Group 15 - Foundation portfolio

1. My group and I have now completed our horror opening sequence, and we believe we have included a range of conventions that are typically used within similar media products.We believe the conventions we have used indicate our opening sequence best fits the psychological horror subgenre as the stalker is mentally torturing the victim, stalking her and playing mind games which is usually shown in other psychological horrors.

I believe our horror movie has similar conventions to the psychological horror 'Gothika' as although the storylines are different it's based on revenge and the main actress being tortured by someone. This is what happens in our horror opening sequence.

Usually there is a female victim within horror films that is known to get stalked, frightened and even killed, the murderer is generally a male as they are know as the more dominant, aggressive sex whereas females are more vulnerable and emotional.We have demonstrated this in our opening sequence as we show a young female being stalked by her best friends boyfriend, who is out to get revenge for the death of his loved one. It is clear she feels threatened as when walking home she is constantly looking over her shoulder.

Another convention we have noticed in typical horror movie is the use of gore which usually includes body parts, blood and horrific footage.In the making of our opening sequence we have taken inspiration from the Godfather part 1 as although this isn’t a horror film, there is a horrific part which shows a man waking up in bed with a horse head covered in blood that was put there by someone seeking revenge, this relates to our opening sequence as a heart from the victims pet dog had been placed in a box by the stalker as one way of getting their own back for their unfortunate loss.

Q2. Our opening sequence represents social groups in a number of ways, as there are two young girls who have a close friendship but one girl is much more intimidating than the other, she is then over powered by the male character who is out to get revenge.It is stereotypical for the male characters to be much more dominant and powerful than the female in most horror films.We believe our horror opening sequence best fits around the ages of 18 to 20 as the characters playing the murderer and victim are around that age therefore the audience could relate to the ‘young love’ storyline.We also believe our film will appeal more to the female gender as we have shown two young girls wanting to party and then showing how vulnerable teenagers can be.Due to the conventions we have used such as drink driving, partying, young love and vulnerability we have came to the decision that out horror opening sequence best fits a teenage audience that are familiar with these things that happen in everyday life and can relate to them in their own way.

3. When looking at distributing our full film I would say that it would fit in being a saturation/ wide release Hollywood film that gets released in all cinemas and then about 3 months later will be released on DVD and blu-ray disk.

If this were to happen distributors to look at working with would be Universal, Lionsgate Films, or New Line Cinema. When looking at these companies they have many of the newly released horror films under their belt that have been huge hits. These films include; The Wolfman (Gross to date $137,332,000), Nightmare on Elm Street Remake, Cabin Fever, Hostel, Friday the 13^th Remake (Gross to date $91,379,051), Saw, Land of the Dead (gross to date $46,770,602), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Remake (Goss to date $107,071,655), House of 1000 Corpses, and The Devils Rejects.

Thinking about directors a name that always seems to come to mind, for me, is Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino has done many different things, such as; directing, screenwriting, producing, cinematography, and acting in many films. Hit films directed by Tarantino include; Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Kill Bill Vol. 2, Sin City, and his most recent movie being Inglorious Bastards.

Another person to look for is Eli Roth. Roth, like Tarantino directs, produces, writes and acts in many films. His movie career includes; Cabin Fever, Hostel, and Hostel pt. 2. The fact also that Tarantino and Roth have worked together before with small budgets to make a movie and they turn into great successes seems to be a way forward. This is apparent especially with the movie hostel as the budget was $4.8 million, but the movie, worldwide, has earned to date $80,578,934.

I believe with a mix of one of the three distributors, Tarantino, and Roth the movie could be a great success.

4. Looking at Merchandise and franchise opportunities I do not think that the film would be to the level of creating a franchise such as Saw or have merchandise to back up the film. The movie would be a smaller Hollywood release but with great potential to have maybe a prequel that would be able to explain the hostility of Jonathan and the volatile relationship between Kristie and Jonathan.4. The film we have created is a psychological horror and the audience we intended our film for would be 18 and older as we gave a certificate of an 18 rating for the film. Even though there is an 18 rating, I think Payback Time would appeal to many teenagers and young adults. The cast when making the full film would mainly be all teens and I believe the audience can relate to the film more that way. When looking at the death of Chloe especially, I think some teens will understand what Jonathan was going through because a lot of teens unfortunately die so friends, relatives, and boyfriends/girlfriends of anyone that has died will understand the pain that Jonathan goes through with Chloe drink driving.

When looking at similarities with other films I would say our film is a one of a kind but would take inspiration from things like Hostel and The Devils Rejects. I would say that from The Devils Rejects that we would take the power of manipulation that the Firefly family had in the movie. Jonathan could even work on gaining his family, or if a prequel were made it would show his bad family life and maybe just put him with a bunch of people like the Firefly family. In this picture that I have included from Hostel we could change the beginning to exclude Kristie finding her dog or add more flashbacks to Jonathan dismembering the dog like this man is doing with bodies. Over all I think that any young adult and teen could love the movie.

5. What we believe will attract our audience is that we have a full teen cast, which is our audience target of 18. We believe that they will relate to our cast and the situations they may get them selves into, such as peer pressure and drunk driving, leading to fatal accidents. I believe that our audience will relate to our drinking scene very well, as it is a common activity for our target audience to pursue. The gender of our audience is male and female, as our mixed sex cast will attract this. We have used one specific point of view shot in our opening, which is a P.O.V of the stalker following his victim, we have used this because we believe that it makes the audience wonder what will happen to the victim and make them wonder why the stalker is following. I believe that our audiences are being put in the position of both our victim and stalker, so that they can see both sides of the story. This leads the audience to choose who is right and who is wrong in the opening sequence. This creates the impact of confusion on our audiance, they are being given two sides of the story, this confuses them because they try to decide who is right and who is wrong and which side they will support. It also shows the reason behind any killings and torturing to come. The way in which we create suspense is by not showing the identity of the killer at first, but we do show it quite soon, this is because of the genre of psychological horror. The audience needs to see and feel both side’s pain and misery and what has happened on both sides to cause this.

6. We have learnt several things from the use of the camera equipment which we did not know before this project. For example, camera's have advantages and disadvantages, a disadvantage would be that camera's do not work well in the different weather conditions, e.g rain or darkness. We found out that the tripod and other essentials were hard for a group of three to lug around. Advantages of the equipment would be the ability to get steady shots e.g steady pans, close ups and more. One of the main problems for constructing our project were the dates, times for the cast and settings. Some times it was not possible to get everyone together on the same day, so we had to sit down and work out a timetable on available days. We had new equipment to be used to our advantage for our film. However we did not believe that we needed most of the equipment due to our story-line and different scenes. Using iMovie for our editing was quite simple, it was not that hard to figure out and use. What I learnt about editing is that it needs time and a lot of work put into it, this is because if you rush your editing you can tell in your video, this lowers the quality of your film. I found that the effects in iMovie were really useful for the mise en scene of our film, this is because we could film during the day and turn it to night for the scenes that require darkness. Garage band was another software we used to improve our film, because in the silent parts we could add music to make it more attracting to the viewer, I found it a useful software to use for our film and easy to make good tracks.

7. I believe that we have progressed in the full product stage compared to our Preliminary task, this is because of several reasons. First of all in the planning stages we did not really get to plan as long or as much for our preliminary compared to our full product, we did not get to research genre, similar movies or conventions of genre's in our preliminary whilst we could in our full product. We did not get as much time to storyboard to prelim so intern it was not as well thought out as the full product. The animatic really made our storyboard come alive and make it a lot more interesting and easier to understand. We knew a lot of the shots that we needed to use from this and how to edit it correctly, this gave us a huge advantage compared to our prelim. I believe that our specific shot types have improved because we used more shot reverse shots in conversations and point of view shots to show peoples views. With the equipment we felt a lot more confident because we knew how to use it professionaly which made it easier to film and create our movie opening. I believe that our product fully fulfills the brief that was set to us, with our variety of shots, smooth editing and use of garage band to create our set tracks for our scenes.