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We took ideas from films such as 'The Blair Witch Project' (1999) and applied similar horror and thriller conventions via camera work to our film to give it the feel of a thriller. For example, when the girl is being followed walking down the road, she turns back to the camera, giving the impression that she is highly paranoid that somebody is following her, a few shots later we see her walking down a similar path back home but she is extremely drunk and can barely walk in a straight line - her paranoia disappears from being so intoxicated, it returns when she actually realises the geek is following her, at this point she speeds up her pace, then eventually starts to make a run for it. Steve Neal said that ‘genre is a repetition with an underlying pattern of variations’ which meant certain generic features had to be included and repeated. In the case of our short film we showed this by using hand held camera shots; to create paranoia and suspense - again we took inspiration from 'The Blair Witch Project' for these ideas. We also chose the location carefully, filming in the woods to give it an isolated feel when the girl is being kidnapped. The woods are highly associated with the horror type genre and also locating parts of the film within a college campus, meant that our target audience could relate to being in an educational place - general corridors, canteen and so on. This location idea also came from 'The Blair Witch Project'. We took inspiration from short films such as 'Love Field' because we liked the idea of how silence and a non-dialogue script made the short film feel more intense. 'The Girl of the Roses' was another short film we were inspired by, again it was a silent film, but it gave us the idea of editing the film in black and white, even though our film had more of a modern feel to it we feel as though it gave it a grittier edge. Especially when it came to using shots that were meant to look like CCTV following the students throughout the college. Had we had more time we would have tried to edit the film with different colours (only using black and white when the shots were meant to look like CCTV). Roland Barthes argued that the horror genre like many others used ‘binary oppositions’ in order to show the contrast between good and evil in order to force the audience to be constantly questioning the specific genre that they would be watching. We used lighting specifically to connote different moods and underlying messages in our film. The girl walks down dark isolated streets, with mild street lighting around her, and when she is at college, happy and carefree she is always in bright lighting. But when she realises she is starting to be followed, she is verging onto darker paths and has to run straight into the unknowing darkness to try and get herself free from being followed. We applied typical protagonist and antagonist roles to our characters by representing them as binary oppositions. We did this by using different costumes - the geek wore a big woolly jumper, a fur hat and glasses, where as the cooler male character wore dark rocker type clothes, had a side fringe and wore a black hood. In a way we were challenging the stereotypes of teenage hoodies; making this hooded character the better guy over the geek. The use of lighting was also important to us when producing our film,
we decided to make it a non-linear narrative, this was to try to keep the audience intrigued. After the first scene (which is in fact the last scene to our film) we show the audience that they are being taken back to events before the kidnapping by showing an intense flash of white, fading into normal lighting. This happens again when the female character finally falls down and is kidnapped.
We used Roland Barthes theory of codes and conventions matching similar horror ideology and narrative to our film. Our film is not in chronological it is in episodic order, it starts with a flashback and ends with the same shot, the middle part showing what has happened in between. We noticed that many horror` films do this - leaving the audience wanting to know more, keeping them enthralled within the first few minutes of any film e.g the film 'The Grudge'. Following the concept of the horror type genre, we made sure the lighting followed the conventions of the genre - dark, dull and gloomy - for the majority of the film. We took inspiration from Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory too, to show the girl's vulnerability. We wanted the audience to look at her from more of a male's perspective of a selfish female: desirable (costume - low cut top, tight leggings and heels), vein (many over the shoulder and mirror type camera shots), vulnerable (wide shots of her walking up a hill drunkenly in high heels, alone in the dead of night). The geek seems vulnerable at the beginning of the film as he seems emotionally unstable - crying he seems jealous in an overbearing way - spies on the girl through the canteen window. But he becomes the dominant character, kidnapping and tying up the female in the back of his car. There is a definate role reversal of power within our film.
A lot of research and consideration was taken when deciding what sort of age range and who are target audience would be. After collecting information from people (by creating and using questionnaires), generally asking people about what films they like and numerous brainstorms, we decided that a young teen age range would be the best (13-19). We wanted to show how different sins are all around everybody within daily life - even if you don't realise they are there. By choosing a younger audience we felt like they would be able tor elate to our film easier than an older type audience. Using the 7 sins as a base idea to our film worked out to be a great idea, because when we asked people to watch it, we also asked them to look out for the subtle sins hidden in the storyline. This meant that it was not only interesting to our audience, but it was as if we were challenging them and this meant they paid closer attention every time they watched the movie.
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