Hello there, welcome to my blog. feel free to leave any comments! You will find a variety of posts on the background research and planning into my slasher film opening, High Royds, being co-produced with GeorgeH and CurtisT. This blog is mainly influenced by the work of John carpenter and his franchise, Halloween.

Friday, 26 April 2013

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.
UUniversalSuitable for all
PGParental GuidanceGeneral viewing, but some scenes may be unsuitable for young children
12A12 Accompanied/AdvisorySuitable for those aged 12 and older (cinema only); under 12s admitted, but only if accompanied by an adult
1212Suitable for those aged 12 and older (VHS and DVD only)
1515Suitable for those aged 15 and older
1818Suitable for those aged 18 and older
R18Restricted 18Restricted 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.

Thursday, 25 April 2013

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.

Wednesday, 24 April 2013

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.

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

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