Foley sound

In our film opening there are many chase scenes, at times we want there to be tension music playing however we also want to recreate some of the original sound to make it more authentic and realistic.

In the opening one of the victims Georgia falls and knocks of her galsses, before this she is running up the stairs. I have, with the help of abbie, recorded the sound of footsteps running up the stairs and falling to the ground.

To do this I carefully watched the oringinal footage to attmept to recreate the speed. This was extremely difficult as I had to run as well as watch the footage on a very small phone screen. I also tried to make sure that the shoes and the surface used were similar. We found a concrete staircase in our school that had about the same number of stairs and also made the smae sound. In the oringinal footage the victim wore shoes with quite thin soles and so my school shoes worked perfectly to recreate, I just slammed my feet down harded to make the sound seem more frantic.

This took many attmepts but below is one of the videos we created

Then, we moved to the scene where Joe, the male victim, is running through the staircase door to the lift. This was a very big, heavy door and so we needed to use one similar. The one we used had glass windows in it making it lighter, this was not ideal but we slammed it back against the wall harder to compensate for this. However, when we edit this on to the footage we may need to review this and use a better door.

Abbie noticed that the door was squeaky and had a good rusty hinge sound. We felt that this would be ideal because it has the eerie sound that is used often in horror films. So we decided to get a close up video of the hinge sound so that this sound can be added in and even distorted and played with to make it sound even more scary.

 

RUNNING THROUGH DOOR



HINGE SOUND

After doing this, we went back to one of the first chase scenes which happens before the glasses are dropped. This scene was especially complicated because we had to represent both the victims who were moving very differently at very different speed. As well as this, Abbie was wearing soft-soled shoes and so had to compensate for this by slamming her feet down harder. Working our timings out was diffcicult, my character was slow and followed on from the other charcater. Abbie's character was fast, heavy footed and did a sort of run/skip which was hard to replicate.

*insert video*

We are unsure about whether the footage will work well with this sound and so editing will be slightly trail and error. However, if the sound is incorrect then will consider refilming in the recording studio where the conditions are far more controlled.

Editing: Stairs-Lair Scene.

I decided to edit the scene where the young girl leads the two victims into the stairwell, and them chasing her down the stairs. I will finish my editing just as they reach the lair, and just before they run away.


I started with the two clips that link to match on action of the victims running through the doorway, I imported them both and they need cropping and the sound needs to be changed on them. I also need to cut them so you don't get Chloe saying "Action" at the beginning of them.

I then cut all of the clips so that they were where we needed them to be and i put them all together so that the match on actions linked up nicely, and i made the editing straight cut but quite fast paced because they are worried for the little girl and so are running after her.

Next I need the clip of them beginning to run down the stairs. This part was filmed without a tripod and so it is visibly shaky, which means I need to stabilise it. I used the tool pictured below and it analysed the clip for a dominant motion and it corrected it so it was straight and didn't move. 

Once that clip was cut properly and stabilised then i needed to get the next clip which was them seeing the girl round the corner of the stairs, and then running after her. The young girl was wearing blue socks on the day of filming this which we did not mean to include in the clip, however I can cut it so that you do not see her feet at all. 

Before.

I have now edited it so that the clip starts here and the clip before ends slightly earlier to make the transition smoother, and also you now cannot see the young girls feet and so the audience will never know she was actually wearing socks, and that her legs weren't painted. 

This is now where the two clips merge together.

The next clip is of the two victims walking down the stairs after they notice the young girl and her lair. This is where the editing has to slow down because the scene becomes tense, and it is no longer them chasing her - so it should not be face paced edits. 

The next few clips are slightly harder to merge together as the camera angle changes from being a two shot to being a high angled shot of the young girl. What I will attempt to do is switch between the young girl playing with her jack-in-the-box to the two victims and back again. I am going to do this so that you can see how the victims are reacting to the lair and the little girl rather than just watching the long scene of the girl.

I used the blade tool to split the two clips where i wanted them, and then I dragged sections of the first clip, into the places i had cut of the second clip.

I then had to remove the audio of the clips because I wanted the "Pop goes the weasel" nursery rhyme to be played throughout, also there were people talking over the clips with the young girl. I then deleted the audio and I am going to overlay the Non-Diegetic nursery rhyme that Chloe made in her blogpost.

During this section of the song I am going to add in videos that we took of the pictures on the walls, these will only be on screen for a few seconds and will fill the time before the singing comes in.
There are a lot of low bass beats in the nursery rhyme and so I've decided that the camera will flick back to the victims reaction on these low bass beats.
In order to do this I had to cut both clips and slot them into the right sections.
I also had to stabilise every clip of the images because they were filmed without a tripod.

Once this was finished I added the last clip, and stabilised it. I then cut it so that it merged well with the clip before it (The little girls head turning.) I kept the sound on this clip because there was nobody speaking in the background, also the diegetic sound of the two victims running up the stairs was loud enough for the viewer to hear and we would not have to add foley over the top of this later.

Once this was finished I exported it and here is the final product: 

Overall I think this was really successful. I especially think the merging of the clips to form the match on action, and change in scene was successful because it flows and does not jump from scene to scene. 

One thing I'm not overly keen on is where I have added in the images from the lair. I personally think that they look slightly out of place, but for the moment they seem fine. If I need to change them in the future then I will have to cut the sound clip so it is shorter at the beginning. 

VLOG: day four

On this day our group decided that we needed to re-film the lair scene because we did not have enough camera angles to be able to pick the best ones for our final piece. So I began setting up the lair while they filmed the final lift scene. Fortunately in the filming before we only filmed the reaction of the victims as they came down the stairs, and so we did not get any of the posters in it. This means that we could put the posters in any random order and it would still work out okay, we wouldn't need to re-film any more reaction scenes.

(Videos of us setting up the lair - get this from documents on a normal computer)

Here we were setting up how we were going to film the close up of the young girl playing with the jack in the box. 

We had to take the camera off of the tripod because it would not fit in the space between the wall on the right and where we had placed the girl. It also did not help us achieve the camera angle we wanted and so we had to take it off and film it in our hands. Chloe has the most stable hands out of everyone so we had her do it. By doing this it means we need to stabilise the footage later on in the editing stages. 

We then instructed the young girl to lift her head when she turned because otherwise it just looked like a huge ball of hair and it wasn't clear that she was turning her head. By doing this it made it a lot clearer which way she was turning because you could see the white face paint. 

Once we had filmed this stage we had to change the angle of the camera so that we could get the reaction of the two victims within the shot. Again we could not fit the tripod behind the young girl and so we had to have chloe sit and hold the camera again. We also had to make sure that we were not cutting the little girls head off in the shot because we had done this a few times previously. 

VLOG: day three.

Unfortunately on this particular filming day we did not have a lot of tim to get the things done that we wanted to, so we were very rushed. Our group were split (so two people could set up the lair and the others would stay and film) and we did specific scenes which we felt we could get done easily and which would not take much time.

 

 

 

Here we decided to re-film the glasses scene, where Georgia runs up the stairs and drops her glasses. This was the easiest scene to film as we did not need any props apart from the glasses and camera. This scene was very successful to shoot because everyone was focused and it was quick to film.

 

 

 

We set up the lair as quickly as we could and when they were done they came down to the lair and we began filming immediately. We decided to film the reaction scene where the two victims first see the lair, we didn't get it first try but in this clip Chloe gives instructions of exactly what we need to get the filming done quickly.

 

 

 

 

This is how we filmed it and this went really well and they stood where we wanted them to and so this will probably end up going on our final piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The finished lair

This is the finished lair. We used lots of sheets of paper to cover the walls in drawings, each member of the group creating over 20 each. This worked really well because it looked cluttered and also brings in the Possesed element really well

The dolls and teddies look effect to show that the area belongs to a little girl straight away and the burnt, cut effect shows how something sweet and innocent is taken and destroyed. 

Run through of events

Joe & Georgia walk towards car. - tracking shot

- Open boot - close up, with Tia far away at end of the car park- focuses on her 

- Then, they walk towards her- long shot 

Mid shot of Tia walking into staircase door 

- Then close up of her walking into door 

- Match on action of joe & Georgia going into staircase 

- Two shot of them looking at each other 

- Then, Chloe sitting at the bottom of the staircase filming joe & Georgia's feet descending the stairs 

- Close up on faces as they walk down the stairs 

- Mid shot of them descending stairs 

- Then, they walk through the door & see the lair. Close up on their faces as they see the lair 

- Mid shot of Tia with jack in the box 

Close ups of photos, beds, teddies 

- joe & Georgia running up stairs

- Point of view shot from Georgia running behind joe

- Georgia falls & glasses drop 

- high angle shot of Georgia getting up

- low angle shot of feet running passed glasses & road feet walking behind 

- running towards lift, over the shoulder from Georgia revealing joe is in the lift 

- match on action of Georgia going into lift & falling into joe 

- then CCTV shot of them in the lift 

- close up of hands pressing buttons 

- then, over the shoulder shot of joe & Georgia looking at the lift doors where Tia is standing with her back to them 

- she turns slowly, then the shot changes to an over the shoulder shot from Tia facing joe & Georgia. Georgia screams 

- close up of tias face 

End titles 

END 

We were getting a little confused about which shots were needed ad how many shots we would need for each scene, although the storyboard was helpful as a group we found it beneficial to sit down and actually say all of the scenes out loud and write them down for future reference.

First day of filming: VLOG.

Firstly we recorded the room tone of the area around the stairwell and we did this because it makes any foley we over lay onto the clip during the editing stages later on, will sound more authentic as we have room tone added in with it.

Here I was painting the young girls face, arms, neck and chest because she needs to be white during the filming, and all of her skin has to be the same colour, we bought facepaint from online so we could do this. 

Here I am explaining how we are going to film a specific scene,
POV Shot of Georgia running away from the demon, Georgia trips and drops her glasses, the only way this could be filmed is if georgia ran with the camera, tripped and dropped her glasses, however her hands were full so Chloe had to run after her and throw her glasses on the floor as she tripped. 

Heres how we had to do it.

We changed the idea, and tried to get Georgia to do both things at once, which worked much better, 

After this we decided to add to the scene by having Georgia the run past her glasses and Tia walk past them, and the camera will film through the glasses at the feet running away. 

Opening Credits plan.

After looking at the deconstructions we have done based on opening credits, I decided to make a plan for the credits to our opening piece.

Before the opening sequence actually starts we're going to have our production companies. The opening credits we've deconstructed have all had the bigger production company first.
The production company we are using is Ghost House Pictures because this company is at the beginning of most supernatural horrors, so it supports our genre very nicely. This is eleven seconds long, which gives us one minute and 49 seconds left for the rest of our footage.

The second production company we will be using will be our homemade production company: Flipbook Pictures.

This will take around eight or nine because we have to allow time for our production company name to show up afterwards, meaning we have one minute and 41 seconds left for our sequence. Our production company logo however is still being edited and filmed so we can make it perfect by the time our sequence needs to be edited and finished. 

What we are planning to do with the actors names is similar to the opening credits of Mama. We are planning to have a short burst of footage which will be around two or three seconds long and then we will have the actors names laid over one of the pictures from the young girls lair.

The thing that usually comes next is leading actors names. We originally planned to have two main actors, a teenage couple. However, the teenage boy is having family issues at the moment so we don't know if we're going to have both people or just one. 

We will have a short clip of footage of the couple/girl walking to the car to put the shopping bags in the boot, halfway through them walking it will cut to a childish picture of a family, with one girl in black and crossed out. This gives the viewer a small insight as to what our sequence will be about. The name that will be laid over the top will be "Georgia Moore" because she is our leading actress. If we are having the teenage boy in it then there will be two names over laid on this picture, the second would be "Joe Mclynn"

What usually comes after this is the film title, but in every supernatural horror opening credits always come after the opening sequence is finished, and so we are going to put it at the end of our sequence. 

Secondly, there will be the directors name, this will be "Rebecca Douglas" 

The next name is the costume designer, the picture the name will be placed over will be a scribbled pentagram so that the viewer knows it will be a supernatural horror. the name over laid over the top will be "Georgia Moore" again. 

Next comes the editor/editors the picture will be another one of the young girls scribbles, possibly of the "Mr Bogeyman" one. The names that will flash up will be "Rebecca Douglas, Chloe Kwok, Abbie Morris and Georgia Moore"

After this will be the sound producer and music technician, the picture that will show up will be of the young girl and her back bending backwards and looking like its broken. The name that will be overlaid on the top will be "Chloe Kwok"  

After this will be the producers and co producers, the picture at current is unknown to us, but we will be creating a lot more of these images very soon. The names that will be overlaid on the top will be "Rebecca Douglas, Abbie Morris, Chloe Kwok and Georgia Moore" again. 

Then our sequence will start properly and there will be no more credits during the sequence until right at the very end of the sequence when the film title pops up. 

Deconstruction: Opening titles: mama

Location Scout Vlog

Location Scout Vlog

This vlog shows our trip to our location where we took test shots to check out the lighting and how the location would work with certain scene ideas.

Deconstrction: The Tome.

           


Appropriate for film opening:

• Doesn't jump between scenes, so this makes it an opening rather than a trailer. 
• I believe this introduces how the villain comes into being, she's changed by the tome. 

Appropriate for target audience:

• Target audience is probably teens. There isn't any jumpy scenes so it's not really scary but the girl who appears in this opening is a teenage girl. 
  

• A lot of screaming which signifies that something scary has happened but it doesn't actually build tension up to it, it seems to build more confusion towards it rather than tension. 

Appropriate for genre: 

• Supernatural horror, the tome seems to possess the girl
• However we do not see any supernatural traits that the girl has apart from the fact she goes crazy and starts to limply scratch the wall, and that she bleeds from the corner of her eye

Editing:

• All straight cut editing
• Zoom after she's dropped the book, adds to tension of scene. 
• Fading shot that links the two together, makes it look like a match on action when its not.

Camera angles:

• Estblishing shot right at the beginning, or it could be a long shot of the girl, showing the scenery in the background. However the dog walker makes it look like a park and not an abandoned cave that no one knows about.

• High angle shot, makes her look like vulnerable
• Low angle shot, gives the audience a sense of place.
• Close up shot of the book, makes it looks important and adds tension

Sound:

• Non digetic - A lot of bass, signifies something bad is about to happen. At points the music can be too loud and overwhelms the viewer. 
• Digetic screaming doesn't sound scared, fake and unnatural.

Titles:

• Titles overlay onto pictures of the scene, the pictures are quite creepy
• Titles however are written in a basic font, they haven't done much typography research or attempted to create their own typography, so it doesnt fit the genre that well. 
• But they are separated into different roles and how important these roles rank in the movie industry, they also have production companies added. 

Mise en scene:

• Costume: Holes in tights, makes her look poor/unwanted, maybe nobody will miss her if she becomes possessed? 
• Shirt that says "Live or die" on it, cleverly placed, adds tension and mystery.
• Short shorts over the tights, boots and shirt and nice coat, typical teenagers clothes. 
• Juxtaposition between her and background, background is lovely and scenic and she is scruffy and looks out of place. 
• Cave with light filtering through it looks quite scary, the shadows that the girl makes on the floor adds to the low key lighting and overall scariness of scene. 

Practical task: Camera angles on a drafted scene

 

 

 

We have drafted into our storyboard a scene where the girl and the boy are running away from the young girl and the teenage girl drops her glasses as she trips up the stairs, the camera then cuts to filming through the glasses and you can see the girls blurred feet behind the glasses running away. I decided for my practical that I was going to test a variety of angles to see which one works best.

 

 

 

 

 

Through the left lens.

I personally think this is the best angle to use as it was easy to film and you can tilt the camera sideways on the tripod and have it halfway down a set of stairs zoomed in.

 

 

 

Through the right lens.

This one was slightly harder to film as i had to awkwardly position myself, and i personally don't think it's the most effective anyway.

 

 

 

 

Through the whole glasses set.

This one requires no tilt but does require the camera to be pushed to one side of a stairwell.

it would be easy to film with a tripod and there would be no camera shake.

I personally thnink this camera angle is also effective with the framing, so you're able to see everythings thats going on.

 

 

This one was filmed upside down because I needed my camera lens to be as close to the floor as possible, unfortunately this makes it difficult to see and I'm not sure how to rotate it.

However this angle looks bad because it's face on and you then focus on where they're going, and this may be harder to act.

 

..

 

 

This video takes a while to kick in because it was very difficult to focus on the glasses, because I wanted it to be focused on the glasses and have the feet blurred instead of it being the other way around. This one looks more like the story board picture that Chloe drew, but it was very hard to film because I had to hold the glasses up and they would not naturally land like this.

 

 

 

This one was a lot easier to film because I could film it from the stair just under the top stair, and we could easily have a tripod a few stairs down and film this, and the fact its focused on the small pieces if carpet in front of it is very effective, especially if our  staircase has a lot of grime and dirt on it.

Deconstruction: Implied death in Dead Silence Part 2

Many death scenes in Dead Silence are implied, and my favourite one is the last death in the film, mainly because we want to do the same type of thing within our final piece. 

Things that happen before this death:

-The Main character goes back to his Dad's house

-You find out about a massive plot twist

He starts seeing flashes of a book that he read on puppets earlier on in the film. This is a bit like what we want to film in our final piece, when the two people find the little girls lair, it flashes on all the manic writing and all the drawings all over the walls on her lair. This would require a lot of light on the subject (As it is in the film) 

He turns suddenly and sees her face. This would be the part where the elevator opens and the two people see the young girls face. 

Her face then flashes to her decayed, evil spirit. In our final piece we want to have a final zoom in on the young girls face, and we want it to become distorted just like it is here. 

Again, the implied death is the scream that zooms in at the end, just as it did in the first scene at the beginning. It then cuts to black and the only sound you hear is a Shh shh

Personally I think this is an effective way to end a film or end a scene because you don't have to do any special effects make up which makes it easy to film and easy to edit too. We could have the little girl giggling instead of saying shh shh, and at the end of the scream the screen will go black and you'd either hear ring a ring a roses or you'd hear a cute girly giggle.

Deconstruction of implied deaths in Dead Silence

There are a series of events that lead up to this womans death, and they all help build tension so I'll list them:

- The music begins to play slower, as if the radio/music player is dying out. This is when the scene changes and the audience begin to know that theres something wrong. It also catches the womans attention and distracts her from playing with the doll.

- When she enters the living room the music player completely dies out, as if something you cannot see has turned it off completely.

- There's a ticking clock in the background and it sounds like a heartbeat, gives the audience a pace. This then slows down but does not stop, as you can still see the clock moving you just cannot hear any noise.

- Noise of the kettle thats been left on the stove for too long, high pitched scream, kind of depicts that the woman is going to be screaming later. But again this goes silent, much like the girl will be as she will be dead.

-No sound at all is extremely clever in a supernatural horror because it really emphasises danger and a "Calm before the storm" type of tension.

In this image, there is a lightning flash but you do not hear the thunder, it makes the audience jump but usually it's the sound the makes the scene scary. Personally I think it makes the scene scarier when you have conventions of a scary scene but you remove the sound as it makes it seem like theres something majorly wrong with the whole sequence. 

This is just after she's had the sheet thrown over her and she's been thrown across the room, she is crawling which makes her seem weak and vulnerable and she coughs up a lot of blood. This is effective because you know she isnt going to come back from this state and that she's going to die, due to the amount of blood shes coughing up but you don't actually see her die here.

She is then dragged through her own blood and back into the room that she was thrown out of. This is effective because you do not see the killer but you know for certain that she's going to die as she is being dragged to her certain death. However the camera angle here is above her and you cannot see the room into which she's being dragged. So again you can't see the killer but she is being dragged off screen towards something horrible. 

Here is from the killers point of view and she is being dragged towards the killer. She has blood everywhere and is screaming and what happens is the camera zooms in on her face as if she is being dragged into it but you do not see her dead body and you do not actually see what happens to her after this, all you see is the way she has been set up to look like a puppet after she has died. 

Practical task: Painted Doll Mask

This is my little sister, and she's going to play the role of the possessed young girl in our final piece. She does have long hair but in order to paint her face properly I had to put her hair up in bunches.

I first painted her face white, in the final piece we will do her ears and hands too, and we'll use white foundation to get it near to her eyes. 

I couldn't find any face paint in my home, so we used water based powder paint, and we did all of this very quickly because we didn't want to damage her skin too much. For our actual final piece we'll invest in some decent face paints so that she's comfortable walking round with makeup on her face all day. 

I then added big red cheeks for the chinese doll effect, the circles aren't perfect because we was in a rush to get the paint on and off of her face, but on the actual day these will be a lot better 

I then painted her lips white and painted a small butterfly type lip pattern onto her lips so that she could have an element of a porcelain chinese doll. I painted the eyebrows on too because she looked slightly weird without them, and i tried not to make them too thick so that they detracted from her face 

Creepy shot of my sister looking up towards the camera with all the paint on her face, this would be the point of view of the boy or girl actor as they are a lot taller than the girl. 

Our group prefer having half the facepaint smeared off because we think this overall looks creepier than having the whole face covered in paint 

Practical task: Photoshop typography

For my practical task I decided to look at possible ways of creating creepy looking typography to use in our final piece.

Made the screen black using the full background tool 

Then I actually needed a word to write so I chose the word horror.

Using this tool smeared the letters to the left and made it look like the wind had blown the paint across the letters while they were drying and this gives it a smudged sideways effect 

I then had to rotate the picture 90 degrees and do the same effect again in order to smear it not only from the left to the right but also to smear it from bottom to top to give it that overall creepy effect

I took the product as it was and I inverted the colours and used the tool on the rift to make the edges glow more to give it an eerie effect. It also made it look much bolder

I'm not entirely sure whether we're going to keep the words black, we may invert the colours back for our final piece as the white is very bright 

However this looks much more effective because the black writing on a white background makes the individual smear lines stand out and makes it look like a fuzzy camera effect, and overall makes it much more creepy to look at, which matches our genre of a supernatural horror 

Practical task: demonic symbols

To Summon a "Common Demon" you need all four of these symbols to be drawn in a row, and so when these are hung up, all four of these will be next to each other, preferably behind the little girl where they are obviously seen

I drew the sigil of Adnachiel and the Lord of Chaos was also on an image sheet I found.

 I drew them out neatly first and then I drew over them erratically with crayon as if a young child had scribbled them down on a piece of paper.

I then used a teabag across the front of the paper to make it look old and maybe as if this child has lived abnormally long, and has been around for a long time because of her demonic posession. 

I also burnt the corners of the paper to make them look like they've been ripped off of a wall a lot where the girl is constantly moving around and terrorising different groups of people, it also makes it seem as if they have burnt in rituals or burnt in house fires where people have tried to kill the young girl