First impressions of my film

Chloe and I have now completed our opening of our film, my first impressions on what I have achieved is that we used the mark scheme to achieve a good mark using different camera angles and we really tried to use titles effectively and tried to make these interesting! I do feel that we should have thought more about acting choice as it was hard for the children to understand what we wanted. However I am pleased with how our film turned out.

Name Of Film

We had many ideas for names, but mnay had been over used or just unorginal, so the one that we are using is Captured. We feel it best sums up what happens and foreshadows what could happen in the furture of our film.

This is an image of title:

Achieving a 2 minute opening.

Even after the new shots being added in, our opening was still not 2 minutes. So, to achieve this we slowed the first opening section our film down so that the meaning was clearer to the audience and we also made a freeze frame shot of the table, and had the titles fade out to convey that the children have disapperead. Not only did this add to our film but it also meant we could achieve a 2 minute opening.
This is an image of the freeze frame shot:

Adding Extra Shots

Chloe and I were well into our editing of our film when we saw that our film was only 1.30 and in the criteria  it states it must be a 2 minute opening of our film. We decided we were going to add in 2 more shots, to show different angles and also add another oppurtinity to use titles orginally and effectively.

Shot 1
Was a high angle shot of the roundabout spinning.
This is an image of the shot:

Shot 2
Is the roundabout spinning and the camera is at the same level. We also chose to add flickering titles when the roundabout is moving.
This is an image of the shot:

Sound Effects

We have created many of the sounds ourselves such as:

We need a sound for when the camera cuts out and plays a fuzzy screen, I recored the sound by a car radio when it is in between two stations and has no signal, it created the perfect sound and we are using that in our film.

I also recored Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by recording Jess Moulsher playing it on the piano for the last shot of film, we decided that this would create the eery childlike atmosphere something that makes us all feel uncomfortable - exactly what a horror film should do.

We also downloaded a sound of a clock tiking for when there is a close up shot of the clock, we chose to add this sound effect to create a more professional feel to our film.

Music

For our scene when the camera pans around and the children are gone, Chloe and I chose that we wanted some music in the background. 

Though we had to make sure that the music is copy right free and also fits in with our genre, we found the website http://music4yourvids.co.uk/pages/mymusicpag.html  and have finalised a song to play, this song is:
childhood memories

We also decided that it would be ideal for music to playing through the kitchen scene where the mum is preparing the dinner, we are yet to finalise a song. We need to make sure that the music doesnt over power the video and that it fits in with our theme of horror.

Title Research

From previous research on http://www.artofthetitle.com/ ,I decided to reasearch the opening titles from two horror films Seven and Halloween, I can  see from this research that the titles used in films are clear easy to read fonts, that are a suitable colour that contrast to the background.
At this present time I am editing my own film, and have used this reasearch to make sure that my titles are in a clear and white font that contrasts heavily aganist the backgrounds.

I have chosen the font American Typewriter, the typewriter effect also fits in with my narrative of the opening sequence being a police report to what happened that day, and the font is a sterotypical image of a police document.

This is an image of the font we are using:

Posters

I have researched posters of films from the horror genre, theses films are Silence of the lambs and Saw, I have used this as part of my research and planning to see what fonts and colours mainstream horror films use so i can use this information when creating my own titles so that the titles,font and colour have connatations of a horror genre. As i want my film to appear proffessional and to scare my target audience, also I would class my film under mainstream so I am researching those films which also are mainstream so that i stay in the right genre and my film connates horror.

From doing this I can see that horrors use the colour red alot, a colour that connate blood, anger, but they also use more subtle colours such as blue which is supposed to connate relaxtion, almost luring the audience into a false sense of security, and more pale colours such as nude and white connating innocene which i believe would be a good colour for me to use i am using children which conveys innocence. I can now use this information to create titles that in themselves will scare the audience.

Reviewing previous work

Today in class we had the chance to watch what other people in previous years had done for the opening of their films, many had done the horror genre so I was able to easily compare my work with theirs and how I could improve mine. We also saw what level and marks they achieved and how they could have achieved a better mark. Many of the films lacked titles and those that did use them didnt use them creatively, from watching the work I now realise the importance of titles and the use of them creatively, so i can apply this knowledge to my film when adding titles.