Our responses to our film.

Lauren: Over all I am very pleased with the outcome of our opening sequence! a few weeks back our video file got deleted, therefore we had limited time and still managed to creative something pretty good/catchy. Although, it's a shame we didn't have that much time to focus on the sound and editing as I wish we had. The sound had to be done very quickly, but it still flows pretty well with the sequence and the shots. I think that there are a few things, in which we could have made our project more successful, but nevermind. We have had many people say they like our opening sequence, which is also great news. Our project "The Slayer" matches well with other horror films, which is exactly what our group planned to do!


~Posted by Lauren 

Our Final Film

Here is our final film that has been uploaded to YouTube. There is also a URL direct link below if you do not wish to watch it through Blogger and want to watch through YouTube directly.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkcSvzKN0Uk&list=PLCE0D39A5C0005A47&feature=plcp

Why we chose our idea?

We wanted to make something that would scare and freak our audience out. We wanted to be able to go extreme with our given brief. We are aware of how hard it is to attract an audience and to frighten them, but this is a challenge our group wants to take on board. When we had a thought about it , we realised that many horror films seem to love blonde young beautiful victims, so we decided to try this out in our story, so people get the idea straight away that she is a victim with no hope. Our group became inspired by "Halloween" the idea of POV shots and having the killer as the main character of the story. Along with that we were also inspired by inspired some of the earlier crime films where there are important detectives to the story, who are the good people in the film, as in most horror films there is a mixture of good/bad as contrasting can be more exciting.


~Posted by Lauren 

Our decided title

THE SLAYER 

• Gives the genre away.
• Gives the audience the idea that there is a killer or something
• When you hear the word "slayer" the theme of violence and blood may get into the viewers mind
• Tells the audience that it's most likely focused on one a main character: shows that it's the type of film where the bad guy/girl is possibly the main character of the film.
• Sounds scary.

~Posted by Laurenn =D

Finished filming. =DDD

~Posted by Lauren

Script

Throughout our opening sequence, we didn't really want much of a script as we thought it would be more thought provoking, so instead we focused on more action happening rather than people talking.
The only piece of dialogue in our sequence is from detective 2 saying "we gotta go now", this was to show that they have a big problem to deal with and it has to be done quickly.


~Posted by Lauren

Inspiration to our music

Although Hitman may be a shooting game we think that the Hitman
Contracts Theme. The same kind of ambient sounds, techno,
string sounds are used like in our sound for our horror opening
sequence. We created our music on garage band using similar
sounds as the ones in Hitman, because we got inspired.
In Hitman, there is a main tune played throughout it, and then
there are added in sounds which are either at a higher or
lower pitch, making the sound often rise and fall, just like our
sound for our opening sequence.


The sounds we got inspired from in this game are the electric
sounds, and the high key sounds , as you can see the variety
of high and low pitch scratchy sounds make a very
scary mix.

~Posted by Lauren and Daniel

Location #3 Office

~Posted by all

A incident that happened while filming.

After we had finished shooting in the forest, we started packing up and clearing up our things/props.
We then decided to film something for our blooper video, so I was laying down on the floor dead with
red food colouring around me and on my t-shirt. Daniel was putting the fake knife away, that was when the incident happened. Daniel had not yet taken off his balaclava, so something unexpected occurred. A guy walked past Daniel, looked across the forest seeing me on the floor (meant to be dead for our filming) and the guy saw Daniel and then me on the floor with fake blood, he  then ran for his life down the pathway. We did not expect to come across an incident like this, and we just want people to know that they should be careful when it comes to using props, and they should make sure people don't get the wrong impression. It was funny at the time, but we will use this as a message to other people to take good care of how things look when they are filming, especially horror/scary shots. We didn't know our filming looked so realistic =D

~Posted by Lauren

Editing Schedule.

~Posted by Lauren

Shooting Schedule (now complete)

                                   

~Posted by Lauren 

Classroom's feedback.

This is the other AS media group's responses to our opening sequence so far. When reading through the feedback, we realised almost every person commented on the storyline not making sense. Of course, this is perfectly understandable and nothing to worry about for our group because we haven't put everything together yet, the classroom only saw two scenes. We are very glad that people commented on our shots and said they liked the variety because that is what we aimed to do. Also, people mentioned the sound a lot, and how it was hard to hear, our group have planned to sort this out by using voice overs and ADR. Our group have not started creating our sound/credits yet, which was also brought up a lot, so we definitely know that we have to get this done anyway. Overall I am pleased with our feedback, as it's all the areas we already knew needed working on, we are very impressed that people like our close-ups and shots though.

~Posted by Lauren

Meeting #8 Shooting the first scene

Here is an image of one of the props that were used in the opening sequence. As you can see in the image, it is a white top that is covered in "blood". Of course the blood is not real. The way we made the 'blood' look alike colour on the white t-shirt was by the use of red food colouring. The red food colouring was very cheap at a cost of 60 pence and the outcome of the colouring on the white shirt was very pleasing and better than we had expected! The shirt was used in the scene where Olivia (Lauren) was up against the tree after she had be brutally stabbed in the chest by the killer (Daniel). Us as a group thought that the prop of the bloody shirt worked really well in the opening sequence because it look realistic. If we were to use something more basic such as ketchup for the blood, we don't think the results would have been as good as the red food colouring.




 Here is another image of the white t-shirt close up. In the morning we went to Alex's mum's office to shoot the office scene. We are very lucky to have a proper office to shoot in, and this was very successful as we were very well organised etc. Later on in the evening we went straight to the forest to shoot the first scene to our opening sequence. The lighting at the park near the forest was very good and bright which gave our film quite a weary atmosphere to the scene. This scene was definitely the most challenging scene as it was important to grab the audience's attention and engage them.
We made sure to film when nobody was around, to make it more lonesome and creepy like. I am very proud of the amount of teamwork there was at this meeting, and I am glad our group pulled off a tough part of our course.

~Posted by Daniel and Lauren

Character profiles! =D

Name:Olivia Watson
Age: 16
Played by: Lauren Elaine Vlahos
Personality: fun, outgoing, confident, dumb, 
Hobbies: films,going out with mates, telling jokes
Occupation:Just started her college course 
Other Information: Olivia is just like any other normal teenage girl. She likes spending late nights out with her friends but she isn't too bothered about life at home. Her dad left her and she prioritises her relationship with her mother, as she lives with her mother and that is all she has. Her mother is an important person to the town, and loves her daughter an unexplainable amount, and if her daughter was to ever go missing, she would do as much as she could to get the people to find her,  losing her daughter would break her heart. Olivia's life at home isn't that great, so she prefers spending time outdoors having fun with her mates. 
Part:Victim


Name: Aran Wong (Asian detective)
Age:  27
Played by:     Daniel Walter 
Personality:  Serious,hard working,intelligent,professional,neat,logical 
Hobbies:solving mysteries, working with crime problems,chess,mechanics
Occupation: Detective
Other Information: Aran Wong is a little less trained and has only been working for a couple of years, he is the type of guy to just get on with things, but often complains and has to prove that he is right. He lives with his mother and father and is more of an independent learner/worker. He has had many jobs and a very good education, he is pretty rich but lives away from his older sister who lives in China. 



Name: Michael Smith (British Detective)
Age:  34
Played by:     Alex Griffith 
Personality:  Demanding,smart, joke able,understandable,helpful,organised.
Hobbies:solving mysteries,investigating,finding out new things, joking about while serious
Occupation: Detective Chief
Other Information: A very upper class detective who has been solving all kinds of crimes/murders since his early twenties. He is good at giving advice and guiding others right away, but he doesn't like messing around and gets straight to things. He is married and has children but he rarely gets to see them and when he does he spoils them, he is the richest out of the two, and can often take a joke too far. 



Name: Unknown
Age:   Unknown
Played by: Daniel Walter 
Personality:  cold hearted,emotionless,careless,horrible,selfish & is easily thrilled.
Hobbies: killing,having a thrill, more killing and being able to get away with it
Occupation: Unknown
Other Information: Bad past, badly influenced as a kid, never felt love. The rest is unknown.

Part:  Killer 

~Posted by Lauren and Daniel

Props/Costumes.

The victim's shirt after her death.

Props                                                                                                                                                                            

1. Map for background.
2. Article
3. bag
4. phone/mobile
5. guns/knives
6. Computers
7. food colouring on white shirt
8. Coffee cup

Costumes      

Killer:                                                                                           

Gloves

Balaclava

Black hoody

Black baggy trousers

Leather boots

Victim:  

Blonde wig(not visible)                                                                    

Slight bit of make-up but not strong

Grey cardigan

White sleeved shirt

shorts

Brown boots

Grey thick tights

Shoulder bag me2you

to suit her friendly personality

Detective 1: 

Glasses

Long black coat

Suit

Tie

Smart shoes

Shoulder length hair

Detective 2: 

Hat

Glasses

Grey suit

smart shoes

Leather jacket

Short hair

~Posted by lauren

      

Problem with Final Cut and School Network.

Today, there was a problem with our Final Cut project for editing some of the clips that we had filmed for our opening sequence task. Our project did not get backed up onto the schools hard drives and the clips that we had imported ended up getting deleted so there forth, all of the editing that we had done was gone completely without any backup to recover our project that we had been working on. This has cut as back quiet some time and has made us fall behind on the work now.

~Posted by Daniel