Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Costume, Make-up and Prop Research

Here is a powerpoint i created about the costume, make-up and props...

Proposal Of Idea's Continued..

These screenshots are from the film Dead Man's Shoes, Al gave us the idea to look at this film as it includes some of the shots we will be using in ours...

These shots (one above and below) are of a group of men torturing another man, they show them all holding the other man with rope around his kneck, and him screeming in pain and frustration. In our film we wanted a group of teens to make fun out of the geek and give him a duff drug, it wont be anything as violent as seen in these shots but this is the idea we were looking at as it shows who is the antagonist and the victim.
We decided that we really liked this shot (below) and that we could replicate something like this in our film. It say's 'One Down' and because in our film we want the geek to come back for revenge on the teens, we were thinking we could write something like this next to the first teens body, and maybe write something else along the lines on 'Another 3 To Go' somewhere were the other teens would see and be scared. We thought that this kind of shot would be scary and intriguing for the audience, and that it gives abit of narrative.

This shot we all thought could contribute really well to our film as here they are forcing him a drug, and in our film we wanted the antagonists at the beginning to give the victim(geek) a duff drug, but we realised that it would be innaproprite to show drugs fully in our trailer therefore we were thinking of portraying something like this so the audience cant actually see what they are giving him but it's ovbious of what it actually is.
As these trailers will be shown to the exam boards and teachers it is inapropriate to put certain things in trailers, we first had the idea of the geek taking it where the audience could see what it was (drugs) but then we realised that this wouldnt be allowed, therefore Al shown us this film and we came up with the idea that we could film it in a way where the audience couldnt actually see what it was but they still new. Also because we are aiming our trailer at a 15-25 audience it is inappropriate for the audience that are under 18 therefore we wanted to make it only a small part of the trailer and not exactly showing it all so it would be ok. We arnt too sure at the moment weather the geek is going to take the drug himself or be forced into taking it, this is something we are going to have to look into more, it would be easier to hide if the was forced it but we wanted to make the storyline at the beginning where the geek is trying to fit in with the popular group so this wouldnt fit in with what we had planned but this maybe changed due to new problems.


Poster Flat Plan



This is a draft that Biancha thought of and drew up, she took inspiration from the Fright Night posters and made it to fit our film. She has put the film name in the right hand corner and the date it comes out, also has drew the 'geek' with the words 'one bad geek, this means revenge' this relates to our film and gives abit away for the audience.

Film Name



This is a list of possible names we created for our film. We tried drug-related names, and revenge related phrases or words. I also looked at the Latin words for some of the English words to see if they sounded more interesting. We looked through the list together and we found that we all liked 'vindicta' the best, which is Latin for 'vengeance' - the main antagonist is getting revenge on his peers for playing a dangerous prank on him which turned him into a raging zombie killer.

Test Shots - House






Here are some test shots of my boyfriend's house up in Stanhope, i thought this would be a great location for shots as it is deserted in the middle of the countryside, it has trees surrounding half of it and a long track leading up to it from a side road. It would be perfect to create shots of a scary house, as in other horror films there is always shots of the outside. I thought if we wanted to film the inside of a house we could use here or somewhere else as you wouldn't be able to tell the inside from the outside as long as it's dark and you cant see out the windows too much. I have permission to shoot here so that would be no problem, the only thing is that it's quite far away from Darlington where Lauren and Ryan live therefore i think if we do need shots of this house we agreed i would shoot them as it's easier for me to get there and back. Also because this house is still not fully finished getting built there is still scaffolding (which would be a safety issue) but this may add to the film and make the house more interesting looking. Also we have been thinking about the weather and have realised that in Stanhope it starts snowing early, (November time) therefore we are thinking of having a few shots in the snow depending on the weather in our other locations and where we are with our trailer.





Here are some shots taken from certain horror films and off google images, these images show typical horror style houses. These kind of shots are what we will be trying to create to make the house look scary and fit to the genre. There is a few different weather conditions including rain/storm (typical weather for a horror film) there is also snow, sun and cloudy. In Stanhope the weather were the house is, is usually cloudy and on a night it rains quite a lot, therefore i think it will go perfectly with the genre. I think the problems that i will face will be lighting! this is because the house is in a remote place there is no lighting hardly s except from a few outside lights that are not that bright so i am thinking i am going to have to find a light source, i was thinking about maybe a few big torches...


Further Research



Here is my drawn version of the fright night poster and the actual one, i decided to have a look at this one in detail as i think it would be easy to replicate. I went to see Fright Night and found it similar to what we are trying to create apart from a few differences, it has a vampire instead of a zombie and the storyline is different but the basics are the same, one antagonist and teenage protagonists. I like this poster as it is simple but says alot, it shows the antagonist and the protagonist with the location in the background and the title of the film and underneath when its coming out. I think it would be easy to replicate this poster using photoshop and other programmes.





I decided to look at this other Fright Night poster as i liked the quote on the front, i think this could relate to our poster as we are only having one antagonist aswell. It stands out and you can clearly tell he is the antagonist by the words and how he is portrayed. It would be east to replicate this shot, as all you need is the antagonist standing in a street with a tiny bit of blood coming out of his mouth. Ovbiously our antagonist is a zombie so we could easily place a zombie instead and just put different words on the front.

Pitch and Feeback

Our pitch to the class about our film idea and research went quite well. We got a lot of feedback on what we should work on, add to our research and what we were already doing well. Here is our feedback from our pitch from our teacher Nicola:


And here is the feedback on post-it notes that our classmates wrote about our pitch and our research and ideas; these will be very useful to us when we are developing our ideas and going back to our research to add to it.
After reading Nicola's feedback on our pitch, we realise we need to think more about how using one zombie in the film will work as an antagonist by himself. A convention in zombie films is the 'apocalypse' kind of storyline, where something triggers a zombie virus that is contagious by a bite and then transfers to most of the population with a few survivors. In our trailer, we want to challenge these conventions by making our 'zombie' character not fit to the usual zombie rules such as contagiousness, more mental ability than mindless zombies and going after a certain group of people rather than just running after any living person. As a group we have looked at Fright Night, which includes a lone antagonist in the form of a vampire. Vampire conventions are usually similar to those of zombies; a group of vampires working together rather than just one. We can take ideas from this lone antagonist and see how he works by himself to take down the other characters. Our group has also taken inspiration from many other zombie and slasher films - Scream has helped us to develop our ideas through the idea of teenage parties going wrong and teenagers watching a horror film together. We have each planned to take some practice shots of locations tonight and to put them onto the blog. Our group plans to create our music for the film trailer in Garage Band on the iMac. Lauren created a short horror/thriller music track in A2 fortnight which is similar to what we will need to create for this trailer, so we will be taking ideas from this already made track in Garage Band to develop the horror music.

Our classmates' feedback about our pitch and ideas was overall helpful. They mostly commented saying that our ideas were original, but we just need to develop them a bit more and add to our blog. They again said think about how the zombie character will work on his own, and so we will be thinking more in depth about making our own conventions. They also said think about practical elements such as locations, props and costume - we have decided on which locations we might use and are taking test shots tonight; we will also be thinking more about what the antagonist will use to kill and what the characters will wear.