Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1

Test Audience Feedback

Test Audience Feedback

SURVEY RESULTS

-The feedback from our audience survey gave us a number of ideas about what kind of things people would want to see in a horror film.

-Subsequently, we adapted our opening to this feedback, making sure to include certain elements, but not to conform to other conventions that would reduce the credibility of our film. 

The majority of people who answered our survey were 16-17 year olds, which is still in the bracket of our target audience. Our certificate rating is a 12, so we only sent to the survey to ages 12 and above. This made it easier to get an idea of what this teenage audience liked/disliked about horror films.

Although more people who answered this survey preferred not to watch horror films, they would still be useful in telling us what they disliked about them and what could be done to make them more appealing. 

The people in our survey watch horror films fairly regularly, giving us a good idea of the variety of these films they had watched, so as to pick out the kind of things that drew them to them. 

When asked 'What interests you about the horror genre?', the top two answers were suspense and clever plots. We also thought these were essential to have in our opening, prior to even developing a storyline.The supernatural and blood/gore were lower down on the list, and since we had decided to create a psychological horror film we were not planning on including these elements. 

We found that 71% of people who answered our survey preferred the psychological horror genre to the paranormal or graphical type. This was ideal as we wanted to create our opening fitted to this subgenre as it was the one that intrigued us the most. 

A number of responses to the question 'What is your favourite horror film?' resulted in many psychological horror films such as 'The Shining', 'Silence of the Lambs' and 'Shutter Island'. This strengthened our motivation to create a psychological horror opening. 

When asked 'What do you like about this particular film?', many people referred to 'twisted plots', 'tension' and relating to 'reality'. We tried to incorpoate these elements in our opening, giving it an edge when compared to graphic films. 

73% of our surveyers thought that a 15 certificate would be best for a typical. However, we felt as our film does not contain anything violent or gory, and is more focused on psychological aspects, that a 12 would be more appropriate. 

The majority of people expected 'suspense', 'tension' and 'well thought out jumpscares'. Again, we made sure to include this in our opening. We created suspense and tension through long, drawn out silences with the faint murmur of eerie music over the top where nothing sinister happens, paired with unpredictable jump scares, created with glitches. 

When asked what they disliked about horror films, the response of our audience was 'bad story lines', 'predictable elements', 'tacky jump scares' and 'excessive gore'. We tried our best to avoid all of these elements, keeping the jump scares to a minimum, and not including any gore as it did not fit in with our genre. 

We found this survey incredibly useful with helping us to create our opening. We adapted many aspects from the audience's answers in order to help us achieve a successful and well-liked clip.

LUNCHTIME SHOWING

We showed our opening to a group of people that were aged 16-18. They completed a sheet that allowed us to understand what was considered effective and any areas that need improvement. 

Genre:	Effectiveness and what was done well:	Improvements:
Horror	Use of non-diegetic sound	Transitions Duller colour
Horror	The sound used; kettle and intense music The first appearance of masked lady	Transitions
Horror/thriller	Sound; kettle and phone call	Transition  Editing
Horror	Costume of masked figure Shot angles to show discomfort	Perhaps face on show instead of mask
Thriller/horror	The phone call voices Panning shot	Make it more jumpy Duller colour
Horror	The part where Evie is washing her face and the figure appears behind her	The sound; walking downstairs
Horror	Camera angles Sound effects	Abrupt ending Flow more Bit more jumpy

Difficulties When Editing

Difficulties When Editing

We used iMovie to edit our opening. An issue we found with editing was creating a glitch in the bathroom scene. We tried to resolve it by looking at tutorials on YouTube, however we found them difficult to follow. We eventually managed to create a glitch, switching between two images on screen, by quickly alternating between the masked lady and a shot of Evie with her head down.

Another issue we found with editing was our timing as we had filmed a lot so we needed to spend a long time selecting the best ones. After we had selected our clips we then needed to cut them down so that our clip was not over two minutes. This slowed the editing process down because we had to make sure the continuity was in order to make the images flow, and to insure there were no jumps.

Rough Cuts

Rough Cuts

Here are some of our rough cuts from our first and second days filming.

We decided not to use them for various reasons. 

• Firstly, if we kept all of the shots our opening would be too long. 
• Secondly, the framing of the shots and the lighting was off, especially when filming Evie getting up from the table and the top of her head is out of the shot. 
• Thirdly, the mise-en-scene wasn't good enough, specifically the 'Malt Wheaties' and the car and wheelie bins at the end of the video.

Editing Schedule

Date:	What to do:	Who?	Completed?
8/2/2016 9/2/2016	Sort the clips to get the best ones that aren’t shaky and are of good quality and appropriate to use	Annabel and Jasmine	No Yes
12/2/2016 23/2/2016	Order the clips, so that the make sense to the audience	George and Anna	No Yes
29/2/2016 1/3/2016	Cutting clips to remove any unnecessary parts that make the final opening too long	George and Anna	No Yes
4/3/2016 7/3/2016	Making the transitions smooth, so they are not jumpy	George and Anna	No Yes
8/3/2016 11/3/2016	Choosing a suitable text and positioning the text	George Anna	No Yes

Technologies used and how they were mastered

Technologies used and how they were mastered

iPhone - we were all familiar with using an iPhone as we all owned one and were aware of how to use the camera and settings. We used an iPhone 6s to film, which gave us a clear HD picture in 4K.

We did not use any other technology to film, as we had a tripod to position the shots and we mainly used natural lighting so didn't need to get it artificially. We wanted the mis-en-scene to be naturalistic as possible so all we needed to do was film in the light of day and use the iPhone. 

We used iMovie to edit our opening. This gave us the ability to use the automatic file types that our clips were filmed in and have an easy transition when exporting them onto the Mac. The main effects that we used were the match colour setting, adjusting the colour and speed. We also learnt how to put a glitch overlay over the top of some of our clips by using the glitch video as a cutaway clip and changing the opacity of it so that you could see the main video underneath it. Importing sound was easy as we were able to use iTunes to find any copyright free music or effects that we needed.

Pixlr.com was used to create our logo. We mainly used the pencil and pen tools to create the tree. We also had to use the wand tool to invert the image from a white background with a black tree to a black background and a white tree so that it would blend in more with the opening. Finally, we used the text tool to add in 'Fatal Films' at the bottom.

We predominantly used Facebook to communicate with each other. We created a group chat in order to share our ideas and post visuals of the work we'd done. We felt this was on easy way to keep up to date with the progress we'd been making with our blog and opening.