Video Evaluation

Final Question 9- By Tom Nunn

i am in a group consisting of myself, Sarah Ellis, Daniel Smith and Kimberley Osbiston. we were asked to plan and produce he introducing 2 minutes to a horror film.

Planning:
whilst we were planning we go together well as a team and discussed our ideas such as what type of horror film we would make etc. i made lots of suggestions with ideas about what could be done and thought of the idea of a girl and nursery rhymes which were used in the film. i also thought of writing the title in blood on the window, which was my bedroom window as we used my location choice as a setting to the film. as a team we discussed how many zombies should be involved and who should be the zombies, and originally in the first shoot i provided 3 of the zombies.
i completed the recee sheet- to allow us to use the location and called West Park School to confirm that we could use the location.
i helped add to the story board as we all did our individual sections, and provided pictures that gave clear stage directions with the environment.
i also did the original zombie test shoot- to get try and test for the best zombie look, which i used the skills to help prepare our actors before shooting- but we later replaced it with the one done by Sarah.



 During the filming:
We re-shot our film 4 times in order to achieve the end product which everyone is happy with as it has lots of shot types, and is a lot scarier through improvements such as more close ups. we used lots of angles so that we could use a variety in our film.

this is the blood that i helped make and i suggested jelly to provide a texture to make it look like insides and told the actor to let it spit out his mouth as he's hungry for more.

we decided to film this at my house as to get a shot of the garden as an over the shoulder shot overlooking the woman being attacked, and we all made fake blood that took adjusting multiple times to stop it looking to bright.

this is the panning shot i suggested so we could see all the zombies and there movements in one shot so no action was missed.

i also provided an opinion to choose where we were going to take the angles such as the shot of the zombies all crowding around the camera at the end to provide a view from the girl on the floor who gets eaten.

this was the shot of the zombies crowding the camera

i also provided my dad and mum as actors (zombie attack victim in the introduction, and zombie man gargling blood everywhere.)
I helped provide stage directions as to direct the zombies where to run in order to get the best angle and shot types all included and to give the zombies an apparent purpose.



After the filming:

i helped the garage band- this is adjusting the volume and when the sound is introduced from quieter to louder.

the musical typing keyboard allowed us to chose the instrument and what pitch we used to create atmosphere.

this was our completed movie soundtrack that me and Dan Smith both worked on half and half.

i helped edit the soundtrack with Dan, and used garage band to create an eerie and exciting soundtrack that matches what you see on screen. i helped record the ring a ring a roses nursery rhyme and the loud bang at the end of the rhyme- "we all fall down..." BANG! which was my idea. i then helped some of the video editing by using using the transition in which the zombie girls eyes stay over the back ground as the two school pupils start walking from the school.

 we also growled and made gurgling blood sounds together and breathing down the microphone on the macs in order to create a tense effect.

Question 9-Kimberleyrose Osbiston

I contributed to the process of planning by getting the permission to film at our location, I had to go to West Park School and get the sheet signed by one of the teachers. I also drew a storyboard up of some of the scenes that we will be doing in our film. This is so when we went to film it on the day we had a clear idea of where we wanted the actors on the camera and where in the location they will be. I also did a textual analysis grid, this is when I watched the film 28 Weeks Later and wrote about it, this was to give us ideas on what we could put in our film and what our zombies looked like, we took ideas from this film like the "running" zombies and the red eyes. As well as this I found an actor to play the main boy in the film (the boy who picks up the money and wallet) this was important as we needed a good enough actor to play this part as he gets tackled and eaten by all of the zombies, he needed to show emotion and look like he was scared.

For my contribution to the production I was one of the directors that filmed the horror film. I also got some of the props like the bag that the boy was wearing and I made some of the fake blood that was used as make-up and for the intestines when the actor gets eaten. We had to re-shoot our film four times throughout our time that we had to record it, which means I had to get my actor to agree to come back every time. I edited the film with Sarah after each shoot, this meant that we could see what was wrong with our film and it showed us what we needed to change. Our original idea was that the boy picks up paper that he has dropped when he gets tackled, but after each re-shoots we changed it to him picking up money, then on the last shoot we changed it to him finding a wallet and picking up all of its contents.

After we finished our final shoot, Sarah and I edited the film again and made it to as close as two minutes as we could get it. We had to put transitions into the film like the fade and the black screen at the end. We also had to chop bits of the clips to make them shorter and more scary then they would've been if they were long.



Overall I think that I put a lot of effort into the process for planning, production and post-production throughout this year. I am happy with our end result of our film as it is just what we imagined it would be. I think our film fits in closely with our original idea and we only had to change one of the main ideas about the paper, but overall I think it was a success and I am very happy.

Question 9 - Sarah Ellis

In the planning folder I completed:  

My sections of the storyboard. I drew in pencil and pen; the pencil drawings were indications of movement within the scene; mainly character movement.

The script. I tried to use as many stage directions and scenery indications as possible as we had little dialogue which in the end we cut down to none. I also tried to copy the layout of a proper script.

The zombie test shot for our main zombie. I tested blood consistancies before I attempted the test shot and discovered that washing up liquid and red food colouring creates the best consistancy for facial blood.

- I also collected some signatures on the release form for three of our zombies and provided a stan in actress when our main human was unable to film for us. 

 - I completed the film pitch sheet and conducted the research for it.

During production I helped film our shots and direct the actors. I have provided images of some of the shots which I filmed below. I provided props such as the contact lenses.

I edited the film along with Kim Osbiston. I cut the final film with Dan Smith.

Question 5 - Tom Nunn

How did you attract/address your audience?
did you meet your target audience's viewing needs?
I think that we targeted our audience very well as we used lots of close ups from examples such as Dead Set and Dawn of the Dead.

 Dead Set close up of blood around the mouth is one that we used as we think that it shows that they are flesh hungry and have just finished eating their latest victim adding to the horror and gore- which our target audience wanted to see.

Our version of this shot.

we asked a student of the media department to evaluate our work, as someone who is nearly a age of our target audience of 18-29, and the questionnaire we asked them to complete is on the left.
this shows that we have successfully managed to create a film which our audience liked, only he seemed to no like the sound as much.

In terms of what we provided in order to reach what we wanted,we we gave multiple actor from different age groups in order o make out that the infection affected everybody, and we also made a small girl one of the main character in the introduction which is creepy as children are supposed to be innocent instead of blood thirsty.





We also provided a sound track that is full of suspense and and keeps the reader waiting however, according to our review we did not successfully boost the excitement as the action excelled.
we used flumps as props as fake intestines and lots of fake jelly blood, which gave across the realistic impression he was being eaten.

We also had a lot of zombies overwhelming one person rather than just one on one attacks, which is a lot more generic as generally there are loads of zombies and its a mass spread infection.

Foundation Portfolio Evaluation Question Seven - Sarah Ellis

I have learnt many things about technologies during the process of constructing our film. The internet helped us create our film by providing us with information about our target audience. Through websites such as IMDB we were able to gather information about what age and gender watched our genre of horror film. We were also able to gather clips from films which helped us in the construction of our own. Besides the internet we also used Imovie. This was the most helpful technology we used as it allowed us to put our film together. We were able to edit our clips to our satisfaction as well as adding desired effects and transitions to make our film the way we wanted it to look. We also used Garageband to create our film soundtrack. 

The dots being pulled into different positions allowed us to change the volume of our sounds. For example, if we wanted the track to become quieter for a part to let other parts of the soundtrack become apparent.  

The musical keyboard allowed us to create some of our background sound. We were able to construct eerie atmospheric sounds.

These are our recordings. We recorded our zombie noises and scream and laid them over the soundtrack where they were needed.

Dan and Tom did the soundtrack whereas Kim and myself edited the film. They were able to record their own sound in Garageband as well as adding different effects the make the sounds eerie. We used the website Blogger to document all of our work. I believe it is very useful as all our work is in one place so it helped with the organization of our work.

The technologies did allow us to become more creative with our work as if the technology was limited I believe that the overall effect of our film would not have been as effective. I believe that our film would lack intensity and interest if created using a basic software program. Imovie allowed us to darken our shots to make the atmosphere of the film darker. 

I believe that these technologies gave us more control over the piece as we were able to edit all aspects of it, view were we went wrong and what needed re-doing, what effects were needed and what cuts to make.

Foundation Portfolio Evaluation Question One - Sarah Ellis

Our task was to plan and produce a two minute horror film opening within a specific horror genre. We chose to create our opening within the genre of zombie. We conducted research into horror films in various ways. We viewed films within our genre and took inspiration from them such as effective camera angles. We were highly influenced by the appearance of the zombies and also their movement as a lot of the well made zombie films contained zombies which were more realistic instead of the typical halloween zombies with very pale faces and slow walks. The image below is of a 28 Weeks Later style zombie. This zombie is clearly human but also it is clear that there is something wrong with him. He has red eyes and this is a characteristic which we used within our zombies. 

Below are screen grabs of the shot with the eyes from 28 Weeks later and our version of the shot. We attempted to recreate this effect in our own way. We got our actress to wear red contacts so that she appears more abnormal and sinister. We also were influenced by the editing we saw. A lot of the zombie films which we used for research contained fast paced editing. Another way in which we did research into horror films was by using the internet movie database (IMDB) website so we could understand how to construct a target audience. 

Our initial idea was inspired by the film 28 Weeks Later. We liked the fact that the zombies were more realistic and human and therefore to us they were more frightening. They were also fast which creates more fear as they can catch up to the victim. We new that it would be hard to film high speed running shots without them looking awful; never the less we still managed to capture a decent running shot with the camera still. We had the zombies run in and out of shot. 

We believe that it was a good compromise considering theres no way we could have managed a running scene such as this one from 28 Weeks Later.

We are trying to create a zombie horror that combines the traditional and modern depictions of zombies. We combined a simple casual everyday clothed zombie look with quick yet abnormal movement. We also picked normal actors and individual actors. Our two main actors were fairly plain whereas the main zombie stood out with her hair and contacts. 

The video below is of the opening to Dawn of the Dead (2004 Remake). This inspired our opening title sequence as we had some interesting zombie shots that didn't fit continuity wise in our opening, hense we used these zombie shots to create a tense intro. We thought that it was an interesting way to induce tension within the intro and also make it clear what genre it was. 

The first two images are screen shots from the Dawn of the Dead opening. They show a black screen with cast names and then flashing images of events and zombies. The bottom two images are screen shots from our film opening. We have incorporated the same elements within our film but just used zombies within the titles instead of events and images of war. 

Our group consisted of myself, Daniel Smith, Kim Osbiston and Tom Nunn. We had an effective relationship as we all came up with ideas and combined them with each others to create interesting events. We managed problems by discussing them, revising them and seeing what we could change to improve or solve the problem, for example, we experienced problems when making the fake blood so we tried lots of different mixtures to try and acquire an effective consistency and look as shown in the image below.