Filming

Today we began to film our horror film, Slaughter School. We found this hard at times, as we were required to continually change the lighting in order to create the right atmosphere and allow the camera to pick up all the action effectively. We also needed to change some of the shots as they did not work out quite right when put into place in the real world. I will update my blog with information about the changed/altered shots at a later date.

Music

We are thinking about editing these tracks together to form the music for our horror film (this is not shown in the video, the tracks have just been put together in the video to give a sample of each). We're not too sure how we're going to use these yet, but we feel the simplicity of the tracks (they're not big, elaborate orchestral pieces, but instead small, low texture tracks, and some even consist of just sounds) compliments our horror film well.

Edit: we have found another track, called ‘Right Behind You’, and we feel this is perfect for our horror film with no editing required. So we will be using this one.

Pitch

This is the pitch for our horror film, Slaughter School, and we were made to do it as if we were pitching for funding in the real world. It outlines the target audience, genre, USP (Unique Selling Point), plot, characters, possible actors, 

taglines and logo. 

Edit: In this pitch we talk about Georgina being our victim, but as she has left the group, this victim will now be played by me. Also, apologies for the jumps when  we introduce ourseleves, this appeared when we exported the file and we are unable to do anything about it.

 

Here are the slides we used for our pitch, as it is hard to see them on the video:

Group

Unfortunately, two members of our group, Georgina Bass and Courtney Castor, have left media, meaning that it is just me and Vincent Man left in this group. We hope to continue as best as we possibly can, but luckily, we do not think that this will affect our group greatly as we are able to handle the workload and can find other actors (we were planning to have Georgina as the main character).

Promotional Poster

Even though it is not required of us to design posters for our horror film, when creating the pitch for our clip, we came up with some taglines and I thought it would be inspiring to make a promotional poster with regards to one of these.

“No walking in the corridor . . . only running!”

We feel this is a good tagline as it is a clever but simple play on a usual saying that is passed around school and implies that the pupils are in danger.

Of course this is only a draft of how we would like our poster to look, and if we were to make it in the real world we would include actual handwriting instead of the paint tool on Paint, in order to give a far more effective and realistic look.

Storyboard

This is the storyboard, drawn by me, for our horror film opening.

Shots 1-5

Shots 6-10

Shots 11-15

Shots 16-20

Shots 21-25

Shots 26-30

Shots 31-35

Shots 36-40

Shots 41-44

Fear moodboard

Here is a mood board compiling various things that people feel fear towards. 

Final Storyline

Here is the final and finished storyline for our short horror clip, Slaughter School.

1.   The victim (a teenage girl) is sleeping in the common room, unaware that she has missed her home time and the school is closed. The girl wakes up, feels confused and then (after looking at the time on her watch) realises what has happened. She panics, fleeing from the common room to the nearest exit which is located in the media classroom, and desperately attempts to open the door, which is locked.

2.   Through her desperation, she misses a deadly message that has been written on the classroom whiteboard by the killer. After ditching her struggles with the door, she then notices this message (which reads “there is no escape”) and hears another door in the classroom closing.

3.   The girl turns towards the door, and observes that it is closing, but no one is there. She walks towards the door, scared, and after opening it comes face to face with the killer, who is waiting at the top of a flight of stairs with a weapon.

4.   A chase begins, with the victim running down another set of stairs into a dark corridor. She hides behind some old filing cabinets in the corridor, and the killer, wanting to trick the victim into coming out from her hiding place, slams the door at the end of the corridor to give the impression that he has gone through it.

5.   The victim, thinking that she now has a chance to escape, emerges from her hiding place and attempts to run back down the corridor to safety (or at least a place that is away from the murderer). The killer is waiting for this to happen however, and he turns back, grabbing her ankle.

6.   A struggle then starts between the killer and the victim, in which the victim grabs the weapon and attacks the killer with it, supposedly killing him. The victim runs from the scene in order to escape the school, but the last thing we see is a shot of the murderer’s fingers twitching, implying that he is not in fact dead, and will go on to kill his victim, as she has no escape from the school.

Location Shots

Today my group and I decided to take some photos of the locations in which our horror film will be shot. Unfortunately we could not get our hands on a camera, and nobody had their mobile, so we planned to take short clips of the different locations on a video camera instead and then print-screen from these clips. The software we were using decided to play up and would not allow us to print-screen properly, so we decided to put the short clips together into a montage video. I think this works better than having simple photos, as despite the low quality, it is much better to have on a blog due to its interactive qualities, and also means that we have all of our location ideas together in one place.