Location Scouting

To follow up Ben's post about typical Horror locations, we explored the possible locations available to us locally. Below you can see our vlogs documenting the location scouting process.

Vlog showing a woodland area we considered, but did not use for filming:

Vlog showing the bus stop used at the end of 'Hunted' to show that the story continues and the film begins:

Props and Equipment

Title Sequence Research

We researched into how other films order and present their titles in a film opening so that we could take inspiration and conform to the codes and conventions of our genre.

The general order in which titles are presented are:

• *Name of the studio/corporation* presents...
• Starring (main actors)
• Film Title
• Other names (other actors, casting by, costume designer, co-producers, sound design by, music by, edited by, production designer, director of photography, executive producers, produced by, screenplay by, directed by)

The other names are usually in a  variation of orders however directed by is usually always last.

The following clips conform to our general order:

Scream Opening Scene

Woman In Black Film Review

Casting

Last week our media teachers held a casting event where we assessed the acting skills of our fellow class mates who do Theatre Studies A Level. Since we have changed the female protagonist in our production we found Bethan Williamson, also known as Bee to play the female protagonist in our production.

We found that she was one of the most talented actresses at the casting. After speaking to her and showing her the storyboard she instantly decided that she wanted to feature in our media product not only to improve her acting experience, but to potentially improve our production.

David Lynch

David Lynch

David lynch is a film producer and director, his films are known for there so called 'Lynchian' nature. They are mysterious, violent and disturbing imagery is used. Some of his most famous films are; Eraserhead, a surrealist body horror filmed in black and white and was his first full length film. This film has odd features such as floating heads and creatures revealing themselves out of peoples mouths. Another of Lynch's films is The Elephant Man, another with a disturbing plot, primarily about a man with a deformed face living in the 19th century, also shot in black and white.

These films are linked to our film opening with their odd imagery and disturbing plots much like our own opening sequence. Eraserhead has disturbing imagery throughout we have tried to use this imagery to make our own 'scary' moments.

ERASERHEAD


THE ELEPHANT MAN

Filming Session 1 Documentation

We have successfully completed our first session of filming and we thought we'd update you as to how it went. 

We learned a lot during the filming process and what you think wouldn't take long in fact takes a great deal of time. We had to make many sacrifices and adaptions according to our resources. 

The first factor we needed to adjust to was the lack of darkness. The majority of our film opening was to be set at night but we needed some light in order for everything in the shot to still be visible. One technique we tried was blacking out the windows and instead artificially lighting the space which deemed harder than we thought. As you can see from the picture we had to peg extra pieces of clothing and blankets to the curtain rails in order to black out the natural light, as the curtains cast a reddish tone over the space. 

We also wanted a tracking shot in our sequence and we weren't sure how to transition the camera smoothly forward. One method we tried was to put Frankie in a child's buggy with her holding the camera and Conor to wheel her along. This was our low budget equivalent of the machines that do it on professional film sets. However watching it back the shot wasn't perfectly smooth which left us with not particularly successful footage.

Conor Jackson's Preliminary Task

Where to find us

As previously mentioned we will be vlogging on our YouTube channel to document events like Location scouting and the film production process. We also use our Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages to post material for opinions and also as another means of documentation.

Here are the links to each

Instagram:
https://instagram.com/serialstudios

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/SerialStudios

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/serialstudios

Update, New Character!

Over the past week or so our group has made some big changes to our project.

After deciding on a young 9 or 10 year old girl to play our main character we since have moved on from that idea.

Instead we have chosen to cast a girl closer to our own age, a typical teenager, as we feel that since our target audience is around our age and upwards, we want the character to be close in age to the majority of our target audience in order for the audience to empathise with our character more.

This now means that our storyline has taken a bit of a turn, we will soon be posting our updated storyboard so stick around for that, but for now, meet our talented new actress Bee!