Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Flat Plan for 'Empire' Magazine Cover


This week I have been working on our groups magazine cover, so I have done a draft sketch of what our magazine will look like, demonstrating where I feel the text is best aligned and what picture shot I feel will look best for the magazine. I am going to do another flat plan of this tonight before I start to create this magazine cover on Photoshop.  It is best to ensure that you create a flat plan for such type of media so when you come to actually doing it in Photoshop it is much easier as you already know what needs to be where and you have a vivid idea of how everything should look. Being organised minimises the time that you spend on creating something and as I only have until next Friday to complete this, creating a flat plan was a good idea.

The Products I Used



I have created a slideshow on the products that I used in order to create this look. http://slide.ly/view/6b1d866d2b15572a5a9f56269cb2f127
Asha Maria Pinder's Slidely by Slidely Slideshow

Friday, 24 January 2014

Meaning Behind 'Chained Souls'

Out of the Two...

Me and Shria, used the words from our mind map and came up with 7 potential film names, we then asked 8 different people what film title they like and the top three names were; ‘where evil lives’, ‘eternal darkness’ and ‘chained souls’. We then collectively as group selected the two titles we liked the most out of the three. That was 'Chained Souls' and 'Eternal Darkness'.

Coming up with a name

Even though overdue my group and I were really uninspired and could not find a title for our horror film trailer. Yesterday, myself and Shria created a mind map with a list of words that relate to our film with the help of an online thesaurus. The screen shot below shows the brainstorm we created as well as print screens of us using the online thesaurus.

Researching titles of other ghost horror films

As are horror film features ghost it only made sense for me to research into real media texts similar to ours so that we could be inspired to find a name for our horror trailer. I was inspired by some names and their concept. For example the use of having nightmare in the title I quite liked and thought was quite simplistic, as well as the word darkness or dark.

Thursday, 23 January 2014

Fonts for Trailer

One of the members of my group, whose main role is editing has been researching into real media texts to analyse what kinds of fonts they use as well as using DaFont to find an appropriate font for our trailer


Article Uploaded

The article about Annabelle's suicide has now been uploaded on to my other blog ‘Local Horror Stories’ ready for us to film later on today.

'12 YEAR OLD GIRL COMMITS SUICIDE' Article

This is the article which me and Ellesha worked together in creating. I found the newspaper to article template from the internet which allowed us to edit and transform the article to suit our narrative. Ellesha used ‘Sepia’ in order to edit the colour of the article so that it created an old effect.

Blog Posts for 'Local Horror Stories' Blog

I have just uploaded a blog on my ‘Local Horror Stories’ blog on a post about a horror story that I found on the internet about a ghost at the very old Croydon Airport. In the final print screen below I have shown by an arrow that I edited the date on the post from 2014 to 1994 in order to make the blog look old. The reason why I am blogging on here is so that when we come to filming this scene today, the blog looks realistic and has a range of local horror stories for us to choose from.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014

'Local Horror Stories' Blog

We have started editing and through this have realised that we need some fillers which includes an over the shoulder shot where our final girl and her two victims find an article about the haunted house. I have created a new blog where we will upload the newspaper article on Annabelle’s suicide, this will be uploaded today, for us to film tomorrow.

Flat Plan of Horror Poster in Photo Shop

Here is a rough template of our horror poster which I designed in Photo Shop, I will then give this to one of my group members so that she can work from this. Creating this rough template makes it easier for the member of my group that is creating this poster as they will just need to insert the text where it says title and replace the square that reads ‘MAIN IMAGE’ with the actual image that we are using, which we are due to shoot next week.

Starting to Flat Plan my Horror Poster

This is where I currently am, when it comes to my horror film poster. I have picked out the main horror poster conventions that are required for a horror film poster. I have included the main image and title of the film on my flat plan, positioning them in the place where I feel is appropriate.

'Dead Silence' Poster Analysis

My group and I are coming to the stage where we need to start to create our own horror film posters. I decided to analysis some horror film posters that share a relevance to our storyline. It is very effective and useful to compare and analysis other forms of media such as this poster, as it will help me to realise the clear conventions that are demonstrated throughout horror posters so that I can make sure my horror poster shows this as well.

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

New Narrative

Below is the new narrative for our trailer, we had to make slight changes to the narrative as through doing filming for our trailer we realised that some elements of our story were not going to work. For example in our old narrative there was a family that moved into a new house, this included the generic family of a man, woman and 3 children, when doing casting we came into realization that this was not going to work as we could not find a mature male to play the role of a father nor could we find to young boys, so we changed our whole storyline around the characters featured. OUR NEW NARRATIVE The narrative of our film features a young girl named Annabelle, aged 15, who lived with her mother, father and younger brother. She loved to write, especially poems. Every day she would write in her diary; a new poem and a chapter about her day concerning her emotions and feelings especially about how she was tormented and labelled about having mental health issues as she would hear voices and see ghosts. She believed that she was being haunted by a ghost who she named ‘Guinevere’ (around the age of 5, but no one knows except herself) or otherwise known as ‘The ghost that lives at 134 Willowtree Lane’, who manipulated and antagonized her constantly because all she wanted was someone to play with her and love her, like her mother never did. This eventually made Annabelle commit suicide; from a drug overdose, due to the constant hassle of people calling her ‘crazy’ and the continuous terrorizing from Guinevere. All she wanted was to be left alone. Guinevere was finally at peace when Annabelle died, as she finally got the friend she always wanted, now that Annabelle is in a spirit form. When Annabelle died, all she left was her diary, and the mystery of her death unsolved. 17 years later, a group of friends are put together to research about something interesting within their locate area for a school project. Searching online they tremble up across an old article which tells them about a young girl called Annabelle committing suicide in this house. The group of friends consist of an innocent, studious and intelligent girl called Sammi (aged17) a provoking, attention seeking and promiscuous girl named Regina (aged 17) and an clumsy, foolish girl called Lara (aged 17). In search of this house, they ask a few people around the locate area if they have heard anything about 134 Queens Road and the story of Annabelle. They all receive negative feedback and are warmed not to go there as the house is haunted by the deadly spirits of Annabelle. But without a doubt Regina insist on making a visit to the house as she finds this mystery of Annabelle intriguing and is determined to find out more for the school project set. On the other hand, Sammi disagrees completely and is constantly reminding Regina of what could potentially go wrong. On the 6th of March, around 5PM they make their visit down to the house, (having trouble finding it at first) they finally reach the old wooden gates. First in, Regina finds a back door which leads them in to the abandoned house, followed by Laura and lastly Sammi. As they start to explore the old and dusty house, Sammi realise that something's completely wrong and tells the others to leave now. Now coming up to 6.30PM; after Regina's satisfaction of staying in the house and messing around they decide to leave, but Regina see’s a door leading to the attic of the house with she insists on exploring. She makes her way up stairs, and suddenly the door slams shut. The sprit of Annabelle kills her and the other two friends panic and run, reaching out for the front door, they hear it lock itself and jumped, left in complete silence. Only accompanied by the spirits of Annabelle, things start to go bad really quickly. Sammi tells Lara to stay together but she disagrees and tries to find a way out. Second death happens to Lara as she gets engulfed into the darkness, and dragged to hell. Left alone in the haunted house, Sammi finds ways to escape but fails. She finds a dairy that Annabelle use to write along with her childhood toys, and discovers the truth behind it all. Speaking back to the spirit, she is tormented for a days until finds a way out and escapes from the house. The spirit of Annabelle is at peace through the killing of Regina and Lara, but this goes down as an unsolved mystery. The haunted house still awaits for its next arrival, this time spirits of Regina and Lara will be after you.

From My Sick Bed

I have been ill since Sunday evening; I was suffering from muscle fatigue and now I have a really bad flu, resulting in me being off from sixth form yesterday and today which meant that I have been away from my group and unaware of what has been going on as I missed a Media lesson yesterday. Even though I am unwell it is important for me to know what is going on with my group, what stage we are at and what I can do from my sick bed, so I have contacted them all by email so I can get up to date.




Monday, 20 January 2014

Bone Cracking Sound Effects

Last week when my group and I were filming, we did a scene where I was getting my bones cracked on the stairs. The idea of this scene sparked form a horror film trailer I had watched last year (which I will upload later). Before filming this scene I was searching on YouTube bone cracking and I found this very good tutorial, where a young boy made the sound of his bones cracking all by squashing your everyday plastic bottle. It was very effective and looks realistic, it even made me jump and feel uncomfortable when I heard it. In editing we plan to insert the sound of us squashing bottle and merging it into the scene where my bones crack.


'Annabelle Comes Alive'

Sunday, 19 January 2014

'Dear Diary'


In order to achieve this look, I used a wet tea bag and dragged it across the page. The reason why I felt this look was appropriate for what we are doing is because the diary is meant to look like it is old as Annabelle would of written in it quite some years ago. I purchased this diary from poundland today so that we can use it in tomorrows shoot where we will be filming the scene where are Final Girl is reading Annabelle's diary.

Monday, 13 January 2014

Location Location Location

These are print screens that I took from Google Maps of potential locations in which we could film some of our horror trailer scenes. The first two images below are images of my favourite location as it already has a natural eerie feeling to it and it is also a detached house which are hard to find in South London, so the setting suggests isolation, loneliness and helplessness which are all key conventions of horror. The next two print screens are of an isolated location situated in Crystal Palace, opposite some woods which we could use to our advantage if we used this location for our horror trailer but the only issue regarding this location is that the houses are attached which does not suggest that the house is isolated. The final print screen is of a house in Thornton Heath, which looks very mysterious but I personally feel it does not look abandoned or old, the house looks too well maintained. 

Norbury


Crystal Palace

Thornton Heath

Ebay £££

Pictured below are some screenshots from my tablet of items that my group and I considered buying as props for our trailer. We did not buy the dress, spider web spray or the doll but we did purchase the necklace which is featured in our trailer. We did not buy the dress due to funds as we had no budget for this trailer and everything was coming out of our own pockets, I went home and grabbed clothes that we could dress our ghost ‘Annabelle’ in. We did not purchase the porcelain doll as Beth found one at home. Shria was meant to purchase the spider web spray but she did not and as we have a limited amount of time to film our trailer, we just went without it.

Saturday, 11 January 2014

A Little More Than Just a Film...

So not only do people die in horror films, which is one of the rules of a typical horror film but people are now dying because of horror films. I stumbled across an article about a teenage boy in India that died from shock when he watched a horror film at his local school. It appears that horror for some has the ability to shock them so much that they die even though extremely uncommon. Being scared to an extreme can cause cardiac arrest. And it has been said that horror films can also influence individuals to behave in a certain way, this idea is demonstrated in a theory called ‘The Copy Cat Theory’ which is mainly about some things which are shown in media can lead on to people imitating the behaviour that they see, this can be either good or bad behaviour. The case of the murder of two year old James Bulger in 1993 was an extremely popular story and is still talked about now, as the story of how this innocent little boy was killed was just malicious. The murder was carried out by two young boys and many have been lead on to say that this horrible incident was influenced by ‘Child’s Play 3’ (1991) a film which was found in one of the murderer’s home.

So there is a very dark side of horror films as well as it being all fun and relishing.

Click the link below, to read this shocking article. 
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-12-06/hyderabad/28230672_1_horror-films-residential-school-student

Do You Believe in Ghosts? The Rubin Report Clip


          Do You Believe in Ghosts? | The Rubin Report


Nearly half of the American population believe that ghosts are real; this just shows you why paranormal horror films are generally so finically successful as I believe that people watch horror films to be scared (I found this out from some audience research I conducted) and If a lot of people believe in ghosts as they feel there is evidence for their existence then these films will scare them.

The fear of the unknown is a very chilling topic for many, as you hear so many ghost stories just as referenced in the clip above.  When horror films containing ghosts are shown it scares people due to all the stories they have heard or things they have witnessed. 




Male Gaze Theory

http://www.slideshare.net/1MariaaMariaa/male-gaze-29914550 Above is the link for a presentation which I created on the Male Gaze Theory by Carol J Clover. By using SlideShare. This theory is extremely relevant to the horror genre and is a theory that I will analyse closely when creating my own horror trailer. (This presentation was created originally prior to starting my horror trailer production work with my group but I never posted it so that is why it reads (January the 11th 2014)

Friday, 10 January 2014

Checklist 13/01/14 - 17/01/14

Next week is going to be an extremely busy week as my group and I have to ensure that all our filming is completed. Above is a screenshot of my checklist for next week which I downloaded from an app called 'Colour Note' on my Archos Tablet.  It is important to stay organised and type up what you need to complete each week, as this week I did not do that and I have not been able to achieve everything I wanted to as there was no visual reminder for me to look at. 

Thursday, 9 January 2014

Fitting The Part

I found a YouTube makeup tutorial which I am going to follow on Monday, when I am filming the ghost scenes with my group with our actress Jozefina. Instead of using facepaint we are going to use baby powder, as Jozefina is allergic to facepaint.


I have gone on to google images and rounded up some makeup ideas for Monday's shoot.