Initial research

As part of the first stage of planning we looked at a number of exsiting horror texts and their marketing/ promotional posters for genral inspiration.

This is a poster for 'Saw 2' and is a very terrifying one! You tell that it is a horror, and is going to be gory. The mask and the red shimmer down one side gives this away. i like this poster, it makes me want to watch the film and find out more.

This is the poster for 'Halloween 2'. This is a horror and the image of the man with a knife sort of gives this away. The dark, dull colour and then the title in red, is i think effective and makes it stand out. The caption line, 'Family is Forever', give you a clue about the film, and so makes you want to find out more.

This is the poster for '28 days later', this is a horror film and the poster really catches the eye. The bright red would draw people to it and the eyes mesmerize you. I like the way they have put to title in the middle and the sort off out line of the person and the buildings in the background.

Definition of Horror and a Thriller

The definition of horror, is fear, terror, a painful emotion, horrible, gloom etc. for a horror film this would include these elements, to elicit those emotions in the audience. Most horrors will have shocking and quite disturbing fundamentals. The aim is to scare the audience. These are a few Horror movies for example, ‘Saw’, ’28 days later’, ‘Halloween’ and ‘The Orphanage’.

Thrill means to ‘to pierce’, a thriller will build up tension and build suspense. And normally unlike a horror won’t involve lots of gore and disturbing elements. These are a few Thriller movies for example, ‘The Godfather’, ‘The matrix’, ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘Psycho’.
There are subgenres to a thriller, action, comedy, mental, dark etc.

Inroduction to final cut pro editing

In our first introduction to final cut pro which is a software package, we learnt how it allows a sequence of shots to be coherently cut together to constructed a narrative or montage.
We then went on to explore final cut server, this software allows the storage of projects like ours and prevents the lose of work and gives easy access by having to check 'out' and 'in', it could be shown as an 'electronic filing cabinet'.
Lastly we learnt how to edited and construct the shots. We had to take the shots we liked and place them together, and chose where we wanted them in our sequences. Unfortunately when we filmed our frames the microphone was broken so we couldn’t hear any sound, so next are going to have to put a voice over on.

Preliminary task

Today our class filmed our preliminary task projects. This exercise was designed to teach us the basics of video production and allow us to learn about the importance of compression, focus, lighting, continuity, the 180 degree rule and the discipline of shooting professionally in a team were each person took on a specific role.
Our group of four filmed our footage in, N10, one of the media class rooms. The room was perfect, it had enough space for us to be able to work with the lights and move the camera around. There were already tables and chairs in there, which we were able to use. I helped direct the actors, along with Ben. I helped out with the camera movement as well.
Our lighting was made to look like an interrogation. The main lights were turned off, and the large light was aimed slightly downwards, to just light the area of the scene up. We used the small desk light and shined it to the actor sitting down on the chairs face. We had this because one of our actors was pushing and pressurising the other one. I think this worked, because the rest of the room was dark and all you saw was the light shinning up the actor’s faces, and the essential movement.
I believe we did set up the camera right, with the shutter speed at F2.8, zero DBs, we bubbled the tripod to make sure it was straight and not at an angle. We made sure the lights and the shadows weren't showing in the shot, and there weren’t too many objects in the background.

The last practical lesson we had, we had to film a 20 second simple action sequence with a PDV 170 camera.
My group and I went out side and filmed Leo running down a hill , which was at a wide shot, and he ran towards the camera. The next frame we did was Leo running towards the class room, which was shot at a mid-shot. The next frame was Leo crashing open the door, with a scared expression. which was at a wide shot. Then we shot Leo running into the class room, and being out of breath and scared which was at mid-shot them into a extreme close up of his face. We then cut straight to him writing something on a piece of paper. Next was him choking to death, which was a close up, and then a close up of what Leo had written on the piece of paper. These were all jump cuts. We didn't necessarily do what we were told to do, it was meant to be simple and one action, but we learnt from our mistake and learnt from the other groups. With an simple action, one wide shot, mid shot, close up and extreme close up. We didn't stick to the 180 decrease rule, which was a big error. We had an idea, which meant we didn't stick to the task in hand, we did get heavily slated for this, so now we know not to do that again! The other groups did really well, so we got to watch theirs and learn from them.

We soon went on the Photoshop and leant all about what the different tools where and how to use them.

• 
  The lasso is the cut/crop people, objects or buildings, sky etc.
• There are three different lassos you can use; the polygon lasso, the magnetic lasso and the free hand lasso.
  
• The healing brush is to get ride of any unwanted spots, scratches or specs on the picture.
  
• The clone stamp tool directly copies information from the first area to the next.
  
• The smudge tool is quite self explanatory; it spreads and mixes the content of an image.
  
• The doge tool lighters areas.
  
• The burn tool darkens areas.
  
• The sponge saturates /desaturates a area
  of an image.

We started are blogs. Which are like our dairies on how we are progressing in media, of which we well keep updating. We will have this until we finish out two year media course. So far we have written about ourselves, and uploading pictures. And there will be a lot more to come!

My first practical lesson we did was working with cameras and lighting. We were constructing an interview and my partner and I had to film, and direct where the lights, the interviewer and the person being interviewed sat. We had to set the camera up by placing it on the tripod and levelling it out, by making sure the bubble was in the middle.
We had to call, “standing by” and “rolling” to let the lighting people and the people we were filming know what was going on. I had never used a camera like this before or ever filmed a real situation like this before, so I found it interesting and all new knowledge. I found to make sure the camera was in the right place, as the lighting did create shadows and we had to make sure we didn’t get those in the shot.

Following on from this we had a lesson in how to use the cameras properly, what all the different buttons mean and about what is on the display, when the camera is switched on.
This shows how many frames.The time code, which is written on the top right of the camera picture is displayed like this; _ _:_ _:_ _:_ _ This stands for Hours/Minutes/Seconds and frames.

The time code is regarded as important and we were told that, when you are filming to never rewind back, otherwise the time cope will go wrong. This is why when people are filming, they have so many takes, because they can’t go back and see what they have done, so they have to keep to going until they feel it is right.
The shutter number is also displayed, we learnt that 50 is the normal amount of shutters the camera does per second. The switch for this is on the back of the camera.
If the number of the shutters is very low, the camera image will be very blurry and delayed. The higher the number, the sharper the image will be. The Iris exposure which is also displayed is changed but turning the silver wheel which is at the back of the camera. The higher the number the darker the picture will be. The white balance can also be changed, which adjusts the intensities of the colours.

I created my poster by taking three separate images: the house in the background, which was a wide view of an image I already had, the gloomy sky, which I took last week and the boy, which was mid shoot, which is an image of my next-door neighbour.
The grass around the house was very, very green, so I had to burn this to darkness it, otherwise it looked pretty and bright and that's not the impression I wanted. I also used the burnt tool to darken the house to make it look less welcoming and more eerie.
Because all my images were separate, i had to used the lasso toll and cut the picture of the boy out and paste it onto the edited image on the house. With the image of the boy, I rubbed out the logan of his school badge on his jumper, and darkened his clothes to look more threatening and less innocent, and made him more translucent. I made the scale smaller and I placed the image of the boy right at the front, to make it look more threatening and in your face.
The sky originally was a sunny blue colour, and i had taken and image of a grey and gloomy sky, so i needed to copy and paste it there. I did this to all the blue sky that was showing.
The last thing I had to do was create a title. I used the writing tool and wrote "Behind Closed Doors" in red, and large writing. I placed this half way down on the right and under that i put the director's name and production name; this is all in blood red writing.
Hopefully the poster created an image of a movie that was scary and of which people would want to see, to be intrigued by the scary house and to want to know what the child does and what the connection between the title, "Behind Closed Doors", the child, and the house.