Main Task Locations, Cast, Costume and Props

Locations:

Jasmine's House
I have decided to set the basis of my film in a house. For a psychological horror, this is a main convention which I feel will allow the audience to put themselves in the characters positions. This will also create realism, something that every film must include in order to create a film of a professional and sophisticated level. I am going to also use a few other locations, so the audience do not get uninterested in where the action is taking place, e.g. flashbacks, but the majority of footage will be found inside of the home. Also,the idea of using a home is a place my target audience would normally associate with security and comfort because they will be living away from home, so the idea of a family home that presents scenes of terror and horror should unnerve them completely.

Cheney School (Drama Room)

Me and my partner thought it would be practical to film in school rather than out of school, this was because it would be more convenient, for e.g if we had any filming errors we wouldn't have to travel to a far location to shoot again. All of our film is based in this room because it presents a sense of homeliness.

Cast:

Leena Wilkes (Oria Malik)-Protagonist

For the character playing 'Leena Wilkes' , i have chosen one of my friends to act her below. As you can see she has pulled of a very upset and depressed look, i have planned for her to be wearing dark clothes to connoatate that she's not happy and jolly like her mum. She fits in with her role because she looks simple with no makeup and special hair done.

Maya Stone (Zahra Malik)- Protaginists Friend

This is our protagonists friend, who is a typical teenager, who likes her education and fashion. As you can see she doesn't look like a very mature neither very young teenager and pulls off a realistic look. 

Maya Stone (Zahra Malik)- Antagonist's Friend

 Alveena Wilkes (Elly) Protagonist's Mum

For the character playing ‘Leena's’ mother, I have chosen to use the actor below. With hair and makeup she is able to pull off a sophisticated look, where the audience can believe her to be a mother. She has a normal look which I think is important for the mother to have in my film and she also seems happy and joyful.  

Hair, Costume and Makeup:

For my main task have decided to go with a more natural look for my cast, i intend not using dramatic makeup and hair as the normal horror genre would use because our film needs to look realistic. If dramatic makeup is not used the audience are also then able to relate to the characters, making it scarier when they begin to put themselves in their position and understand the characters more well rather than the usual stereotype.  I also feel that in psychological horror films, you do not tend to see characters with overwhelming makeup; it is more subtle and realistic. I am aware that the makeup of the antagonist needs to look tired and tormented. I am going to try and achieve the look where by ‘Leena’ will look pale, but fresh faced, again reflecting a pure and innocent person, but also reflecting the fact that she is troubled and determined. 

‘Leena’ will be wearing a casual outfit consisting of skinny jeans and a dark blue jumper reflecting her young age and her innocence. Also, I think this will also reflect the stressful  side of ‘Leena’ as the dark colours will present a lone and boring life. I plan to dress the antagonists (Leena's) friend's outfit consisting of a red party wear top and black shiny jeans, this connotates she is happy and cheerful and not in the same position as 'Leena'.

I am going to have 'Leena's' hair straight and down, reflecting a young and girly person, but i don't want her to look perfect reflecting the fact that she has been neglected. I therefore think that she should look hard done by stress, and by having messy hair I believe that I can achieve this look, along with makeup and costume. The antagonists friend 'Maya', will have her hair long and straight as I think that this is a typically teenage girl hairstyle, this look  will allow the audience to appreciate her age and make it more believable to the fact that that she is a teenager. 

Props:

For my main task i only need a limited amount of props, these include:

Some school books that Leena Wilkes and Maya Stone are going to be working from

This is the book that our protagonists friend is reading, ans is really concentrating hard on her English Literature exams.

This is the book that our protagonist is supposed to be reading because she is depressed and isolated.

A TV and remote:

Makeup for the mum (Alveena Wilkes) person that scares Leena Wilkes when she looks into the TV:

Codes and Conventions (Psychological Horror)

In this post I am going to identify the codes and conventions that we have used in our psychological horror opening.

Production Company logo at the beginning: this is a typical convention in most film genres, including horror, to have the institutional information at the very beginning of the film. This typical convention in every film, helped our product seem more like a real horror film, and also draws audience attention because of the good reputation that our company –Clockwork Productions – has amongst horror fans.

Non-Diegetic Soundtracks: All horror films rely on music at the beginning to build up an atmosphere, we have also used this typical code and convention. A typical horror soundtrack would be eerie, jumpy and on edge, we have chosen to use a soundtrack that was pre-loaded on iMovie called 'Dragons Den', this soundtrack had an exact beat that went with our credentials. We did this, as not only did we want a sound that was haunting than scary, we wanted to convey the fact that our film is the most typical of psychological horrors because it was based in a house, and we wanted to build up the tension gradually.

Black and White Typography: we chose to use these two colours because; black is a typical convention of horror films, as the colour has connotations of danger and White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection. This gives the audience the message that this film is consisted of mixed emotion between characters. The style of the font for the title is also a typical horror style, and makes the genre obvious.

Typical House Location: A house is somewhere you would expect to feel secure, and most Psychological horror films, are established in a house which makes it one of the key codes and conventions we have used. Its links with the supernatural which makes it an ideal establishing shot to set the scene. However, we didn’t play it up as the typical convention it is in other horror films (in the dark) because the idea was to show the afterlife of the protagonist after her mum had died, and make it seem from the first shots that someone was watching over Leena Wilkes's House.

Types of Character: Our two characters, Leena Wilkes and Maya Stone are the typical characters you see in other horror films; the one who panics at the first sign of strange things, and the one who is disbelieving, and thinks everything will be fine.

Reaction Shot: This was included a lot when our protagonist kept seeing someone in the TV screen . This type of shot is used a lot in many horror films, as it creates tension and with reduced vision, the audience are on edge at the possibilty that something may be hiding.

Flashback. Flashbacks are used in quite a few horror films, as there is often a dark secret that gets out of hand, and can be a good way to unravel parts of the story, bit by bit, to create a sense of mystery. This is what we aimed to do with our flashback of Leena Wilkes and her mum in the past, this helped the audience understand where all this depression was coming from in Leena Wilkes.

Main Task Pitch and Feedback

Young, happy and full of life, but not for long. In her last year of university, Leena Wilkes loses an important part of her life. She now thinks she's alone.... But is she?

This is the pitch for our main task, it was originally "London, 2012. Jennifer Dawson has lost an important part of her life after a tragic accident. She now think's she's alone, but is she?" we decided to change it because we felt that it didn't give enough information about our main character and who she was. Also we thought that "London 2012" was not relevant enough in the story-line to put in the pitch. After our teacher had given us some criticism, we added "young, happy and full of life, but not for long" to give some background information on our character and to draw the target audience in, to make them wonder why she was happy, and not anymore? We also added an ellipsis to create suspense, and keep the reader interested.

Furthermore when we asked our class mates about our pitch they asked us the following:

• How will your target audience relate to this?

Our target audience is young adults, our pitch relates to our audience because our protagonist is a university student and most young adults will be interested in watching a psychological horror of their age group. 

• How does your sub genre fit in with this pitch?

We have related our pitch to psychological horror by adding an ellipsis to create that extra suspense and keep the audience in tact with the horror genre.

• Why would we pay to watch your film?

You should pay to watch our film because there aren't many psychological films that get released very often in Oxford and our film is also going to consist of  better genre horror conventions and not the typical conventions like "fake blood" and "predictable scenes".

The Ring- Does the Frequency of Cuts Relate to the Tension/ Excitement in a film Extract?

In our theory side of AS Media we were watching an extract from 'The ring'. After watching this extract we were analyzing whether the frequency of cuts relate to the tension/excitement in a film extract, we drawed a graph to clearly show whether this question was true or false. As you can see on the graph there is a line drawn in pencil, this was to show were i thought was most tension and were i thought there wasn't much when the line goes down. After doing this we watched the extract again and made a frequency table to assure ourselves how many cuts there were altogether by splitting it up into certain duration's within the film. From the data gathered we can conclude that the extract started off with a minimal number of cuts then increased and decreased one after the other until 1:46-2:12 minutes, this was the time duration when the number of cuts increased the most, this showed us that the frequency of cuts does relate to the tension/ excitement of this film extract because this is when the extract was building up in tension and excitement.  Another thing we saw in this extract was that there were some hidden images at the end between 2:11-2:12 that the audience would be unaware of in such a quick time, there are a total of 5 hidden images which also builded up the frequency of cuts and made tension. 

Target Audience

The target audience for my short film will be young adults aged 16-35 , i have chose this because the main characters in my main task are of similar age. This may terrify my target audience more as they may may feel as if they could be targeted against hallucinations or they might find they are in the same situation as Jennifer Dawson. Being a young female, myself, I know about the fear of being home alone when it's dark and. The disappearances and deaths of young girls has always been in the news, frightening young girls and parents.  

Psychological Horror

The type of sub genre that i am going to be using for my main task is Psychological Horror, this is based on horror fiction that relies on characters' fears and emotional instability to build tension. 

Psychological Horror films gnerally rely on the characters beliefs, fears and any hidden truths about the character or what they have done. Psychological Horror tends to involve ordinary people who tend to be the person subjecting the horror onto the charecters. The evil work of the character is not shown until the end when the story is fully established. 

An example film: 

An example film of Psychological Horror is Apartment 143 we chose this because it matched with our target audience of young adults and when we did out market research majority of people said they didn't find 'fake blood' and 'predictable scenes' scary in horror movies. This film doesn't include any of this, theres always the unknown in the next scene its not predictable of whats going to happen next and its not typical of the horror genre.

Other Example Films:

§  Eraserhead

§  The Strangers

§  The Thing

§  The Blair Witch Project

§  The Haunting in Connecticut

§  The Sixth Sense

§  Dark Water

§  The Unborn

§  The Exorcist

§  The Omen

§  Gothika

§  The Shining

§  The Others

§  Paranormal Activity

§  The Ring

§  Silent Hill

§  The Village

§  The Uninvited

§  The Haunting

Psychological Horror usually tends to follow a number of conventions:

•       The killer usually appears to be normal; there are not usually any usual physical signs that would identify the person as a killer, this is because they may lead an average normal lifestyle with no other possible reasons to point to the way that they are. 

•       Psychological Horror films will generally rely on the characters beliefs, fears, and any hidden truths about the character or what they have done.

•       Psychological horrors tend to involve ordinary people who tend to be the person subjecting the horror onto the other characters which often makes it difficult to identify who the killer is.  Very often the evil works of this character is not shown until the end or when the story of the horror is fully established.

•       They rely on the audience’s mind to create the horror effect, with less gore noticeable like in Slasher films where the film is heavily dependent on it to create effect.

•       In horror film trailers the audience rarely see the killers face, this helps to create an effect and mystery, but also increases the suspense in the film.