other forms of drama do not, including the violation of social norms and the portrayal of events seldom seen in real life. People rarely view horror films alone. Violent entertainment appeals primarily to males, and it appeals to them mostly in groups. For many young people and adults, horror films are a topic of conversation, a source of shared experience, and a means of self-presentation. Not everyone will like the blood and gore, but many may continue to watch because of other goals, such as demonstrating their ability to tolerate it, or the desire to master the threatening images.

Location Research

Off set location: Where you're using the outside world rather than setting up in a studio. This is cheap and of course the quickest way to film, and can be just as effective.

Popular settings for horror movies:

• Alleys
• Parks
• Dark areas
• Quiet Areas
• Forests
• Houses
• Anywhere unpredictable.

Atmosphere: Must be a very lonesome area where a dangerous and catious things could happen. Usually in horror movies, the locations are often sometimes local places, but based at night time. Most horror movies use a lot of low-key lighting, or natural dark lighting. There are a few which have special colour lighting to give a more emotional effect, but this is way more expensive and takes longer to set up.

Location 1: The forest.

The forest is a lovely place to be during the daytime, and obviously with the wonderful nature around people suspect that it's peacful,calm and relaxing. The forest is a ideal location and we chose it because, from my research it's a very popular location for British horror films, like Wrong Turn. The advantages to the forest is that there is absalutely no where the victim can run, once they've entered it. The forest is a easy place to capture or murder a victim during the night time where nobody is around to watch.

The trees add to the idea that there's no where to hide. In the forest there is no signal to call for help, the whole place is just hard to see past, especially with all the branches/trees and logs that will give the victim less time to run. Also from my research, forest's are easy to get lost into, as the place can sometimes pretty much look the same, and in the night the victim won't be able to see very clear what is around him/her.

Sometimes in horror movies, graffiti is used in the setting of the forest location. This is where the crime comes into our opening, when graffiti is used in a opening to a film the audience often get the idea that the film is set in a very dangerous but local area, where it's perhaps never really safe.

Cover's of films which use a similar setting.

Location 2: The office

The office is a very high standard place where detectives can easily get their job done, and quickly. Within showing an office in our film, we let the audience understand that they are important people and that they have quite upper class hard working jobs. The office shows that they have pretty much everything they need, and that they are working on a crime case.

A huge range of crime and even crime and horror films like ours, use a office at some point during their film.

Offices are quite professional, and for quite higher/upper class important characters when they are used in films. Once the office is shown, the audience know that there will be more happening throughout the film, and that more will be happening within that spacific location.

To make our location look realistic, and to suit our storyline, we decided to stick posters up around the office on the walls, and pinning them up, other real missing articles which are actually real life stories. This imidietly shows the audience that it is a film dealt with crime aspects. Also, the missing article gives the audience some idea that the world in our film is actually a very unsafe place to be, because of the amount of time spent on missing cases. The missing people posters also tell the audience that there are detectives within our film.

Actor and Genre Research

From my research blonde young girls are victimised in a lot of horror, thriller, or crime films.

It is a popular thing nowerdays, and the coulour of this innocent teenage girl's hair could

almost be a code to our genre. I researched that it is usually the beautiful and most

attractive blonde's that are victims of a tragic murder. Female victims are also very popular,

I think this is because they are more vunrable and tend to have less psychical power 

and less control. Also, the younger the less aware you are of the dangers around you, put

these together and there is your perfect victim. Young girls and women are very popular in horror/crimes.

The bright clothes respresent innocence and happiness, and contrast with the killer's. So therefore it's all about juxtapositioning them/ showing the different roles and personalities through Mis-en-scene which gives out the auidence our ideal genre.

From my research detectives are meant to look smart and neutral with a side of personality

and slight sofistication. In the less modern films, detectives seem to wear glasses and hats as

well as baggy trousers. But however, nowerdays the more popular Mis-en-scene for crime genres are suits,ties, coats and upper class businessy wear are used more frequently. Our job is to make sure the detectives stand out by far from the other characters, from the

bad and good, and make them seem although they're just doing their job. As you can see both

men come from different culural backgrounds. One is English, and the other is mixed race.

We thought this would be a good idea, rather than having two English white men.

It appears that the variety of ethnicity is important in films, as it shows the producer

isn't racist. From my research, the more cultural the film likely the more viewers. We got inspired by the movie "Men in black" this idea of two men from different cultures helping each other out and working

together.

The killer's identity is hidden behind his balaclava. We don't want the audience to see the face at the opening otherwise people will know who the killer is before the ending of the film, which makes it less exciting. For all the audience know, the killer could be one of the detectives, but we don't want them to know who it is as it's more fun for the audience to keep guessing. The killer's clothes contrast with the other character's clothing. The effect of the black clothes tell the audience that this is a bad character with a evil personality who does bad things. The black clothes tell us that the killer doesn't want to be seen during the night time, he wants to merge in with the dark so he doesn't get caught when murdering.