750 Word Reflective Analysis
My intention was to produce and capture a short section of a film of around 3 minutes long and approximately 25 shots, my film is a hybrid as it is to be categorised into both the horror and thriller genre as it contains conventions of both; specificly I concentrated on themes of a psychological thriller, which is a sub genre for a thriller. I hoped to capture a film that will frighten and panic the audience by choosing a realistic setting, characters and storyline.To do this I concentrated on non-diegetic sound, miss-en-scene and cinematography, whilst using conventions of a psychological thriller.
The conventions and themes of a psychological thriller that i used were; Reality, the quality of being real. Perception, seeing through a characters viewpoint and vision, we did this with the shots where we circled around the teenage girl antagonist using an 'Arc shot'. Mind, the human consciousness, we displayed this through point of view shots. And death - the antagonist died.As the film was a hybrid, conventions of Horrors that we used were Low Key Lighting, Isolation of the antagonist in a abandoned overgrown area and suspense by using non-diegetic sound.
In the Film Project, I took the role as Film Editor, which included finding appropriate non-diegetic sound that could link with the film and also create the convention of suspense. My target audience is teenagers ranging from 12 years onwards. I chose my film to be certified a 12A as the film would be to upsetting for children under this age as some violent themes are explored and also if it was certified higher such as a 15, then this would rule out too much audience and effect box office income - i showed the finished film to people in this age group and the outcome was that parts of the film were harder for younger audiences to follow, so i considered if the film should be a 15.
Another outcome was that the middle sequence of shots were too long, and lost most of the suspense in the film, so i went back and edited the middle shots to make them much shorter. Throughout my film, I used handheld, Point of View (POV) shots this made the film personal to the killer as it was from his perspective, and also connected to the victim with point of view shots from the innocent teenage girl, this made the build up to jump scares even more significant. We also used High angles looking down at the victim, this made her look small, insignificant and in danger - another shot type we used was close ups to exaggerate important events, such as when the girl cut herself. Low angles were used alongside with tracking shots of a persons feet whilst they ran, this created suspicion with the audience on who the person was, as we didn't show the killers face at all. I believe this had a successful effect on my film as I had a diverse range of angles, movements and shot sizes, from Low Angles, high angles, close ups, mid shots, tracking shots, arc shots, panning and tilting.
My film contained mainly Non-Diegetic sound which i included to create suspense and scare the audience. However i left some diegetic sound in as it captured a more realistic sound such as feet running on leaves. The non-diegetic music which i used was soundtracks from a similar psychological thriller, 'The Killing', and music from a depression scene of 'Twilight' as the music fitted with what we wanted and the mood we wanted to set.They created a gloomy, freaky and unnatural effect which was common in the genre of horror films and it added to the suspense and mystery in the film.We chose not to include any dialogue as this added to the mystery of the situation, and also to the convention of being alone in isolation, as the girl had no one to talk to.I chose to have low key lighting throughout my sequence as this is a regular convention used in horror films and to a point it was successful as this created fear and tension amongst some audience members. However, we couldn't film in the dark so to tackle this problem we had to film in the light, and then come back to the lighting in editing and make most of the shots as dark as we wanted to.My sequence could have a linear storyline with the events happening in chronological order. Although the film can also be seen in a different way of the girl already being dead and remembering the last few moments of her life.
This was intentional and we decided to do this as it makes the film a little less obvious and predictable, it also confuses the audience slightly so they want to carry on watching in order to figure things out, and it's not until right at the end they realise she is dead.
