Planning: Animatic

This is our animation we have created to help us create the film.

Audience Research

Unfortunately one of our audience focus group is being uncooperative and refusing to comment on our music clips so we've had to replace the person with somebody else.

Animation process

During the animation process, I forgot to save the images from the video we created thus having to start again next lesson. This slowed down progress and put us slightly behind.

Audience Research Results

The results from our focus group with regards to the music we chose.

Audience Research

To make sure that other people would agree with our choice of music we asked our focus group for feedback on our decision.

Shot List

These are the shots we are using in the feature film, in order.
Shot 1: Close up of lighter
Shot 2: Close up of lighter with door in background
Shot 3: Long shot of the door to the room
Shot 4: Close up of the light switch including a pan whip to the light
Shot 5: Long shot of the zombie in the corner of the room
Shot 6: Long shot of girls feet in the door way
Shot 7: Extreme close up of the girls eye
Shot 8: Close up of feet running away
Shot 9: Long Shot of the corridor with doors on either side
Shot 10: Close up of a door on the left side of the corridor
Shot 11: Long shot of the corridor with doors on either side again
Shot 12: Close up of hand turning door key
Shot 13: Midshot behind the girl with the pan going down her body, door visible infront.
Shot 14: Close up of the door banging, zombie on other side.
Shot 15: Close up of girls feet, camera panning up her body.
Shot 16: Close up of Lighter flicking
Shot 17: Jump shot of lighter flicking
Shot 18: Close of lighter flicking this time door is in sight.
Shot 19: Close up of a clock on the wall, it's midnight
Shot 20: Close up of girl's ragged face
Shot 21: Titles

This is another piece of music we have found that will work really well with a horror film. I have gained permission to use this piece of music as I am good friends with the band and they are happy for us to use it.

Location

We have decided to use parts of the college for our locations, this is because we realise we have limited time and   would like to put more effort into the filming and planning of the story. The parts of the college we will use are the main corridor and an empty tutor room, also these areas will be relatively easy to gain permission to use.

Music

While I was drawing the storyboard up for the sequence, Dan was listening to non copyrighted music the college provided for us and found an excellent piece called 'Activate - X-Ray Dog 

Synopsis

This is a brief explanation of what will happen in our opening sequence: A girl (of target audience age) she hears a bang and walks into the room, flicks the light on and sees a huddled figure in the corner. The light turns off and she runs away, she can hear the figure advancing towards her. The she runs down the corridor, she stops, you can hear her heavy breathing, she flicks a lighter on infront of her face, you can see the figure behind her. The lighter flicks off, she yelps and then you hear a growl and a thud (her falling on the floor) then like an eating noise and then the lights come on and you can see her dead body, the titles appear across her body, music plays 'let it shine'. The titles will appear in some sections where light is shone.

Genre Research Summary

We have done research into other films of our chosen genre (horror) and have found key conventions to making an effective opening sequence.
The titles are often in red text with black background, as these are colour associated with scary things like death and Halloween, we have decided to incorporate this into our opening sequence.
The music is often slow to build up tension with non diegetic sounds such as screaming and heartbeats which help create enigma for the audience, we have chosen to use these in our piece of film.
We have found the characters of a horror film are often introduced as perfect with underlying mental issues or no main character is introduced and just clips of gruesome, scary scenes are played to explain part of the plot to the audience. Perfection is often contrasted with blood and inhumane imagery which we think is a good idea and might use this in our opening scene.
With regards to mise en scene, bright rooms inside large buildings are used to create tension and contrast with dark costume. Also zombie make-up (eg. blood, contact lenses) is one of our ideas to shock the audience like in films such as 'Dawn of the Dead'.
Popular narrative codes in horror films are often ellipses, with slow music and tension also creating enigma for the audience. These are what we will apply to our opening sequence.
Cinematography is a key convention to creating an effective horror genre opening sequence, close ups, varying fast pace to slow pace editing and slow zoom shots to force the audience to focus on important images that are vital to the film.

Target Audience Research

A member of our group set up a focus group and we asked them specific questions about what types of horror they like and why, this has enabled us to discover what type of horror we should create and what our opening sequence should include as some ideas appear to be quite popular. We will try and use the most popular ideas from these comments and incorporate them into our sequence.

Here are our responses:

Target Audience

We have decided that the demographic target audience for our opening sequence will be B, C1 and C2,  as it is a low budget film we cannot afford special effects so we have included enigma codes as this appeals to more higher class audiences, it requires them to think more about the plot of the film, it is more niche. Mixed Gender that like horror films and are quite intelligent so they can understand the twists in the plot which most horrors include.

The psychographic audience will be individualists, again because this is a low budget opening sequence and enigma codes are used to create a sense of narrative.