Horror Movie - Redrafting

Since we received the feedback from the questionnaire we have spent time improving the horror movie opening taking on board the feedback. Although people said to change the title we didn't agree as 'the river's' true purpose would come apparent further on in the film and we didn't want to explain everything at the beginning as its one of the mysteries found in 'the River'.

One of the things we did change however was the ending, when the detective (Josh Spoelstra) was talking to the father of children played by Harry Smith, we cut out the bit where Harry smiled and put in an earlier fade to keep the intensity of the film's current situation and ring true to the horror genre also.

Through re-editing, the title 'The River' did go a bit odd, and didn't 'move' properlyy like we wanted, but we soon corrected this. We also removed the 'ghosting effect' as this failed to work correctly once we exported it. We also made the title's appear slower to make them feel more professional and this also added to the readability.

Overall I think The opening is now improved and when we showed it to the class for a second time this did echo.

Horror movie opening: Questionaire

After finishing our horror movie draft we were told to make a questionnaire for the rest of the group and year 13's so they could tell us what they thought was good and what they didn't like through a 'yes and no' system. Then finally leaving a comment for us on how to improve it.



In the questionnaire we asked a variety of things that would help us improve our movie, the questions i feel covered everything, so when we get the results it'll be very clear for us on what to change and what worked well. I think the questionnaire will give us a very good idea on this and help us achieve a better opening overall.

Horror Opening Questionnaire: The River  

1.       Did the opening make you want to watch on?                    Y / N

2.       Was the storyline clear?                                `                   Y / N

3.       Did the editing flow well?                                                  Y / N

4.       What did you think of the special effects?                          G/ B

5.       Were the characters believable?                                        Y / N

6.       Was the camerawork good?                                             Y / N

7.       Do you think the film title relates to the film?                      Y / N

8.       Did the sound and music fit the scene?                              Y / N

9.       Was the continuity good?                                                 Y / N     

10.   Did the film have enough conventions of a horror film?      Y / N

11.   Was the title sequence like a real movie?                          Y / N  

12.   How could we improve the film?

After the rest of the class and other years watched it we seemed to get good feedback overall, we constructed our results in the graph below -

 

The feedback we received was mostly good however the over all issues was with the 'title sequence'. Most thought that it was too fast which we'll take on board and change. The most voiced comment for question 12 was too shorten the last scene as a character laughs which we'll also change. Another comment was to remove 'the ghosting effect' which is a shame as when editing it looked really good and made the masked people look in-human and supernatural. it distorted however when we exported it, so we'll have to get rid of that also.
The second comment we received quite a lot of negative feedback on was question 7: 'Does the title relate ?' We are considering changing this though we still think it does relate, and that its true relation to the film would come clear later on, remembering it is just an opening and it would spoil it if we answered everything at the beginning.

Horror Movie Draft of 'The River'

 

This is our draft of our Horror opening 'The River' We think it has turned out well but we still don't think its perfect, so we'll be making a questionnaire for the rest of the group to fill out so they can voice their opinions on what they liked and what they think didn't work.

Lighting used in 'The River'

I choose lighting carefully when directing our film, making sure the opening which was a somewhat happier scene had high key lighting, gradually decreasing as the story progressed and the characters went deeper into the wood eventually dieing at nightfall. This is done in a wide range of film by using lighting to convey the emotions of character, 'dark' a connotation for misery, brightness for happiness etc. I also took use of such pathetic fallacy when directing emphasising the situation and mood of the characters to audience, somewhat subconsciously.

Horror movie:Music

It was hard to find the correct source for the un-copyrighted music we have in our horror film however when we did locate a good website there was lots of good conventional and unique horror tracks on it. We downloaded over 20 tracks and put them with our film in each scene until we were pleased with the result in each section and in the end we have the carefully chosen music that's in the product today.
We made sure to get slower tracks for sections such as the title sequence and very tense tracks for the climax of the opening were Rowen's character realises Michael's death which overall we thought accompanied our film well. We were lucky to find the tracks what we did as they all worked so well in our film we think due to their general convention horror factors while still having an original sound to each tune.

Special effects in our film.

Many films nowadays have to us special effects to appeal to the more expecting modern day audience,we thought of this and tried to incorporate this in our own film production, in the end we only managed to use a black and white effect however, however we did plan to use the 'ghosting effect' which worked well by making the masked antagonists more conventional to horror by not appearing as normal humans,the effect made them appear translucent and distorted which made them appear ghost like and supernatural which greatly appeared to a modern audience and further their conventions to horror. However we weren't able to use this effect in the end as after distorting it it looked very bad so in the end we decided to go without it. Although the horror film looked better with it it looked better without it then a blurry and bad version.

'Elliot Minor' horror music

Before I suspected that their music was copyrighted I thought that the band 'Elliot Minor' would have very appropriate songs for our film with their well known scary undertones to their music which are also quite mysterious songs however I soon realised that their music would most likely be copyrighted which was a shame so we began to search for un-copyrighted music and luckily we managed to find some stereotypical horror symphonies which we have used in our final production.