The Watcher completed film opening

Film Opening

Preliminary Task

Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from its full product?

Question 6: What have you learnt about Technologies from the process of constructing the Film Opening?

Question 4 & 5: What would be the audience for our Film Opening & How did you attract your audience?

Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute our film opening and why?

Question 2: How does our film opening represent particular social groups?

Question 1: In what ways does your Film Opening use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real Media products?

The production of our film opening was influenced by a few other horror films that we watched during the Production Process. We studied different films, analysing the codes and conventions used. This included the opening titles, types of shot and the uses of editing to create different emotions and moods in the audience. 

One film that heavily influenced us was Se7en. We took notes on the opening titles, looking at the colour, positioning, font and transitions used. The opening titles of Se7en have create unusual emotions in the audience, due to the flickering text and distorted font and positioning. As our film is a Paranormal Horror, we used the flickering Text technique to create a sense of uneasiness and fear in the audience. We also positioned the titles in the corners of the frame. This also creates uneasiness, as titles are mainly positioned in the centre of the frame.

Our opening titles were also influenced by the film Scream. The opening titles of Scream used a false jump, to instantly create fear and tension in the audience. I found this very effective, as it creates fear in the audience early on in the opening. Because of this, we added a loud static sound in our opening, acting as a false jump.

Another heavy influence on the production of our film was Dead Wood. The first shot in Dead Wood is a panning shot, establishing the secluded location where the film is set. The character then runs past, stamping in a puddle as he passes the camera. This also acts as a false jump, and helps represent the urgency of the character and the danger that he is in. 

Construction: Sounds

During our editing, i was given the task to find sounds to add to our opening two minutes of our horror film, i had the inspiration to find Foley sound which we learned about in 'Importance of Sound' in a previous blog post. I used the website free sound which is a collaborative repository of creative commons licensed audio samples in which the audio files aren't copyrighted allowing them to be used freely by anybody. 

I started off by searching for generic key words that linked to particular scenes in our opening scene, so for this particular one i searched the clips that matched the sound of the undergrowth and the pace of which our characters are tracking through the forest, this particular sound clip was very useful for this scene, but it wouldn't be suitable for our chase scene due to the fact the pace of the footsteps wouldn't sync properly and it wouldn't give the desired effect. 

I also tried to use broad generic key words to search for our running scenes, however nothing that came up was particularly useful which is a downside to the user created clips of free sound. Luckily our running audio from the scenes where clear enough to be used and it created the desired effect which we wanted. 

Another audio clip we needed was a tinny sounding white noise, we tried to record white noise with the external microphone on the video camera itself but with too much background noise the clip wasn't very persuasive, so we opted to use free sound to find a higher quality sounding clip which we found in abundance. The reason for the white noise is that it is the link that associates our protagonist, the white noise will be used to indicate that 'He'  is close...

Construction: Filming and Re-Filming

Our first time filming was a disaster. On the day of filming we made sure to leave with plenty of light still left in the day, and before we knew it we where recording in pure darkness. not only this but the clips we captured and played back where unfortunately bad quality and shaky. Along side these clips which we played back on the camera looked usable, however imported on to a bigger screen we can spot even more issues with these clips pretty much leaving all our clips rendered useless.

First Filming attempt.

Our first few clips where different camera angles and movements of our Chase scene. This particular shot was a tracking shot following our character, on play back we though that the blur around the character that is in focus created a decent chase scene with the effect that he is running for his life, the distortion adds to the effect that he is being chased.

This was one of the upwards panning spin shot, it looked effective showing the trees towering over adding to the effect that this forest is isolated. However on second viewing the exposure and lighting was awful, the focus was too much on the sky and light rather than on the trees which we were hoping for, This could of easily been fixed if our camera had a manual focus mode to help change the exposure.

Out of all our footage, this still shot looked the most professional, the idea of the still shot just being to show how isolated and quiet this forest was before the disturbance. a few more of these would also be effective in being used to input titles for our opening sequence.

We also attempted more angles of our camp site, this particular one was a crane shot moving from the bottom on the right hand side of the tree upwards in an arch towards the top left hand side of the tree, this shot looked pretty good but the fact that it was shaky and it wasn't smooth no matter how hard we tried.

This was one of our last shots before it quickly went pitch black. This was a panning shot from the treelike down towards the entrance of the tent, this footage was where we would introduce our main characters.

Quickly you can start to see that our footage has become darker, which is very noticeable in contrast to our last scene. Another panning shot was used to frame this shot. It came in from an angle hiding the camp and slowly reviled the scene which i thought looked pretty effective.

However, as the sun set and it became darker our shots looked more menacing and more horror-esque. this particular shot was a point of view of our character locking their phone, the close up of the phone foreshadows the importance of the device at a later date.






Before we knew it, there was not enough light to capture the detail we needed, it's quality is also extremely poor along with the last few clips as it started getting dark, the footage was grainy and had so much noise that the floor looked like it was shaking which was not a desired effect.





Running Scenes Re-done

Since our filming was a disaster, me and Jake went out to film more running scenes, these were much better than the first ones in terms of the lighting and quality. We also got a lot of running scenes so we have a lot to work with shot wise so if we don't like a particular shot, we have another shot to replace it with. We also found it much easier to get the running scenes because we didn't have to focus on the other scene as well meaning we had more time to find a decent location, get a lot of different angles,movements and shots. Overall, these running scenes were much better and better quality because we took more time on these because like i stated before, we didn't worry one bit about getting shots for the other scene as well.

Construction:Fonts

Before we made our edit to our film, we looked at different font styles that we would like to consider for our opening of our film, i have got screenshots of different font styles that we may use and I will be highlighting the good points about these fonts and the bad points of these fonts as well. As you will be able to see, these fonts are very similar in terms of the background and the colour of the writing. This is because the white and black are very simple to do and they are very effective as well and looks more uneasy for the audience to watch.

This is the first font we though of using and this font is called Onyx. We may not use this font because it looks like it won't intimidate the audience and this font has no specific meaning, therefore we may not be using this one.



This second is called Nanum Brush Script. Our group really liked this font and this will be the font used in our final piece, this is because some of the letters look distorted and uneven, creating a unsettling mood for the audience; similar to Se7en.

This third font is called cambria and we thought just a basic font would look good but we decided that it didn't and is going to be the one we definitely don't use because just like the first one we had, this one creates no meaning for the audience and it won't affect them at all.






Our final font was called chalk duster. At first we thought this font was really good but looking back at it now, we are not too sure if we want to use this because it looks a bit too cartoony and not suitable for a teen horror film because the audience will feel that the film will not be scary because the use of titles doesn't make the film scary to watch.







We also looked at Art of the title as well to get an idea of different titles that we may use when creating our opening titles. By looking at famous film opening titles, we were able to make our decision based on this site. Particularly Se7en which our titles look like a little bit with the black background and white writing, we also didn't want to add any special effects such as moving because it may look unprofessional and not very good at all.