Change in our concept - Group

When filming for this project, we have numerous problems with our footage which has lead to multiple shoots having to be re done:

• Poor lighting - By the time we got to our location after school, it was starting to get dark so by the time we got to the final shots, the cameras were unable to pick up what we wanted them too. However, we did not realise this as the footage looked good on the camera, but when we exported the clips to the computer and viewed them back, we were unable to see what we were hoping for.

• Location - Our location, the bomb shelters was a good idea. We still believe that it is a good idea, however, the poor lighting has made it impossible for us to film there. We tried using torches and our phones to light up the bomb shelter, but this was unsuccessful. As well as this, Anthony took 100 tea light candles and laid them around the edges of the bomb shelter in hope that it would make it lighter and would allow us to film, however, this also proved to be unsuccessful when we did the shoot.

• Title - Our title which was originally Nyctophobia (the fear of darkness) meant that we had to film in the dark. We liked the title and the idea of filming in the dark attracted us as we thought that for our concept, this would be a good for our film. Also darkness is a convention of horror movies.

The shoot we did at Christy's house was successful, we put it together for our rough cut and the rest of the class liked what they had seen. This made us want to carry on trying to film in the dark because our audience liked it. We did another shoot on the 27th January before school, at this time of the morning, it was getting light and we thought that we would just forget filming in the dark because it was too hard. The external shots in the woods were good, however, the internal shots in the bomb shelter were still too dark because there is no source of light. We came into school and started putting it all together and we realised that it was not going to work.

After all of this, we have now decided to change our idea but keeping the idea of the rope. We are now going to be filming at Christy's house in his garden. In his garden he has a vegetable patch which we are going to use. He also has a shed at the back of the garden which we will use to keep someone 'hostage' whilst his death is being planned out. As we are now filming during the day, we have decided to change our name from Nyctophobia to forget me knot. We are going to be shooting this on Saturday 31st January and we are hoping this will be the final shoot as we have  carefully planned it out and Christy has also completed a location RECCE of his garden.

Location RECCE

GROUP - Filming review-28th Jauary 2015

We re-filmed the footage we did on the 26th but this time at the crack of dawn, which was much more efficient due to the much improved lighting. The pictures were much clearer and you could see much more of the actor, expressing the mise-en-scene through the actors costume, his non verbal body language and the location in much more detail, which is vital in horror movies. The camera work was much better as we could see the pans better and the different angles of filming were much more visible. In terms of sound there was some very effective diegetic sound we filmed such as birds chirping and the closing of the metal gate. We explored many movements using the track and dolly, and different angles including a high angle from on top of the bomb shelter showing ant entering the bomb shelter.

GROUP - Lesson-27th January 2015

One of the main focuses for todays lesson was cutting in the usable shots from our latest shoot and making them flow with the shots from our rough cut, and cutting down the longer shots and removing those that we found were not vital, and making the unnecessarily long ones shorter. we are still discussing if there's any better options than filming at the bomb shelters as there may be places that have more light.

GROUP - Filming reveiw-26th January 2015

Yesterday was supposed to be our final filming session, it was a repeat of our first shoot and included Anthony entering the woods past two of his former victims and into the bomb shelters to conduct the murder of his final victim, this part of the shoot was fine as the bomb shelter was illuminated with candles, as we though this would help improve the mise-en-scene of our production and making it seem more like Ants lair. The scenes outside the wood were good due to the lighting of the street and the blurry cars in the background, however when we entered the woods the torch we were using ran out, despite being fully charged, so it was not possible to film these scenes as the lighting was poor, we are going to redo these shots on Thursday morning and edit them to look like night time.
 

Ant Pitts	Actor-main character Filming assistant Co-Editor
Christy O’Shea	Actor-Role cancelled due to poor lighting Main cameraman/Director Co-Editor
Josh Platt	Actor-Role cancelled due to poor lighting Chief Editor
Ed Roebuck	Actor-Final murder victim

Rough Cut - Group

Here is the rough cut of what we have so far. We still have to do more filming in the woods which show the people who are being murdered in the bomb shelters as Anthony has now left the house and is on route to the location of the murders.

Feedback, what went well: 

- Good continuity editing. 

- Composition of shots 

- Light of external location, outside Christy's house. 

- Credits on the wall. 

What could be improved?

- Too many shots on the stairs so we will need to cut that down. 

- More sound needed in certain places, which we were planning to do but didn't have time to put in the rough cut. 

Sequencing - Anthony Pitts

Today I have been doing sequencing for the project. I have been putting all of the shots in the order and cutting them down to ensure the scene is continuous. As well as doing the sequencing, I have been using freesound.org to get sound for our project. So far, I have sequenced all of the footage which we have so far.

Sound Development- Josh Platt and Christy O'Shea

Today Chris and I have been looking at different sounds to include in our production. We have mainly focused on synchronous sound, like background noise such as distant car alarms and wind rustling through trees. Due to a problem we faced of not actually being able to work the alarm clock, we decided to use sound effects and we found some very good ones that add more of a scarier edge to the film. Sound effects such as the car alarm can be used as sound bridges to help link different shots, as the house is in a different location from the woods/bomb shelter. The car alarm is a strong example of extra diegetic sound as there is obviously not going to be a car when shooting inside. Another strong sound we found was the croaking of a rope, which is a difficult sound to capture on our cameras.

 

GROUP - Filming Reveiw-20th January 2015

On Tuesday 20th January, Anthony and Christy did filming round Christy's house for the opening of our scene. The shot went well and we used a wide range of shots and angles.

From the shoot we learnt that we need to do more than one take and use a wide range of angles as sometimes the footage was not as good as we were expecting. We did not have the rope we were planning to use so instead we borrowed from one of Christy's neighbours which we used to tie in to a hang mans noose which was used to show that I have an obsession with rope and there is something wrong with me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text analysis - Insidious - Anthony Pitts

Order and Duration of Titles

'In association with Stage 6 Films' - 0.00-0.03

'An Alliance Films, and Im Global Presentation, of A Haunted Movies Production' - 0.03-0.09

'A James Wan Film' (Director) - 0.17-0.28

'Insidious ' - 1.22-1.27

'Patrick Wilson' (Actor) - 1.32-1.36

'Rose Byrne' - 1.39-1.44

'Line Shaye' - 1.46-1.50

'Ty Simpkins' - 1.52-1.57

'And Barbara Hershey' - 2.00-2.04

'Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson' - 2.07-2.10

'Andrew Astor, Joseph Bishara' - 2.13-2.16

'Casting by Annie McCarthy and Kellie Gesell' - 2.19-2.23

'Costume by Kristin M.Burke' - 2.26-2.30

'Music by Joseph Bishara' - 2.32-2.37

'Edited by James Wan, Kirk Morri' - 2.39-2.44

'Production Designer Aaron Sims' - 2.46-2.50

'Director of Photography John R.Leonetti ASC, David M.Brewer' - 2.52-2.56

'Line Producer Jeanette Volturno-Brill' - 2.58-3.03

'Co-Produced by John R.Leonetti, Aaron Sims' - 3.05-3.10

'Executive Producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones' - 3.12-3.17

'Produced by Jason Blum, Steven Schneider and Oren Peli' - 3.20-3.25

'Written by Leigh Whannell' - 3.27-3.31

'Directed by James Wan' 3.34-3.42

 

Typography

The red text fades to white and then fades out in a way that looks like smoke. And the fact that the font is red coincides with the theme of horror, as it creates connotations of blood and death, which is a common feature of the horror genre.

The actual film title 'Insidious' is in red, like the opening credits, but is in a different font, which is thicker and fills the frame. This means that the audience focus more or less completely on the title, so the sinister look and colour of the typography adds to the theme of horror created through use of non-diegetic music.

Each title fades out letter-by-letter, in a seemingly random order. This adds to the sense of mystery and creates more tension that a simple title sequence would. So the transition of the titles add to the sense of gore and horror that is created by the music and font colour.

During the opening scene of 'Insidious', an object is shown, which takes up a lot of the frame. But next to each object there is always a dark space, in which the titles appear. Even though the titles do not take up a lot of space, the red text stands out against the black background, due to the colour as well as the fact it is all in uppercase.

 

Text Relationship

Analysis of 'Insidious' has made it clear that titles should be the emphasis of the opening. If there is no action, like in 'Insidious', it's best to use bold fonts and choose a colour that stands out. This allows the audience to focus on the titles, and therefore the colour red (associated with blood and horror),as well as the random transition of each letter (enforcing the idea of mystery and horror)

The focus on the colour and, therefore, genre means the audience focus on the genre of horror, which builds up tension as the audience know that something bad will happen, as it's apparent through the general theme of horror as well as the music and typography.

How Does This Affect Our Production?

The analysis has made me realise how important it is that we think about where the titles will appear in post-production, before we have even started shooting, as a certain amount of the frame was left plain and dark so as the text could fit in next to or around the object shown.

We have thought about trying to incorporate the text onto the different objects in the scene, but we know this could take up too much time, so our back-up plan will be to place the titles clearly in the frame, but towards a corner of the screen, so they don't take up too much of the frame, as the focus will be on the action.

 

Text ananlysis - Christy O'Shea

The resident evil introduction title sequence is scenes in reverse combining black screens at the beginning with artistic money shots featuring explosions, it also utilises time expansion. The different titles appear on different parts of the screen which looks professional so it would be a good idea for us to use this technique in our opening scene. The different titles moves slightly from side to side while the action was going on  screen, the smooth transition would be good to use in our sequence in such scenes such as the cigarette butt and creates a professional finish to our title sequence.

Screen gems	Stationary black screen 4 seconds
Constantin film, davis films/impact pictures-present	Stationary black screen 4 seconds
A constantin film davis films/impact pictures production	Stationary black screen 4 seconds
A film by Paul W.S. Anderson	Text coming to foreground, enlarging it 3 seconds
Milla Jovovich	Starts on left and pans slowly further left 3 seconds
Michelle Rodriguez	Starts on right and pans further right slowly, same picture as last text 3 seconds
Resident evil	Image change, dead central 2 seconds
Resident evil: Retribution	Retribution appears below previous text 4 seconds
Kevin Durand as Barry Burton	Top right corner of the screen as action continues 6 seconds
Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine	Top left of screen 6 seconds
Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker	Center of the screen above an air craft not interfering with action 6 seconds
Aryana Engineer	To the left of the character with prevalence 4 seconds
Colin Salmon	Bottom left of the image 4 seconds
Johan Urn as Leon S.Kennedy	Bottom right of the image 6 seconds
With Boris Kodjoe	Right of image midway of the shot, drifting towards the centre 4 seconds
And Li Bingbing as Ada Wong	Right hand side of the image between middle and bottom of the screen 6 seconds
Canadian Casting by Deirdre Bowen, Uk casting by Suzanne M. Smith, CDG	Right side of the shot 7 seconds
Music by Tomandandy	Central right of the screen, not overlapping any of the characters on screen 3 seconds
Special makeup effects by Paul Jones	Overlapping character in dark costume, not as clearly visible 4 seconds
Visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi	Right hand side of the screen, drifting slowly further right 4 seconds
Associate producer Hiroyuki Kobayahi	Slightly right of the centre, drifting up with the explosion 5 seconds
Based upon Capcoms video gamer Resident evil	Left of the screen, slightly bigger than the other text 5 seconds
Costume designer Wendy Partridge	On the right hand side 4 seconds
Production designer Kevin Phipps	Slightly left of the centre 4 seconds
Edited by Niven Howie	Slightly right of centre 5 seconds
Director of photography Glen MacPherson	Slightly left of centre 5 seconds
Co-producer Victor Hadida	On the right hand side of the screen 5 seconds
Executive producer Martin Moszkowicz	Slightly towards the left of the screen 5 seconds
Produced by Robert Kulzer	Right of the screen 5 seconds
Written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson	Right of the screen 7 seconds

Typography 

The text its self is a silvery colour, with a slight black outlining on certain straight edges to make it look slightly 3D. The colour is smooth and slick, adding to the horror connotations as it may represent a bladed object.

The names of the people involved is slightly larger than the title of the task they did in creating the movie, and all the letters are in capitals.

A vast majority of the text goes from left to right or right to left from its starting position slowly, this looks smooth and professional, this looks good with the movement and action on the screen  

The relationship between the film and text

The metallic silver and serif style of the text fit with the futuristic style of the movie. The movie franchise is set in a futuristic post apocalyptical world. In terms of fitting in with the opening sequence, there is a lot of spaceships and gadgets so the text looks as if it belongs in the sequence, and the slight movement of the text fits well with the fact that the scenes are in reverse. The text contradicts well, the numerous slow motion scenes, such as the main character suspended in water, this creates a peaceful effect while the text looks official and sharp.