Friday, 25 November 2011

Photos

Went to the location of our photo shoot, and hopefully film set. The woods surrounding Kelly's house were a perfect location for the set. We walked into the woods and took our relevant photos that corresponded with our storyboard shots. We all acted our parts and took turns with using the camera.

Our shots varied from us entering the wood, all of us together, then we moved on to being separated and the shots of our 'ghost' Mary, who was played by Katie. With the camera however it was quite hard to get the light just right due to the fact it was almost dusk at the time we were shooting, and with the strong flash on the camera  result in a lot of shots being over exposed.

During the shoot we didn't have exactly the correct props we're going to use in the final trailer but it gave a good idea of what we wanted to achieve.

Thursday, 17 November 2011

Storyboarding

Plan to make trailer contain around 80 shots. It seems to be the general amount that most horror films have and with our limited skills in editing it isn't too difficult to get 80 shots.

We've all coordinated times in which we are free and have now started storyboarding outside of lessons.
Our trailer is going to follow the general structure for a horror trailer i.e starting slow and gradually speeding up, and will have a mix of fast paced and slower editing. We plan to have titles throughout the trailer and have voices from the characters; narration will not be used. One thing that may go against the conventions of a lot of horror trailers is that we are going to aim to use as limited music as possible in attempt to try and keep the viewer in suspense. If it's possible we also would like to use maybe a girl's voice singing a children's song in the background to create a sense of a young child's ghost coming to haunt you.

We use the storyboard sheets and draw a picture of a shot then write a brief description to accompany the picture. The difficult part is trying to fit them all in order.

Casting

The casting for our film trailer is now complete. With only a small number of characters it didn't take long to decide as my group can play most of the roles. We decided to act ourselves in the trailer so that we don't have to worry about availability of actors.

I'm playing the role of Jack who is the confident sensible one of the group.
Jordan is playing the role of Connor who is the stupid, immature one in the group.
Kelly is Connors girlfriend Sophie, she is a very timid and nervous character.
Emma (the only independent cast member) is playing Holly who is like the leader of the group.
And finally Katie is playing the Ghost of Mary.

We've decided to film in the woods surrounding Kelly's house. They're quite extensive and are perfect for our film.

Planning for film trailer

Groups finally organised and left to decide on film genre and story etc. My group decided to go for the horror genre as it seemed easy to film for our tiny budget and it was something we were all keen to do. Our story consists of four teenagers who go for a camping trip in the local woods. The woods they go into are known to be the site of various teenage hangings but they go in anyway. They are then haunted by the ghost of a local girl called Mary who hung herself in the woods 80 years before. The children must struggle to control themselves and to mentally overcome their trauma. 

We at first tried to come up with a name for the film but we've decided to leave that until the end in case we get better ideas along the way, at the moment we have ... The Hanging, The Suicide Diary, or The unfinished.
We did some research among pupils in our school, we questioned which title they preferred and the results were very close with The Hanging just getting the majority.