RD: Concept Development-Casting, Costume and Props

Casting
Man (antagonist)- Tall, dark hair. Tim?
Wife- Kind looking. ?
Male Victims- Normal boys. Miles
Female Victims- Normal girls. Anna, Orla
Child?- Young, innocent.

Costume
Man (antagonist)-Business suit, glasses, moustache?.
Wife- Dress, apron.
Male Victims- Ripped jean, blood stained baggy tshirt.
Female Victims-Ripped suggestive clothing: short skirt, crop top
Child?-Dungarees

Props
Rope
Cages
Tea cup
Kettle
Oven timer
Hand cuffs?
Photos
Newspaper Clippings
Gags
Chains
Keys

Man: Our antagonist being tall with dark hair suggest normality but also a bit of mystery. He will be dressed so the audience are made to believe he is a regular working gentleman.

Wife: The wife is needing to look kind and dress like a classic stay at home, cooking dinner lady. This is so when it turns out she is also in on the plan it is made to be more of a shock.

Male Victims: The male victims should look like they have been beaten or tested on or mistreated in someway but it is not obvious so the audience guesses for themselves what is being done to them.

Female Victims: The female victims will be wearing ripped and suggestive clothing implying to the audience that they are being sexually assaulted. They will also be made to look weak to create a binary opposition with the wife who is in power.

 Child?- We have not decided whether we will include the child character yet but if we do he will be mad to look innocent but completely unbothered by the people in cages, to show how normal it is to him.

JP. Concept Development - Sound

• We will be including diegetic sound in as most scenes to try to express the couple as a normal family. These sounds will include dialogue, movement and a kettle boiling
• As the antagonist nears the basement we will sync non-diegetic sound such as spooky and eerie creeks and noises to create a tense atmosphere.
• We will be getting all of these non-diegetic sounds and some diegetic sounds from https://www.freesound.org/
• We will want to use these extra sounds to create a visceral experience for the viewer similarly to in The Ring (Verbinski, 2002) when the women walks towards the door and the music immerses the audience as we know something is about to happen.

Soudtrack:

• Tension building when wife goes into basement
• Light hearted music to express normality
• Scary, enhanced music when the victims and newspaper articles are revealed

Effects:

• Chains rattling enhanced 
• Scratching 
• Muffled screams
• Oven timer ping 
• Sizzling meat
• Close door and lock enhanced 

JP. Concept Development - Potential Locations

• Through our discussion in class as well as our location recce we decided an internal location would be best for our film.
• The process of choosing a location has become easier now that we have a brief plot, we have decided our scenes will consist of a hallway, a kitchen, living room and a basement.
• We are in the middle of contacting friends and family and seeing if anyone would have a suitable house.
• Since in our plot the antagonist's are normal people we want the set to be a normal ish looking house, the basement will be the only area where we will create a specific set

• This is our location recce to our friend Harry's basement, we can see it has an eery damp look to it
• It also already has a cage in it which is convenient for us since we need one as a major prop
• We found the basement was quite small but will work fine for our filming, Harry said it would be fine for us to film there and he also lives very close to Fred and I
• We found this recce very useful to us as it helped us visualise our ideas; this location is what we think we are going to use in our production due

F.O'C - Concept development 2 - Typography

The typography of our title and any credits we may have will be a very important aspect of the film. The word typography encapsulates all parts of the text such as the font, the colour, whether it's serif or sans serif, line spacing and line length. We have to take all of this into account when deciding on the typography as it can create or destroy a mood/ atmosphere within a film.

Font:

• The font is the main aspect of typography.
• A capitalised font will draw a lot of attention however it is proven that more time is required for humans to read and internalise what the writing dictates.
• For this reason our group may want to consider a capitalised font for the title which will stay on the screen for longer, but not for the credits which may subconsciously devalue the visuals.
  

The Scream 4 (Craven-2011) Title

• The web link below has 161 different horror fonts which I think we could definitely utilise. A more subtle font may go nicely with our chosen plot idea.
• http://www.1001fonts.com/horror-fonts.html

Colour:

• Colour if used effectively can set the mood in a scene almost subconsciously.
• Red - Blood and violence. Pink - Innocence and playfulness. Black - Mystery, fear and evil.
• As you can see different colours can connote different things and not only can we use this when deciding on the typography, but also when looking at mise-en-scene.

Photoshop:

• While finding the right font to start out with is important, we have to remember that by using the Adobe Photoshop software we can dramatically change and customise our text making it unique for our chosen filming style.
• We can stretch, apply colour grading, patterns and textures if we feel as though it will improve the quality of the text.



Another thing we must take into account is the length of our title. A long title would maybe require a taller and less wide text so we could fit it all in frame. However a tall text would probably be preferable no matter what length the title is. An example of this is the trademark font from Alien (Scott-1979) which I found effective and innovative while being simplistic and not stylised.

Group: Concept development 1 - Mindmap

In today's lesson we discussed numerous ideas to do with our horror opening as a group. The areas that we looked at were:

• Location - Kitchen, hallway, basement in a 'seemingly' regular household.
• Our individual research tasks into film openings.
• Plot - We've outlined the plot which can be seen in a different post in more detail.
• The antagonist - White collar, seemingly normal, middle class, glasses. He will be represented at the start of the clip as a regular, unsuspecting, middle class worker.
• How we are going to utilise visceral and intellectual pleasures.

JP. Analysis of opening sequence: Halloween (Carpenter 1978)

Genre:

• This film is an iconic psychotic stalker/thriller, Halloween includes conventions of this genre such as a knife, a female victim and a psychopathic killer who doesn't want to do the murder but is being 'controlled' which in this case is the little brother.
• These characters are stock characters of horror films, visual signifiers of the psychological horror are represented through pov shots and props such as the mask and knife

Film language:

• A point-of-view shot looking up the stairs is used to build tension after the teenagers go upstairs, this combined with the continuous editing makes the clip more immersive. This shot was very effective since we couldn't see the antagonist so we had no idea who or what it was, especially not the little brother. We only find out it is the little brother through dialogue, the first major piece of dialogue is of the girl saying the little brothers. This dialogue is important to us since it is when we first learn that the girl has a relationship with the antagonist.
• Mise-en-scene is used a lot in this opening; props such as the knife set the scene for the audience. The urban house with just the teenagers in give a sense of isolation which is typical to these kind of films, we also see vulnerability when the male teenager leaves through a pov shot.
• Sound is also used in this opening such as the diegetic sound when the antagonist is outside, we can hear crickets and other ambient sounds. Non-diegetic sound is also used for example when we see the lights turn off in the window and a sudden high-pitched alerting sound is matched, this is done again when the antagonist spots the girl. These sound effects are visceral and so keep the audiences on edge.
• The opening is done without any pro/post filmic effects and has very minimal editing to it apart from the cuts and music.

Narrative:

• The audience is always placed with the antagonist since we see almost everything from their pov. The first scene is off the sexually promiscuous teenage couple on the sofa and one of them asks if they are alone, this idea of isolation is strongly expressed in this genre of horror. 
• We then see the antagonist picking up a knife from a pov handicam shot and he progresses into the stairs where we see the male teenager leaving the female along.
• We then follow the antagonist up the stairs and into the girls bedroom where he kills us, this matched with the non-diegetic sound creates an immerse atmosphere.

Representation and Ideology:

• We instantly see two teenagers who are sexually attracted to each other, in most horror films the couple are murdered rather fast, just as they were in this opening so this stereotype was met.
• Carpenter tries to express the vulnerability of youth at the time by making the first characters to die the young characters.
• Many antagonist's in these genre's of film are children or women so this stereotype was also met, similarly it was set in an isolated house and the victim was a girl.

Media Audiences:

• Halloween (Carpenter 1978) was aimed at the core audience of 16-30 since it is mainly teenagers and young adults who enjoy horror movies, especially since the protagonists are young as well.
• There are mainly two different perspectives that Halloween was interpreted in, one was that the boy had mental issues/possession and it was not really him doing the actions and the other was that she had been targeted due to her sexually promiscuous attitude and so we sympathise with the boy. I personally interpret the film as the boy being possessed since when the mother comes home he asks normal again.

 

Institutional context:

• Halloween premiered on October 25, 1978 in Kansas City
• The film grossed $70m
• The film had no big A lister's in it, some of the opening was even played by the producer
• It was produced by Falcon International Productions and distributed by both Warner Bros Pictures and Compass International Pictures.
• Halloween has become increasingly iconic for the psychology genre as it has become somewhat of a cult film and inspires many inspiring ideas.

RD: Task 5: Horror Research Task

Reading source 1

1. In the late 60's/ early 70's women were repositioned in the horror genre. They we no longer seen as the weak characters they became able to defend themselves and seek out the antagonist and fight.
2. The conventions of the 'stalk and slash' subgenre of horror: Group of teenagers, use of drugs and alcohol, "masked killer".
3. Slasher and Stalker films are most commonly watch by teenage boys and young men because they enjoy the female nudity and the graphic violence shown.
4. The author of this article argues that theses types of film are significant because they have given birth to some very important film franchises and at the core of all these films it is a deeply moral tale.
5. The final girl is the sole female survivor of numerous Slasher films. The final girl is generically more intelligent than the rest of the group and much more "morally pure" than the others, giving her the ability to recognise the danger earlier. An example of a final girl is Clover in "Her body, Himself".

Slasher Film-Friday the 13th

Stalker Film- One Hour Photo

Final Girl

 

 

 



Reading Source 2

 

1. Stories that aim to scare are so popular because cultures create and ascribe meaning to monsters, endowing them with characteristics derived from their most deep-seated fears and taboos.
2. A study of horror monsters can give an insight into the anxieties and concerns of the contemporary culture.
3. Nosferatu (1922), one of the earliest horror films use the vampires as a metaphor for the Germans in WW1.
4. Horror is still popular with audiences today because it has the ability to adapt and change to the preferences of each generation.

Horror Monster