.....

Throughout the past week, me and the rest of my group could not come to terms with a greeing with a final idea to do in the project. Therefore, the filming has taken a while to start on doing and not really a lot of footage has been captured.
Throughout this group project, it had led to me falling out with following group members, Therefore there won't be enough/ a lot of information to go off from what I had been doing.

Media Studies Coursework Examples.

As part of our research, me and my group searched on Youtube for A-Grade examples of As Media films, done in other colleges, following the Horror genre, which we have also chosen to do: They all have similar conventions, themes, plots and the same sort of gritty look to the. Here they are:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nicolestephenson94?feature=mhum#p/a/B5519A75CF7B8237/0/tODtjmGzo7k

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nicolestephenson94?feature=mhum#p/a/B5519A75CF7B8237/1/C1xx2oZy-Nk

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nicolestephenson94?feature=mhum#p/a/B5519A75CF7B8237/2/RRHFRCU-S8Q

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nicolestephenson94?feature=mhum#p/c/B5519A75CF7B8237/3/lbNwU6nfJfw

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nicolestephenson94?feature=mhum#p/c/B5519A75CF7B8237/4/VFHnkKpQof0

http://www.youtube.com/user/Nicolestephenson94?feature=mhum#p/c/B5519A75CF7B8237/5/TzsoU254zBU

There here is 6 examples of Media Coursework at Grade-A. These have gave us more of a brief idea on how to go about on filiming the beginning to our film

Revised Plot Idea

After discussing potential opening discussions with my group, I have taken their suggestions added some back story and considered how the narrative will develop. I think this is important because once we know what the characters are doing, we can help explain this to the audience through the filming.

Plot of film
In the past a young girl is attacked by a would-be killer, she escapes, he is caught sent to prison and later escapes. He comes back to get his revenge, stalking and killing her family and friends, until the climax when they fight and only one survives.

I understand that this plot has some similarities to Prom Night, however when we film this, it will be different.

Opening Sequence
Opening shot-Girl tossing and turning in bed.
Group of girls dancing at college
Cut to man looking at pictures of girls, discarded underwear etc,
Cut back to dancing girls, performance ends,
Three girls go toilet, remainder of girls leave building.
Cut back to man (face unseen) looking at photo of main girl.
Man hears girls voices, leaves caretakers room (half seen dead body in background) and goes to lock main doors.
Cut to girls going to door, find it locked, angry expressions, lights begin to go out in the building, girls become agitated.
Cut to man walking out of dark (with knife in hand and mask over face) Shot reverse shot to the girls.

What the genre 'Horror' is!

First of all, as me and my group have chosen to do horror for our final production, I decided to find out some extra research on horror altogether.

Horror

The aim of a typical horror film is to scare people, create tension, also it aims to fear people but also fascinate them at the same time. Horror can be up tight and really scary, it can also be psychological, this makes you think, but can get you freaked out at the same time.

Early horror movies are largely based on classic literature of the gothic/horror genre, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. More recent horror films continue to exploit the monsters of literature. So as the years have gone on, horror movies have changed significantly, now they are more about freaking people out and really scaring them....'Saw' films are a good example of this, even 'Paranormal Activity' these are the more up to date horrors.

Characters in a horror film usually have specific roles, the killer, they have their identification hidden or there is a twist along the lines. The victims are either male or females (blonde females) the children are innocent, if not, it is typical staff if the film is set in a work based setting. E.g. Hotel.

The style in a horror film is key, it has many features: Lighting is low key, Usually dark, Noises, Refletions, Low angle shots, Close Ups, Mid-Shots and many more.

Typical settings ofa horror film are: Hotels, Work Places, Forests, Woods, Schools, anywhere really, as long as it has its conventions etc it makes the horror good, also needs the themes and visual style to create these affects.

Knifes, Blood, Killings, Houses, Phone Calls, typical things to expect in a horror film.

Finally, the themes of a horror film are: Thriller, Viloence, Disgust, Comedy, Suspense

So overall, horror creates a big pack of tension and it wants to make people be facinated but also fear at the same time, unexpected things happen in horror films, this makes people want to carry on watching and not leave their seats. Some are made just to purely freak people out.
This research will help me and my group put some ideas together on how we can make our film production, look as much as a horror film as possible, we will use some of the techniques and conventions to help us gain in the project ahead.

Research

In order to do my AS Coursework, I had to look int a specific genre and look at examples and some of the genetic conventions of what is applied to this genre.The genre me and my group have chosen to do is horror. We have chosen to do horror because it is something we all agreed we would like to do, also we thought it would be the most interesting one to do.

We came up with 3 ideas for our final piece, a vampire film, a zombie film and a teen slasher. We thought about the use of facilities we would have to abtain to make the films and also the budget that applied to us, to make put to use for the special effects etc. From this, we could clearly chose one of our ideas and therefore we picked a teen slasher movie.

From research about a teen slasher movie, it would help us and give us a brief idea of how to make our final piece as best as possible. We found out some of the conventions you would expect:

• Knifes
• Teenagers
• Masked killers
• Ineffectionate adults
• Point of view shots
• Isolated areas

From doing the research, I watched the first 2-3 minutes of 'Scream' this is a Teen Slasher movie.
I took some screen grabs to show the conventions.

This is a typical feature you would expect in a film like this. The location is where the girl would feel safe and secure, also what is typical is that the house is isolated and the scene is set at night. Also, the girl is home alone in such a big house, this is typical in relation to a Teen Slasher.

This is another typical convention you would see featured in a Teen Slaher film, the use of knifes. It is an important shot, it shows Casey on the phone flirting with a male caller and this tells the audience that she might be promisqus. Which means that she might be a sinner. The fact that she's toying with the knife in phallic way reinforces the female sexuality. Knifes are key weapons in Slasher Movies and fans of this genre may expect to see that knife being used later in the film.

From seeing the opening of Scream, I can see that an isolated house and also the use of knifes and a girl left home alone with a mysterious man ringing her, I now know that these are ideas that can fit into my idea.

Camera, Equipment, etc. Getting to know the uses and how they work.

The Camera Equipment, as mentioned in my first Blog entry was difficult to get used to. We have already Practically set it up and played about testing out the different buttons on the Camera and adjusting the tri-pod so instead to day I tried a theory based approached by looking at pictures of the Camera and The Tri-pod with labelled descriptions of  all the different parts with what they are called and what they do. This will help us when we start filming our project as it will help us remember where everything is and what it is used for.

 

These were Very usefull and many of the names of the buttons and devices on the Tri-pod have been rememberd well by Myself and other group members due to these images... which will hopefully be usefull when filming.

Adobe Premiere Pro

After getting used to the Camera Equipment last week, experimenting with the different buttons and adjusting the tri-pod to various positions. It was decided this week that we become more familiar with the editing software Adobe Premier Pro; we did upload our footage but didn’t really start editing it last week.

So, today we used the capturing technique to select all of the footage we wanted and placed the clips onto the timeline in a logical order. We also learned how to trim the clips to the size we wanted them and how to render work together once we had made a change. The final part which we added to our footage was including titles to the sequence which showed what it was called and therefore gave a glimpse as to what it was about.  

Overall I found this lesson enjoyable, slightly confusing learning how to use the software at first but once you begin to see your work beginning to look like a real story with a plot and good shots coming together it encourages you to carry on editing and making it look even better. However this wasn’t our best piece of work as we were still unsteady with the camera equipment, we did do a good job at covering most of our mishaps up with good editing used to cut parts out.

Here are some of the Technical words associated with camera work and editing I learnt in today’s lesson, I have placed them on Bold above, they are:

1.       Capture

2.       Footage

3.       Clips

4.       Timeline

5.       Render

6.       Trim

7.       Titles

8.       Sequence.

Preliminary Screen Grab shots.

The screen grabs I am about to upload, are images of my fully edited piece of preliminary work.

This is a low angle shot of 'Lucy' this shows that she is important.

This is a medium close-up shot.

This is an over the shoulder shot.

This is another over the shoulder shot, however, this links with the other over the shoulder shot as it is a shot-reverse-shot, to show the link between the two characters.