Final cut audience feedback

This is our video on audience feedback on our final piece.
The questions asked were:

• do you like the overall piece?
• What do you like the most?
• what would you change?
• do you think it appeals to a teenage audience?

Asylum Narratives

The patient escaping

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

Feedback

Ben giving us feedback


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.

5th rough cut

This was our latest rough cut and definately our  best, we changed certain elements like the beginning of the film adding abit of exposition and an all round cleaner cut. However the film needs to be shortened and certain elements like the bathroom scene need to be taken out

Asylum Narratives

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.

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

Asylum Mise-En-Scene & Costume

Mise-En-Scene:

Establishing shot

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 Halloween we 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. 

Costume

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

Titles from the slasher genre

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

My Ident

This is my completed Ident it doesn't have audio as for our film opening the audio starts when the Idents start, therefore i didn't include the audio.

LiveType 

Adobe flash

Fake blood

Blood scene

For our murder scene we had to make it look effective as if she had been stabbed. as we could not get any fake blood for the shoot we had to make it ourselves, we used the easiest fake blood you could use, which was tomato ketchup mixed with a bit of soy sauce it give it more of a dark colour and from the angle we used in it look like blood.

Our Poster

this is our poster we created on photoshop for our film The Asylum, with our slogan 'Revenge is sour' a play on words from 'revenge is sweet'. We also used a serif font to signify the slasher genre with its sharp font.

BBFC Ratings

Below are the Certificate pictures for age ratings in Britain.

	Universal	Suitable for all
	Parental Guidance	General viewing, but some scenes may be unsuitable for young children
	12 Accompanied/Advisory	Suitable for those aged 12 and older (cinema only); under 12s admitted, but only if accompanied by an adult
	12	Suitable for those aged 12 and older (VHS and DVD only)
	15	Suitable for those aged 15 and older
	18	Suitable for those aged 18 and older
	Restricted 18	Restricted to those aged 18 and older and only available at licensed cinemas and sex shops. The latter will not require a licence to sell R18 films

We have rated our film as a 15 due to the fact that our film doesn't contain any explicit nudity, however it does contain sexual references and violence form the outset and throughout.

Rough cut Feedback

Facebook

We used Facebook to attract our audience and keeping our target audience up to date. we used George's account to attract the audience as he had the most friends on his account so hopefully more people would watch it. We advertised our trailer and our rough cut to hopefully get feedback from different people and hopefully our target audience. as our audience is 15-25 years old this is perfect as most of George's friends are within that range. it is a very useful tool to advertise as it is obviously free and there are many people you can advertise to. Facebook can make things go viral and for many people to watch it so the potential is great for facebook. We got very good feedback as we got alot of constructive criticism for our rough cut whioch helped us alot with what to change or add. With our trailer the feedback was great as we got 19 'likes' and a great comment saaying 'looks really interesting and left me wanting more, great!,' which we were very happy about.

Conventions

Crow sounds

Our first convention was the sound of the crows as heard in the opening of The last house on the left we 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 Dead which 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.

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 fromHalloween which 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

False Scare

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

Scream Queen

Male Gaze Theory

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 fromNightmare On Elm Street the scream queen was Heather 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 Halloween the 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.

Treatment

This is our treatment created for the purpose of defining our planned film Asylum. All the information for the film is included in our treatment. The films we are referring to are Mad House and Silent House we are going to include references to these films in our opening which will also help us to define that our film is in the slasher genre depending on the conventions we will be using, whether they are similar to previous films or our own.  

Teaser Trailer Planning

Synopsis: 
The trailer opens in 1991 with media reportage of a criminally insane patient escaping from an asylum. It therefore ends in the present with the killer on the loose, atmospheric, unsetlling music and FX will be a key feature of the trailer, which we sustain a degree of narrative enigma.

Time:
We plan on filming the footage for our trailer on the 8th of february. We aim to shoot all of our footage in 1 hour however if this isn't enough time we will further plan on another date.



Newspapers

Example of a newspaper we edited

What we had planned to include  in the trailer form the start, was the newspapers we were using this method to create a sense of realism for the audience. However, to do so we had to edit all the text included in recent articles and incl;ude our own images all of which wre form the courtesy of google images. 

Another style of editing we used was an old effect to make the newspapers look aged, this was used for our preffered reading of the trailer to signify thatHighRoyds is an extremely scary lunatic asylum and to connotate the trime era that the trailer is set in (1991).

Example edited newspaper

The picture in the bottom newspaper is a legitimate photo of the doctors who used to operate in HighRoyds this also creates a sense of realism.

Pictures:

We had planned on using pictures of past patients and also shots of the asylum for the trailer
The picture to the right is a patient who was admitted toHighRoyds asylum in 1982

Example of a newspaper we edited

This is the shot we plan on using at the start of the trailer - the establishing shot. This will connote to the audience where the trailer and the opening will be set.

This shot is from the inside of the asylum we plan on using an affect to this picture as it was recently taken, which doesn't give it an authentic feel like the others do. This is something we can't ignore in our trailer because we don't want to have an oppositional reading.

Again this is an old picture from 1981 of the patients we will be using.

Editing:

The programme we used was sony vegas, what we are planning to do is test the effects and audio  we plan to test a number of different effects to see which one signifies previous time the best, we did this before we made the trailer for organisational purposes so we could include more time into creating the trailer.

Sony Vegas

This is the titles in Adobe After Effects, we used a background with a time lapse of clouds with a dark effect added which signifies horror. We also used a san serif font to connote a slasher film and we also used a stutter affect for the title to twitch out which signifies something isn't right.

Adobe After Effects