My role in the making of this film was the director, meaning my main job during the making of it was to make sure the actors and mise en scene were all in the right place and doing what they were meant to be doing in order to achieve the desired final effect of the project.
The film genre our
group decided on was horror, a classic type of story line in which a supernatural, young girl antagonist is out to get people because of a dark history that surrounds the place at which she was killed. Films that I thought related to the type of idea that we had for our films included Poltergeist, The Grudge and Amytiville Horror. All three of these films had some kind of elements that I wanted to take and use within out film. Amytiville Horror was the one that struck me as the most similar to out film. The character “Jodie” in this fil
m (shown in the photo here) is not dissimilar to our girl antagonist in our one. I think that the look of this character in our short extract was a fairly important aspect of the filming part and as director I made sure that the girl who played our “Girl” had appropriate make-up, hair and costume so that she looked the part because when filming, one of the most important parts is to make what you’re filming believable to the audience.
So, firstly, our scene was all based in one location, a barn, which is believable as the victim in our film is a farmer. Because we were lucky that we had an actual working barn to use, there was plenty of equipment in the barn which added to the mise en scene and makes the whole scene much more believable. We also filmed at night, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, but because it was filmed on an afternoon in winter, this was fairly inevitable. However, I think this was only a good thing as it makes the scene work much better and gives the eerie, more cautious feel that this genre requires to work its best.
Although I obviously directed the whole of the film extract, there are a couple of shots that were slightly more problematic or important than others. Firstly, the close up shots of the victim’s face were particularly important to direct to a good standard, this is because there is very little else in the frame other than the actor’s face, the audiences attention is all on the facial expression and so it ha
s to be perfectly believable. There were several close up shots of the victims face, the first one was an extreme close up of just his eyes, this was fairly easy to direct, he just had look in another direction. The second close up of the victim was a confused expression which although w
as still not too challenging it was slightly more difficult hat just the turn of the eyes. However, later on in filming, the victim had to do a scared/shocked face after seeing the antagonist, this was much more difficult for both the actor and myself; because of this we had to shoot this close up several times to get an expression suitable for the film. To make the actor get into character, I tried to make him feel uncomfortable and scared while filming to give a more realistic effect and I think that this shows in the final outcome. Sometimes the look wasn’t strong enough to make it obvious what the victim was feeling and in other takes the look was far too extreme which gave the complete wrong impression and made it look more comical than seriously frightened. The final shot that we ended up using is the best one I think that we got, even though it is acceptable and works in the extract but I wouldn’t say that I am one hundred percent happy with it still because I don’t think that it looks that believable, the expression is slightly too extreme, if I were able to film more footage, this is definitely a shot that I’d liked to have worked on more.
Overall with the whole of the film extract, I am fairly pleased with the outcome of the final outcome, it’s got the look that I expected it to have that works well for the horror genre which like I have previously said is important to give the audience the right impression. I am pleased with the acting, the whole mise en scene of the film and am happy with how our whole group have worked within their roles to achieve the best results that we could have done.
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