How did you use media forms to come up with something and original?

How did you use media forms to come up with something and original? 

Where did ideas come from?  

Initial ideas- The initial idea for our film was to create a horror film with stereotypical elements in it, at the time we were making our opening two minutes, the film Ouija had just been released in cinema’s, this helped us a lot despite not seeing the film till late November, just from the trailer we could take out stereotypical aspects of a film of that genre and use it for our own ideas.   

How did you work collaboratively to share ideas? 

Research and planning- Blogger was the best software when it came to sharing our ideas; it meant we could equally distribute the workload so we all had an equal amount. This was especially helpful when we had to research what to put in our film with scripts and stuff. It was a lot easier to split the work and do the posts to a high standard rather than completing it all seperatly. 

How did you change things? 

Changes during production- The main change we had to do during our production was to change the setting of the film, our original plan involved going to an abandoned house in Bookham, however as we found out it was a 2 and a half hour walk to a destination which was under construction with personnel all around meaning we couldn’t use the location, the only thing it was good for was research when it came to a location. We therefore had to think of an alternative location, something which was old and had a large living space, we therefore settled for my house, a terraced cottage which from the outside doesn’t look well maintained because its under private ownership who don’t find the time to improve it. However this meant that we had the setting to our film as the cottage provided us with a suitable alternative for a horror film, it was in a very quiet neighbourhood and so interference was minimal but we had to be mindful of the lighting as we were filming over the Christmas period and so it was almost dark by the time we got back from school. Another change we had to settle for during production was the camera type we used, at first we used a professional canon camera with a 48x zoom but its battery life was small and so for the climactic scene we used a Samsung Galaxy S4 mini which had a good enough quality camera to capture the flickering of the candle in the darkness. 

How did you use tools like Adobe Premier Elements etc. to achieve something imaginative? And what stylistic techniques were used to appeal to the audience? 

Editing- The main imaginative invention we made for the opening two minutes was our production company log which flashed from black and white to colour. This was very effective as the last shot of our movie is the flickering of a match and then it gets blown out, the production company log symbolizes this just the other way around, instead of the match being blown out it is lit possibly linking the idea of how light might mean life and the blowing out of the match means death.  

Our original distributing company logo ‘IFM Studio’s’ was also significant as we tried to get across the idea of it being a horror movie by the use of conventional stereotypes such as the dark forest as the background with white writing over the top, this has become significant over the years as a sign of a horror movie as the darkness represents all that people are scared of and the white writing is used as it sticks out far better on a plain black background especially when it comes to the title. 

What was the intended outcome of the production? (Assessment objectives, preferred readings, promotional purposes?) 

Actual movie- We did have the idea if the opening two minutes went well than we would go about making it into an actual film (probably a 30 minute film if we would’ve done it), we all enjoyed making the production and felt we were on track to make the actual film, however because of exams and other issues out of our hands we had to keep delaying the filming of it, eventually we started A2 and had a new project so plans for an actual film stopped. 

Pretence- A target which we had for our production was for the opening two minutes to be a pretence, the idea being that we leave an enigma code at the end of the opening two minutes at which point it would then go back two weeks into the past to show how the group ended up in the house and why they were so interested in the Ouija board to start with. 

How have you developed these skills at A2? 

At A2 we developed all these creativity skills in order to keep a good quality production; we used blogger far more effectively when it came to research and planning and got a lot more of a choice when it came to making our production. The trailer we made was a good quality and made sense come the end of the production but we did struggle to get the shots we needed, it was a case of there being not enough shots come the time we went to editing, this was a massive problem as our storyboard was constantly changing especially seeing me and matt were going everywhere we could to film with very little idea of what we actually needed, this caused problems but also made solutions, the fact that me and Matt took the initiative to go and film some more probably saved our production as without it we would have probably had about a minute of footage as opposed to our eventual two minute trailer as set out in the specifications at the start of the year.