1) Media evaluation questions- Louise

Introduction: What we've made

We are going to make a psychological horror film that appeals to our target audience of teenagers. We have chosen to do this as we, as a group, found it very easy to relate to our audience therefore having ideas that would be best to incorporate into the film and make it enjoyable to watch. In order to research further into a convincing horror film, we decided to watch films which are in the psychological genre to gain ideas and enable ourselves to create a relation to those movies through our horror film making it effective and exciting.

The initial idea stemmed from a typical psychological horror which generally takes place within a hospital, so we therefore decided to film in this specific location however creating the effects of a mental institution.  From watching ‘The Strangers’ and ‘The Sixth Sense’ the idea of the event happening mentally sparked the story line to create a creepy and  an uncertainty within the atmosphere which is intriguing and suspenseful to watch. Therefore we are trying to create the illusion that our main character is seeing things that aren’t really there which relates to ‘The Strangers’ with the use of ‘mind games’.

The Sixth Sense Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpm50EBQaA

This part of the Sixth Sense Trailer gave us the idea of how to apply effective makeup to make our actor look tired, but also could give an open interpretation to whether she could be dead or not. This girl in the Sixth Sense is dead but she looks alive so therefore it enabled us to try and encourage the audience to question whether or not she is dead. However we decided to base our make up on Jessica Alba from "the eye" as Charlotte, who did the test shot, thought that is was the effective type of make up to use.


The Strangers Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lm2hZ50sN4

These are screen shots from the trailer of The Strangers which inspired our initial thought of 'mind games'. However we used a figure behind a curtain who is not really there when she pulls open the curtain. The figure looks quite artificial which was the effect we decided to portray as it leaves many questions as to 'who? or what?'

These two images inspired us when creating our gory end scene. We combined both ideas from The Sixth Sense and The Strangers by combining the lighting and scenery in the Sixth Sense and the bloody body from The Strangers in order to successfully create the blood to looks very realistic and effective. Also the moody lighting used in this image of the sixth sense creates an effective and tense atmosphere throughout the end sequence.

In our group there I am working with Joely, Charlotte and Elliot.  Although we had a few group contribution issues, which we solved by encouragement and responsibility share, we filmed a very productive amount within the first shoot which meant that we were able to get the majority of the editing done. However our camera was without a battery so therefore we had to use another camera which unfortunately, when uploaded for editing, was not compatible therefore we had to re-shoot, but it enabled us to get the idea of how a certain scene fits and how we could improve it with the proper camera.  This further meant that we had plenty of time to re-shoot and edit further and we only had to re-shoot small amounts in order to complete our film, making it effective and fluent.