The crime scene genre

Within my group for our aim my partner and I have decided choose the crime scene genre with a two to three minute opening title sequence option on video.

Our target audience it will be aimed at is male/female 15-18 year olds, certificate 15. I have questioned a few people from that age group and they told me that they would enjoy a ” film that has tension and is quite scary”. Films they said they enjoyed watching were ” Haunted House on a Hill” and ” The Blair Witch Project”.

Our short film will have intertextual references from films such as ” The Others”* and ” Scream”**

These texts will be similar to ours because they build great tension and they are also quite scary.

First of all my partner and I mapped out what our story line should be and we started making our storyboard. We also started our shooting of the sequence, one of the shots we used was a dutch angle shot showing a swing swaying, after being shot at a normal close-up angle shot of the swing hanging still, to represent a sense of presence.

In the first part of putting our film together my partner and I decided to take a few pictures for our storyboard, these were taken in and around the school mainly. The pictures included long shots, close ups, many P. O. V shots and also camera angles to show disequlibrium, such as a dutch angle shot.

We decided to take the pictures around the school because we thought it would be easier to access the actual equipment such as digital camera, and if we needed to re-take the photos then we could when we came into school.

After that we started shooting our film, we were going to film it in school, but we thought it would be a more suitable location to work at Jenny’s house and back garden as jenny owns a camcorder we could film it there.

So we did many different shots and lots of different ideas for what we should do, and also we filmed everything at least twice so we could edit out shots we didn’t need easily.

We used a pan shot for a scene in the kitchen to show where Jenny was going in the house and what she was going to do. Also to create a sense of looking through the ” stalker’s” eyes we used a point of view shot and then a close up, from a long shot, of Jenny to show what the ” stalker” was actually there for.

The language of one of the shots of the knife helps to build tension and excitement.

I shot most of the film because jenny and her brother had to take part in featuring in the opening title sequence. When jenny wasn’t on camera she was usually shooting the film.

We generally used the tripod on the camera to give a less amateur effect, but we used the camera hand held to give the effect of a P. O. V shot.

After we had shot all we needed to make our opening title sequence we started editing it at school. The program we used to edit our short film was ” Videowave” on a ” Sonyvaio”.

There were many outtakes and lots of mistakes we hadn’t realized we’d made in the making of the film and so we decided to go back to Jenny’s house and re-shoot all the scenes we caught that were wrong. I changed all of the shots to black and white to give a more spooky effect and then I added in all of the ” fade-ins” and ” cuts” that were needed in between the scenes. Then I added the credits at the beginning with the title ” Agoraphobia”. To advertise my film I would put an advertisement on television quite late at night just before a programme such as ” Frost” or ” 24″.

To improve my film I would actually shoot the text at night rather than having to digitally edit the text on the computer to give a more overall professional effect.