THE preliminary project

And………here it is:

This is really bad quality and we're not sure why. The quality was quite good when we made it :/ As it's  only our preliminary and we don't get marks for it anyway we thought it didn't matter all that much. It also varied a bit from the outline.

Development of Preliminary

From the basic outline, we knew we needed someone walking down a corridor, going through a door and talking to someone.
As we are doing a horror/ thriller for our finished product. we thought it would be best to do a similar genre for our preliminary. This would allow us to experiment with shots and other techniques used in filming to convey the atmospheric feelings of tension and suspense.

Instead of walking down a corridor, the character is walking home, although she does walk down her corridor inside the house. Going through the door could either be through the front door or her bedroom door and instead of talking, we felt a single, scream would be more appropriate.
We filmed at dusk/night because this would create the necessary atmosphere and lighting. We thought this was vital to the mise en scene of our preliminary.

We chose Kerry Pike to be the victim as she appears vulnerable and represents the classic stereotype.
Our murderer does not appear in the filming, which provides a mysterious, ominous atmosphere, coupled with the diagetic heavy breathing. We thought that to convincingly not show the murderer, we needed to use a handheld camera, to portray the murderer's point of view.

Preliminary plan summary

In our preliminary project, we will follow the outline closely (someone walks down a corridor, through a door and talks to someone). We will film it at Hannah's house because there are multiple set options. We would also have a range of actors to choose from.
The story for our preliminary is that a girl comes home from [school?] and is being stalked by a murderous murderer. She goes into her house and into her room. As she closes the door we hear her scream. This is where it will end.

Film opening research

We studied and made notes on a variety of different film openings to see what aspects of them we want in ours. This would help us appeal to our target audience.

In the opening of Australia, there is voice-over narration to give background to the main characters and story and show life through his eyes. It also positions us on his side and we automatically dislike the antagonist even though we haven't met  him yet, through the murder of Maitland Ashley. In addition, as this happens right at the beginning, it adds intrigue to the storyline as his killer is unknown.
All music in this opening is non-diegetic and adds atmosphere. All other sound is diegetic except the voice-over narration.

In the opening of this film, it immediately dives into the action, which makes us anticipate the rest of the film and adds intrigue, as we don't know what happens to the characters. However, it is similar to the other two films. This makes the storyline predictable as the story unravels. On the other hand, there are some twists which make it interesting.
The use of non-diegetic music adds suspense and alerts the viewer to the fact something is about to happen.

 In the opening of One Missed Call, the camera is tracking along where we view a derelict wall and

dark windows and the non-diegetic music is ominous which created suspense and as it slows down and zooms in on one of the windows so we expect something to make us jump so we automatically feel nervous and after the scream it cuts to the next scene which is action packed, and we are forced to relate the opening scene to this scene thus we want to understand more about the story line and make sense of it so we want to watch more.

In the opening of this film, we are immediately introduced to the main character. We are also positioned with him as he is injured. As the opening continues, we are drawn more and more to this character as he continues in his plight to keep his leg. The music also adds to this as it builds atmosphere. It is non-diegetic and reflects the emotions in this opening.

Questionnaire results analysis

We have gathered the results from our questionnaire and put them into graphs in order to make analysis and evaluation easier:

Everyone said that they would pay an average around £10 for a new film. A few people said the would spend up to £15.

In the openings of films, our audience said they looked for the Primacy effect, action, good music and an introduction to the main characters. They also thought it was important to have a good plot,  realistic characters and a suitable location.

Our most popular film openings from our audience were Star Trek, Cabin in the Woods, Skyfall and Goodfellas. As most of these are Action/Adventure we would base our film on this. However this would be hard to do with our budget and time limit. We will, therefore, do a Thriller instead as it also includes the main features our audience thought important.

Questionnaire

We have made a questionnaire to gather information about our audiences media consumption habits to determine what sort of target audience we are aiming our film opening project at. This is our questionnaire:

We are planning to distribute it around our school amongst the teachers and students by emailing a variety of age groups plus printing of a few to hand out to people. We will use the filled questionnaires to gather a range of information from throughout the year groups, then use it to plan our project and expand on our knowledge of our target audience.      

Introduction

Welcome to our epic blog of awesomeness!! We've never had a blog before but apparently we need one so here we are....... THIS IS SOOOO EXCITING!!! :D  We will take you on an adventure through our media studies work...i know, exciting right!? Here we shall post all our super rad developments to our project. WICKED TIGHT MAN!





The deadline for the research, planning and finished film opening is 18th January. We have carefully looked at and planned our time management for this project but we are fairly reliant on the weather as it could affect our filming schedule.