This week in AS Media Studies we made our preliminary assignment which was to remake a 30/40 second clip of a student horror film from lat year. Amber, Abby and myself remade 36 seconds of a film called "The White Room" about a girl who becomes possessed when she and her friends hold a seance.
I think that our preliminary assignment shows that we can hold a steady shot as the different shots we used were all straight and didn't wobble. We used a variety of shots such as close ups, mid shots, and long shots, we didn't however use any high angle, low angle or canted angle shots. I think that these may have helped the impact this clip had on the audience as a high angle would have made Amber look slightly more vulnerable. We also used a camera track to follow Amber as she stood up. To help us frame the shots correctly, we used the grid on the camera screen to help see that everything was positioned rightly and placed along the Golden Mean, following the rule of thirds. We managed to keep a decent amount of head room and lead room in each shot.
For our editing, we used iMovie HD. We managed to cut the amount of shots that we recorded down to the vital few and edited them down to the vital few that we needed. I think that they flow reasonably well together. The main issue we had with continuity was that from one shot, Amber's cardigan sleeve is down, the next it's up, then down again. As we only noticed that this morning it is too late for us to go and re-shoot and we should have watched the footage back when recording to see if we had any issues like this. The only editing technique we really used was changing the exposure of the film to make it look very white and exposed. I think that this worked really well as it is a similar technique to the one used by the original students with the original film.
We used stripes for a lot of our costume; Amber had a stripy cardigan and striped socks and we also drew striped on her face for the possession marks. I think that this suits the sub-genre we chose as dark colours contrasting with white is seen in different possession based horror films. It took us a while to find a location to film our horror in, this is because we needed to find a white room and none of us knew where we could find one. We ended up filming in the college faith room. We were very lucky we were able to film here and had to follow strict rules. I do think it was worth this as the white room really helped the effect this has on the audience as it looks like the sort of place you would find in a mental asylum. The actress we used in our film was actually one of our group. this was because we had issues trying to find someone who would be in it willingly, however, I do think Amber did a great job of being a possessed person and looked right for the part as she has long hair which was easy to mess up and skin that was easy too draw the markings on.
As my contribution to the finished project, I helped to make the shot list before we filmed by sitting and watching the 40 seconds we were going to remake and going through each shot with Abby slowly and noting down how long each one was, what happened, what sort of angle and the camera movement. This took us around 15-20 minutes to do. Me and Amber did the test shots together of her make up for when she became possessed. I also did the majority of filming during the making of it. During editing, I imported the footage and added a few sounds after it had been cut down, though we did remove some of them as Abby found some that would suit it better. A few improvements could be made to the finished film by assuring there isn't as much background noise as there was, e could cut it our during editing and record the heavy breathing and scream over the top. This would make the film seem a little bit more professional.
When it comes to my final horror film coursework, I think that I would like to change the sub-genre I am working in to a slasher film. This is because I think that a possession film would actually be quite difficult to come up with, whereas a slasher film seems a little easier. We will also get to use different props such as fake blood. I'd like to stay working in the same group I worked in as I think we worked quite well together and live close enough to each other that it isn't impossible to meet.
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