Research and planning

As a group before making our film we decided to make the target audience 15-24. We chose this specific audience as when doing research on a few horror movies we looked up what age category was mostly likely to watch that horror movie and these were the most popular ages. This will then enable our film to be more popular with a wide range audience that appeal to horrors. This type of audience may be popular as we know young teenage boys and girls are most likely to go in groups and watch a horror movie as they love the adrenaline of being frightened. Our audience enjoy horrors that contain a lot of suspense which we tried to succeed in our opening two minutes with the build-up and eerie music trying to create as much spook and tension as possible.

We recorded our research on our blogspots; we did this by making a questionnaire to ask the people within the age group their favourite aspects of horrors. This allowed us to use quantitative data to calculate the statistics of each question, increasing reliability but using some open questions where they had to explain their reasoning which also allowed us to use qualitative data where we could analyse and understand a deeper meaning into why this aspect of a horror means so much to them.

This research is effective as it allowed us as a group to create an opening two minutes that suits the needs of the particular demographic as we used random sampling, allowing us to get a cross section of the population, increasing representativeness for this audience and generalisability resulting increasing popularity for our opening two minutes.

In our storyboard we did follow the general pattern and idea of it however, when we got to the location our minds had come up with more ideas within where we could place shots in certain areas therefore we did go off track. However, it still provided us with a frame of what we were going to do when we arrived so it was still effective. With the shots we pretty much followed the codes and conventions of horrors and used a range of close ups, medium shots and long shots which we knew could all create suspense and tension therefore this was straight forward and made our opening two minutes look so much more effective and professional. Our opening two minutes didn’t contain much script at all, as we used the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds to create the ere ad ominous atmosphere that we wanted to appear. For example, the non-diegetic sound consisted of the victim screaming, the rush of the chase and the slow build up creating tension where it is completely silent, and then a stick snaps connoting the fact that she is officially in danger. The non-diegetic sound used was Evening on Chaos where we trimmed and extended certain bits to create a build up from her unaware of a follower, to the two shot where we finally see the protagonist, reaching the climax and music becoming louder and faster during the embrace of the chase.

However, our group has further developed these skills at A2 where we could show off more skills through creating our own magazine cover and poster to advertise and sell our movie. Therefore we had to dive into deeper research, using a range of questionnaires and surveys, ensuring they are much more detailed and will provide more effective results compared to last year. For example, in AS they were mostly closed questions with only around four choices therefore it did not cover all aspects of a horror genre. This year each we added the choice of ‘other’ and if this box was chosen there would be an opportunity for the participant to explain what and why. This was effective as it allowed our trailer to keep up with what the demographic enjoyed to see in horrors now days as this could have possibly changed from a year ago. As well as this, with our storyboard we wanted it to be more specific so we had something to strictly follow instead of partly improvising like we did last year. We achieved this by adding many more images to the animatic storyboard, allowing it to be more detailed and provide an accurate video of what our trailer would look like. Therefore when coming to our filming it was less time consuming allowing us to meet deadlines. With the shots last year, our criticisms was that we did not have that many close ups therefore this year we did incorporate a range of extreme close ups and then close ups on the victims face and certain surroundings such as the window of the abandoned house. This was effective as it created the atmosphere that somebody was there, watching her, creating suspense.