Lighting Considerations

Three Point Lighting: Key Light, Fill Light, Backlight

Key Light: 

• The key to whole set up
• Main source of illumination in the scene
• Best spot for a key light is at 45 degree angle from where the camera is set up
• The reason why it is not placed directly to your subject, is because you want to add some definition  to the edges of the face and shoulders.

Fill Light:

• Fill in the dark shadows on the opposite side of the face to where the key light is set up
• Set up 45 degrees away from the camera (45 degrees opposite of the key light)
• Less intense than the key light so it doesnt compete with it. A few ways to do this are: 

1. use a lamp or bulb with less watts
2. move the light further away 
3. use a neutral density gel  over the light

• When the key light and fill light are both turned on, you get a much more even light around the whole face
• The shadows from the key light is still there, the idea is to not get rid of all the shadows but to soften them
• A more pleasing natural appearance

Back Light: 

• Stops the subject blending in with the background
• Placed behind the subject, set off to an angle where the light itself is placed above and out of the frame
• The light spills on to the subject, not on the camera lense
• Fairly low intensity 
• Shine down on the subject and create a rim of light around the shoulders and head.
• When combined with the other two lights, the back light makes the subject stand out abit more from the background and focuses your attention on the subject 

Psychological Horror Make Up

Costume:

For the costume of our character for our horror film we will need the actor to wear casual clothes that could also represent a mental stability. This may include unusual yet normal clothing e.g a shirt with some sort of crazy pattern on it. 

Make Up:

The make up of our character will need to look natural, almost like there is no make up them at all although they will need to look tired and unwell as everything what is happening is psychological and based inside the head. The character will need to look like as if they have mental health issues.

Location:

In the locations shown above you can see that they are based in a run down, careless room that is very badly decorated. This suggests that the character is a very messy, lazy person as they haven't bothered to take care of their home or themselves. Being in this kind of environment could frustrate them as the room will be very distort so the dust and mites within the room could be getting to their head and making them seem like they are going insane. To get this sort of environment, we will have to make a large amount of adjustment to the furniture within the house to create the damp, airy effect as our location is well decorated and pleasant to live in. We may need to change the saturation levels on the camera to darken the room to create the dull, unhappy environment.

Character/s:

Our characters in relation to the ones shown above are female and much younger (teenager aged 16-18). We have used this particular character as women are seen as the weak vulnerable one and are more likely to get scared in a situation like this. Women are usually the ones that are insecure about themselves and think too much into things. Our film could be seen as stereotypical but i think it is for a good cause. Having a male character in our Psychological horror film would create a different effect on the audiences reaction. People don't usually care that much about boys as they are more eligible to look after themselves, however girls depend on the boys to look after them, so without anyone there, how are they going to defend themselves? 

SIXTH SENSE COMMENTARY

What is the purpose of storyboarding?

The purpose of story boarding is to plan your shot types and camera angles. This is to save time on the day of shooting. You can look at the story board and know exactly where you are going to put the camera and the characters. Story boarding allows you to see what camera angle to use and which shot type to use (CU etc...) Story boarding is known as 2D film making, it is almost like a pictured script.

How can you show lighting?

You can show lighting through the use of camera movement and angles. Different camera angles can position the lighting to create different effects and moods to the characters and the audience. Bright lighting creates a happy cheerful effect but could also create a ghostly feeling to the scene, whereas dull dark lighting creates a gloomy, miserable effect is is mostly used within horror movies. 

The way camera angles are used to create different lighting effects is to create different views on the characters, such as low angles are used to create the powerful character in a brighter light and high angles are used to make the vulnerable character in a more darker lighting.

MOVING PICTURES (STORYBOARDING) THE SIXTH SENSE

Script example

This is an example of a script. This outlines the basic format for a script design, in terms of how each entity should be displayed on the page. When making scripts, the parameters are very strict and particular, so in order to ensure our script comes out the way it is supposed to, we may refer back to this script for guidance.

Nightmare on elm street script

This is a script example of nightmare on elm street.

Researching Horror Film Openings

The Shining Opening - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw23KM3-Ry8 

There are many ideas which we could take from this opening scene. These ideas are:

1. Mysterious, glum music for the introduction
2. Fades from 1 shot to another shot
3. Different angles to make the sequence that little bit more interesting
4. Using a deserted/quiet setting
5. More OSS, to create the feeling as though someone/something is following the victim
6. Scary sound effects to create an atmosphere
7. Title sequence going up the screen

Sixth Sense Opening - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44VRhcFxFF4 

The ideas which we could take from this film opening are:

1. Production name at the very beginning
2. Slow, deep music for the introduction
3. Black Out (editing technique)
4. Title sequence fading in on to the screen
5. Dark background
6. Gothic readable font
   
7. Heightened sound on sound effects to intimidate the audience
8. Close up of a particular object 
9. Camera behind an object (like something is watching someone without them knowing from behind a shelf?)
10. Shadows and dull lighting which create silhouettes of a character on a wall
11. Candle light (creates an airy feeling to the scene)
12. Old pictures
13. Long shot of setting showing character in a different room through the door
14. Things moving on their own
15. Things smashed up although they have not been touched
16. Shadows of somebody moving along the wall although nothing is present
17. Camera shot looking into a lit bathroom

Insideous Opening-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxntX0Ay62Q&feature=related

The ideas that we could take from this opening scene are:

1. Heightened sound on sound effects to make the audience jump
2. Sound effect as if somebody is screaming/whiney noises
3. Quick black and white shots of the most scary parts of the film
4. Close up of character
5. Blue lighting (creates a cool, airy touch to the scene)
6. Dull, ticking of a clock-counting down to death?
7. Black outs
8. Fading in of title sequences (different fonts)
9. Establishing shot of house with voice overs
10. Extreme close ups of character
11. Screaming  and screaching of the character with quick shots
    

By watching the openings to some very successful horror films from our subgenre we were able to get further ideas about our own title sequence and opening scenes. These gave us a better idea of what to include as i think we were thinking a bit too much on the action rather than how we are going to introduce the character, setting and threat which is crucial to the opening of the film and creating fear.

True Blood

The video above is the opening and closing credits of True Blood. The music soundtrack implies that something terrible is going to happen due to the lyrics 'I want to do bad things with you'. This shows that somebody/something is out to hurt someone.

The colours are very dull and quite dark with glimpses of bright red. Red symbolises danger and blood, but could also imply romance. This gives us a hint of what True Blood is all about, especially the title. Blood is the colour red and the true could mean that is someones actual blood from their body.

There are many uses of long shots with animals in  a close shot. This could mean that somebody has hurt the animal within that location or the other way round. The setting is very secluded until it gets to the city, where there are many houses around but not that much people. 

There's some mid shots of adults and children, these could be the main characters, one ECU is a child with red stuff around his mouth, this could indicate that he has biten something and made it bleed which explains the redness around his mouth.

Pitch Feedback

After we did our pitch, we waited outside the room for our class to discuss our pitching ideas. Most of the comments we got back was that we had some very good ideas and went in to alot of detail about our film and covered most of the grounds. 

The only negative we only really got was that we repeated ourselved ALOT! and that it is too stereotypical. We will keep our negatives to mind and do everything we can to prevent them when shooting our actual film.

All in all, we are very pleased with our pitch feedback!

Title Sequence Planning

After our initial ideas we began to plan our title sequence as well as include the necessary institutional information shown.

Here's our first draft and initial ideas for our title sequence -->

We showed this as part of our pitch and the feedback we got was that the images we had initially chosen to use were to brief and random  - we needed to rethink this slightly and decided to redraft our title sequence basing it around the idea we had for one of the images being focused on an old typewriter.

Title Ideas

We started thinking about our titles and came up wth basic ideas for a theme based title sequence (i.e. based around the idea fo the fear being psychological) and a character driven title sequence.

Theme related (stereotypical images seen in psychological horrors) -->

Character based title sequence ideas - 



I think we realised after doing these that we needed to make it simpler - it doesnt need to be a whole story thats followed - it can just be short clips of related or important shots that are relevant to the story of our opening, when we go on to design our titles we will try and do this.

Kyle Cooper Research

We started to think more about our title sequence and after being so influenced by the title sequence used in Se7en, we looked into their designer Kyle Cooper and his opinions on title design and the art of films.

Se7en title sequence -

We watched an interview with Kyle Cooper where he discusses the ideas he has about title sequences, and film design. We became much more aware or the simplicity of successful and interesting title sequences - often purely using ECU's to keep certain things secret e.g. location or identity etc. and also how the font can be used to mirror a characters personality or aid understanding/give more information about characters/events to the audience.

Textual Analysis of Psychological horror films

Textual Analysis -

 The Sixth Sense  (Catherine)

 

The Shining   (Emily)

 

Insidious  (Josh)

We watched some films from within our chosen sub-genre and focussed particularly on the opening since thats what we have to achieve ourselves. We analysed them in terms of camera work, lighting, sound, location, props, how they create fear and what typical genre conventions they include. From our findings we decided that having the characters in an enclosed space e.g. house or hotel room, allows the story to become more unsettling in a short space of time which we want in our opening - we want to draw the audience in and make them interested in the story and characters and share the character's fear. The use of mental insecurities as a basis for the fear in these films seemed really important within this subgenre of horror also.

Seven - Opening Credits Analysis

 

The video above shows the opening credits to Se7en. There are many close ups and extreme close ups. The audience feel like they aren't being told everything so therefore it is being mysterious and the trailor doesn't want to give too much away about the film.

We suggest that the character has an obsession with bodies as is collecting information and samples on them. We guess that the location and setting is based in a science lab as he is taking samples from human bodies. and creating montages of information about everything he does.

The sound effects are haunting and create an airy effect. It makes you wonder what and why the character is doing what he is doing because we have so little information. We have to figure everything out ourselves.