PLANNING: Head on activity

PLANNING: Individual idea for title sequence

The genre we will be focusing on is horror. The initial ideas were the young teenage girl running away from something that is yet unknown to the audience.

 Although many of the group ideas where not mine, I came up with the idea of heart beating getting faster as the unknown get closer to the girl. I also thought about using Paranormal activity as a reference to this because in the movies we never actual see the paranormal things, we only see what they do to the people.

Lastly the main characters are the girl and the three things that we don't fully see, as we only see parts of their face.

PLANNING: Initial creative ideas (group ideas)

Group initial ideas

Mise-en-scene- mainly a forest and possible an empty warehouse
Colours/palettes- Mainly dark colours like navy, black, brown and dark red.
Range of shots/Shot types- many close ups of the 'murderous doctors' and of the fear on the girls face. Mid shots of the girl running.
Camera movement- Jagged and fast moving.

Use of sound-Mainly diegetic, leaves crunching, footsteps, heavy breathing from the girl and the 'murderous doctors' and finally panting from running
Introducing characters- 3 'murderous doctors' and the teenage girl running away.
Storytelling ideas/plot devices- Group of scientist/doctors, girl running trips on a tree branch , while running away from the scientist through the forest. Also, Marina came up with the idea of the girl falling into a huge pile of blood, which helps conform to the horror genre.

PLANNING - Soundtrack ideas

Initial Soundtrack Ideas:

For our title sequence, we are going to mostly use diegetic sound, this will give it a more realistic feel making it more scary as the audience will feel like they're there.

As a group, we came up with a couple ideas, this includes the use of a door creak at the beginning and then running footsteps to go with the imagery of the girl running. 

We was also going to include harsh breathing and a heart beat that builds up and then slowly leads to non-diegetic sound (the heart beat will go along with it).

For our non-diegetic sound, we looked at title sequences like American Horror Story as theres is very similar to what we are looking for (slow, creepy instrumental)

We decided to use an instrumental rather than a song with lyrics as the lyrics may take focus of it and may make it less serious. Even though we are using non-diegetic sound, the diegetic sound will still be dominant throughout with distant screams in the background, running and towards the end we will put in sounds of twigs breaking and various people running.

While the soundtrack is playing, we will have snippets of newspaper articles that are in context with the narrative (kidnappings etc.) and the changes of the shots will go with the music to create a more smooth and clear flow throughout.

PLANNING- Costume ideas

Costume Ideas:

Our initial idea was having teenagers kidnapped by surgeons who harvest and take their organs, cells, etc. and the teenagers (main characters) are desperately trying to escape.

Evil Dead:

I thought evil dead (2013) was a good costume choice for the main character and other teenagers as the clothes throughout are casual but worn out and bloody towards the end. The make-up is minimal and very tired looking.

Teen Wolf:

For the costumes of the "surgeons" in out sequence i looked at the costumes for the surgeons in the TV series Teen wolf. I liked this as it was unorthodox and different as is definitely scary and works well with horror. The look is made up of mostly leather and they wear full faced mask making it more eerie and scary.

American Horror Story:

For the teenagers (victims) i thought the victims form the fist season of American Horror Story (Murder House) would of been good as they were regular teenagers but they had been murdered and the make-up is very good and scary and clearly shows that they had been tortured which goes well with the narrative of our sequence.

PLANNING- Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas:

As a group we decided to do horror as it would be an interesting genre to take on as the filming and acting is completely different from other genres

Our idea that we agreed on was someone running through a dark and isolated location (forest) as if they are running away from something but we would not give the full narrative through the sequence as suspense is key in horror.

Horror is interesting as it would give us more to work with (costume, make-up, narrative, emotions etc.) than any other genre would.

We also decided that the soundtrack would be minimal with diegetic sound dominating but we will also have non-diegetic sound and motifs.

RESEARCH- Remake Evaluation

Seven Remake Evaluation:

In our group we had a choice out of 6 movies title sequences to remake and we decided to remake Se7en as it fits with the genre we want to do for out final title sequence.

The title sequence itself was very complicated as there were a variety of shots (mainly close ups) and the sequence was very fast paste and had a lot of complicated editing.

Filming:

The filming went quite easy. we used the trailer to refer to and we managed to get most of the shots which went smoothly together and resembled the original title sequence.

To make it better we used a portable spotlight to capture good lighting and to make it more eerie by keeping it dark in some areas but we did struggle finding places to put the light and making sure there wasn't a glare or the spotlight it self wasn't caught on camera.

We got very good close shots of objects and we did most of the shots in the trailer but we did miss a couple as we didnt have the resources to film.

Also, even though there wasn't any acting. it was hard to remake it as there was alot of jerky movements and flickering images and light which was hard to capture and when we id manage it didnt convey the same feeling as the original trailer as the lighting would be wrong etc.

Editing:

Editing went really well as we all had a part to do with it, when one was editing the other would help by talking through the trailer step by step and an another would right down the title timings etc.. however we did come across a few troubles with the editing but it was mostly to do with the drive we had to save on as when we first edited it it didnt save on to the drive meaning we had to start over again but we managed to finish it by the due date.

While editing the sequence we had to overlap alot of different shots to get a good effect and we had to change the font to make sure it matched the original title sequence.

To conclude i think we did a good job at making the remake as we managed to refer to the trailed and it resembles it very well. The filming on a whole was very well done and i think we successfully remade the shots and the lighting. The editing, excluding the technical difficulty, we did very well with all aspects and the final product is very good.