Welcome to my blog where you will find a record of background research and planning behind the slasher opening production - Our working title is 'Doctor' Our opening is influenced by Mad House Also you will find my colleagues blog pages where there will be additional information. Please feel free to leave any helpful comments.
This is our screening for our core target audience through this we were able to get constructive feedback from our target audience. We managed to get a screening in our classroom as our peers were very helpful to give up their lesson time for us.
We asked the following questions:
Overall thoughts
What they liked about the film
What they would change and why
If they were to make this film how would they do it differently
In our film, at the beginning we provide exposition, as our film is inspired largely by Halloween we felt that we should take inspiration from the film. Therefore we provided the location at the start of our film opening saying 'High Royds' this was to introduce the film and to give the audience a sense of where the location is.
We then took another inspiration from Halloween and provided
another bit of exposition with providing the times/dates of when
the scenes are. This also gives the viewer a sense of time and
information. As the film is not continuous exposition is needed for the viewer.
Here is the titles of the film SAW it is a sequence of titles after the short introduction, just like our film. It has the effect of running blood down the screen then has the letters in blood like effect, this is the kind of inspiration that gave us to do our titles and what our titles are going to look like.
In the titles of Halloween it introduces two of the main characters, with their name in big letter the 'in'. This is because the names of these two are either recognised or are main parts in the film. As me and Curtis Tiplady are both recognised names in our media society from doing the swede and the micro-drama, we are going to do the same as this
Here is our opening shot, here we give the audience a view of the mental asylum, this was to give an insight into how big of an escape this is as the size of the building lets you know that it is a large scale asylum, it also provided exposition to our audience. The reason we chose this building is because since a few years ago it has been a fully functional mental asylum. this we thought was absolutely ideal for our opening as we feel it still has the eery buzz about it with its dark, mysterious look about it.
Mad house opening
We saw an opening shot used in Mad House and thought that our opening shot could be similar but we would change the context. However, it will still have the same effect of providing exposition to the audience.
POV shot
Here we used a Mercedes car. We used this to signify how old the character is as he is a Dr in his early thirty's, using a Mercedes would anchor his age to our audience, this is a method of age representation we used. We filmed our doctor getting out of the car and locking it to signify to our audience that he had just driven back from the asylum in a state of equilibrium.
Halloween POV shot
Like the POV shot in Halloweenwe wanted our audience to feel involved and get the sense of anticipation with a shot through the bushes. As in our film opening just like Halloween there is the idea of the killer stalking their victims.
This shot is one of my favorite shots of the killer, i think it is very effective, building suspense as we break some of the narrative enigma to the audience showing the full body of the killer. we did this by arranging the position of Curtis (the killer) by shouting out of the window so he was in the right spot. We managed to get the perfect position and used an outdoor light to make the shot more effective to show the killer more clearly.
In our opening it goes against Todorovs theory of starting with equilibrium. Our film starts with complete dis-equilibrium as there is massive panic as a psycho patient has escaped the asylum. it goes from dis-equilibrium to equilibrium when we go straight to the house, this is the complete opposite to Todorovs theory. We decided to do this as we thought it would be a very effective opening to the film to get the audience on the edge of their seats. In our opening we used some binary opposition, One of the main binary oppositions was the Dr and the patient. The patient is kind of pushed out of society, earns no money and a low social class. then we have our Dr who is a high social class as his job is a very respectable job. He drives a mercedes and looks to have money with his clothes. Then we have the patient with no job, mentally ill etc.
The exposition
We also provided exposition as we were very influenced by Halloween. We also thought that we needed to provide the audience with information about where they were as it was just an outside shot of the building. it also gives the time as we later on went to the house in the opening, this gave the audience a sense of time in the opening
Here we have a shot from in the cupboard it shows the costume of the Dr. As he is a Dr it is a smart uniform he is wearing, i chose chino trousers and a smart shirt buttoned up as this is what was in our mind as a stereotypical Dr from first hand experience and from watching television. To add to the costume we used my Driving license as an identity for the Dr, as we thought it would add to the stereotypical look.
Here we have the bottom half of what our scream queen was wearing, we asked her to wear shorts as this shows a lot of skin especially with the top she was wearing as well. This was used as it is very stereotypical of the scream queen archetype to be blonde and wear revealing clothes.
This is the killer running from the Asylum. The killers costume, is inspired by the patients escape. He is wearing the Dr's lab coat and was the reason he was able to escape by disguise. We went to the schools biology department and they let us borrow the lab coat, this worked very effectively
Ben gave us some really positive feed back on the start of our opening and credited our build up of the tension through our use of digetic and non digetic music and sound effects. the editing also is well done which is what we were trying to achieve a continuity for our opening. However for improvements our opening is very long and Ben suggested that we could shorten some of the takes, this is what we had considered previously in our other rough cuts but it is clear that some takes still need shortening and we can see that too. Also a bit more sound was suggested which we had also taken into consideration previously but what i think Ben means is sound linking scenes together for example the scene form the mental asylum to the scene of the doctor getting out of his car. Additionally Ben said that we could include a basic soundtrack which could work well with the opening to the film and the opening to the opening of the credits.
Therefore there are a few points we can take form this constructive piece of feedback which will be put into context of our final film. As well as our feedback as a group we feel that there are still tweaks that can be changed in our opening but feedback has helped massively on all of our rough cuts. This way we know what to improve and that it will be to our target audiences taste as our feedback was from people between the age of 15-26 as we don't want to change anything that hasn't been suggested unless we are confident that it will be effective.
Our first convention was the sound of the crows as heard in the opening of The last house on the leftwe felt this would link in well as the patient escaped the mental asylum as the sound of crows screeching is recognised with horror which is why it links well with our opening. As we wanted the audience to have some anticipation to what was going to happen.
Rock Music
Another convention linked in with sound was the rock music that we used. The music comes from Red Hot Chili Peppers - Cant Stop. Rock music was used in The Return of The Living Deadwhich is why we used to use this convention. It also links in with the death as the music stops as the 'scream queen' is killed.
Here is the trailer for Return of the living dead you
can hear from the trailer the rock music which is used
during the movie: http://youtu.be/wylpeAXYcBQ
POV shot
The POV camere shot was another convention we used however this convention has not been used many times in films we have seen apart from Halloweenwhich is where we got our shot form as our killer hides behind the bushes to give the audience a sense of view from the killer
The convention of a false scare is not just apparent in most slasher films but in almost any horror film as well. The false scare brings up the audiences sense of anticipation to then relieve them to make the real scare of a much more significance to the audience.
The final girl was a new addition to our film opening, the convention of a scream queen is in a lot of slasher movies. We took our convention from Nightmare On Elm Streetthe scream queen wasHeather Langenkamp who played Nancy. To anchor our final girl we used revealing clothes and made it apparent to our audience that she was sexually active.
With our final girl we also played up to Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory. She believes that audiences have to view characters form the view of a hetrosexual male. Our camera lingers on parts of the female body in context of a males reaction. We used this to appeal to a wider male audience.
Weapon
We took our convention of the weapon from Halloweenthe iconic kitchen knife, because its nothing out of the un-ordinary it is just a standard kitchen knife, but it becomes a lot more scarier when it is put in to context of killing someone which is the effect we tried to achieve.
This is our film poster for The Asylum we chose to show very little detail about the film itself. We included an image of the knife and the killer to signify the slasher genre. Also to signify the slasher genre we used a san serif font. As we have looked at previous slasher posters such as Psycho. We also went with the red and black which signifies horror.
Our response:
Giving the feedback we got for our trailer we were really pleased as we knew our primary target audience had clearly enjoyed our trailer giving the amount of likes we received. Also our target audience had clearly followed our preferred reading as the trailer had created suspense as you can see from the comments above.
