Week 1
We began with a class discussion. We looked at film opening of different genres and analysed the codes and conventions. This was very useful to us, it gave us an idea about typical behaviour we'd expect to see in different films, and what each genre usually consists of. We watched several different openings and realised that it would be hard to create something similar due to the resources and budget we have. Horror has always been my favourite genre so I immediately wanted to research this further, I also think this would be the easiest to achieve.
Week 2
By week 2 we had chosen our group members, we then began to work on our project. After creating a questionnaire, it became apparent that "horror" was the most popular genre for our age group. We liked the idea of using hand held shots and was inspired by the "Blair witch project." We liked the realism it creates. We had a group discussion and all liked the idea, so decided to trial the technique for our opening sequence.
Week 3
In week three we began to research hybrids. We particularly focused on the openings and myself and Dora analysed looked at some classic horror films. We analysed the camera movement and angles, the mis-en-scene, and the sound, we wanted to get and idea of the how horror film atmospheres are generally created. We then researched some physiological thrillers such as "The Wicker Man" and a psychological thriller (traditional ghost story), "The others." This gave us some very useful information about sub genres, and inspired us to produce a narrative for our opening.
Week 4
This is the week we started to draft script ideas and a basic outline on what we wanted to base our opening on. After many discussion's we finally came to a mutual decision, we liked the idea of a group of teenagers daring each other to spend a night in a cemetery. During our Wednesday lesson we visit a cemetery to take some pictures for a location shoot and to see whether it would be suitable to use of not. We would use a series of parallel action shots, cutting between shots of the teens and the "killer." We wrote up a script that we thought would work well.
Week 5
In week 5 all our thoughts had changed, we didn't want to use the narrative idea we initially had planned so spent one of our lessons producing a script we were happy with. We wanted to keep the basic horror idea but add a little twist so we chose to combine this with a thriller and produce a hybrid. Our new basic plot was based on somebody stalking a girl, we thought this would be more effective because we would be able to be more creative and use locations that are closer to us. We were all much happier with this idea and all had lots of ideas we wanted to incorporate in our opening.
Week 6
We spent this whole week filming. We first collected new papers, so we could cut out letters to use for our credits and cut out pictures of victims to use in our mise-en-scene. We then went to the darkroom to arrange our mise-en-scene and filming area, to make the "stalker's" working environment look serious, we included a range of technical equipment that professional use in photography, this worked well for our opening. We began to film in the darkroom and recorded a series of different scenes; we paned a shot of all our credits and company name "L.A.D Productions," shot scenes of Alex (with a hoody on hiding his identity) hanging up pictures of the victim (me) and also scenes of other equipment we thought were relevant. During our next day of filming we filmed our main chase scene, this was quite easy for us to do because we used a nearby forest. We repeatedly filmed the chase scene to get the best chase scene, we included a variety of different shots including; match on action, long shots and close ups, we wanted to experiment with different effects to see which would be successful and which wouldn't.
