INDIVIDUAL AUDIENCE FEEDBACK

I surveyed a few people, asking them about their thoughts and opinons of our opening sequence.
21 year old female
Rating: 9/10
She likes the idea and could relate to the storyline herself and was very impressed by the acting. She thought it was extremely scary and urged to know what was going to happen next. The part which frightened her the most was 1.12, when the TV turns on with a scream. She thought the location was ideal however the door opened to fast at the end, it should've been more subtle.
40 year old male:
Rating: 7/10
Thought the opening sequence was put together well, however the idea didn't seem to frighten him. He is not into horror movies and therfore wasn't really engaged with the story line. He thought the soundtrack was of a good choice and fitted in with our opening sequence perfectly. Again, he agreed that the acting was very realistic and that the storyline was plausible.
14 year old female:
Rating: 10/10.
Thinks the actress was very professional and the enigma actions worked very well. However, she would be 'too scared' to watch the rest of the film and said it would stop her from staying home alone for a while (therfore I think the 15 age certificate for our film was accurately set!) She also said it reminded her of the opening sequence from 'Halloween'

Overall, I think this individual feedback anchored many facts. Our target audience, 15 to 19 year olds, (feedback shown on group blog) really enjoyed the opening sequence and wanted to know what was going to happen to the character next. I think it was useful to do this individual research of people other than those in the target audience and see what they have to say about our opening sequence. My 21 year old sister was really impressed with the opening sequence, she thought it looked professional and could imagine it being released in a local cinema. However, my 4o year old dad wouldn't watch the rest of the film because he didn't think it was scary enough, and couldn't relate to many events that took place. Finally, my 14 year old sister was amazed by our work and thought it was too scary too watch!
Overall, our core audience really enjoyed the opening sequence. However our secondary audience, along with horror fans, also had a enjoyable viewing experience .

DEADLINE

Finally, we have perfected our video sequence and met the deadline. Today we finished/changed:
The text - (changed the blue shadow to no shadow as it didn't fit with the theme of the movie)
- Faded the text in and out to make it seem more realistic
- Changed any typing errors
Shots - Changed the corridor shot of Charlotte walking towards the front door as it wasn't a good match on action. We solved this problem by extending our previous shot and shortening the shot after.
Title - We figured that Engima productions was a well known productions so therefore we changed the name to ' WHAT DID WE CHANGE IT TO '
- CLN films was the name of our company. (Named after Charlotte, Loren, Nisha)
Contrast - We contrasted the shots to give it a professional, high quality finish.
Sound - Finally we edited the treble so that the sound of the camera does not distract the audience.

TARGET AUDIENCE

As a group we decided the target audience for our opening sequence should be 15 to 25 year olds, alongside horror fans. 15 to 25 year olds is our core audience with out age certificate of 15, and our secondary audience is 25 to 30 year olds, as I think they will also be engaged with out film. We have set the age certificate as 15 because the film contains many murder scenes. 15 to 25 is our core audience as we reckon this age group can relate to our story line the most.
Gender wise, the film can be watched by both genders, however it is more female - orientated, because they would probably find it more scary and would be able to empathise with how the girls in the film must feel.

CHARACTER ANALYSIS

For our opening sequence the protagonist is a media student from our group; Charlotte Cooper. We decided to keep her name as Charlotte.

Charlotte plays a young, naive, innocent girl who is rather laid back and doesn't care about anything much other than partying and having a good time. She comes from a middle class family and lives in a large house with her parents. Her being an only child makes her rather spoilt.

COSTUME

Charlotte played the role of the teenage girl coming home from a wild night out. We dressed her in a metallic, silver, short party dress. This makes her look like every other teenager - giving the audience something to relate to so that they can really empathise with her. Her heels were placed beside the sofa and there was a half drunk bottle of alcohol on the table in the first few shots, making the scenario of a tipsy young girl coming home and hitting the sofa seem realistic! Her make up was smeary and smudged making her look vulnerable and as if she had just woken up. I thought this costume worked really well with the role because if she was dressed in something more casual she would look more powerful and in control of what is going around in the house rather than timid and insecure.

holiday break

I just got back from Dubai and forgot to leave a message before I left. We're now in our christmas holidays, we finished all our shooting and are going to continue with editing once we're back in school. Until then I'm not going to be doing any more blogging.
See you in 2009!

MEETINGS

We discussed the problems we were having in our group to try and overcome them and make our group work together more efficiently. The problems included
- Too little paperwork being done
- More conversations and interactions over blogs needed
- Equipment needs to be used correctly
- Charlotte needs to arrive on time to shoots

These were the four main issues which we figured away to overcome. We allocated different paperwork for different members of the group, we decided to interact more over the blog to show the marker we are communicating well as a team, we decided we would make sure the tripod and camera is set up correctly before every shot, and Charlotte promised she would set her alarm earlier to arrive on time to shoots.

After a few more sessions of editing we noticed there was a lot to re-shoot. Our second shoot is going to be after school on wednesday. Things we need to consider are:
- First shot of the eyes: the camera should pull back to show the audience where the character is, becaure right now, they do not know whether or not she is in the same room as the TV
- The POV shot is too wobbly and needs to be more smooth as if it is from someones perspective
- The establishing shot is too long. There needs to be a few cutaways (maybe have a close up of Charlotte picking up the glass of wine)
- We don't understand why she is switching the TV off. To make it more realistic we could have her switching through the channels to find nothing good coming on TV and then switching it off (A close up of her hand switching the TV off can also be used here)
- In the fridge shot, the reaction shot and the frame within a frame shot do not match. We need to retake both these shots to make the continuity invisible and we need to oil the fridge door to prevent the squeakyness which distracts the audience.
- We need to have more conventional things in the fridge door, in place of carrier bags! Maybe a bottle of water.
- The POV shot of Charlotte through the window is too dark. We could use some outdoor high key lighting to make her more visible
- As she walks back into the house and goes to pick up the phone she, she uses her left hand, yet in the next shot the phone is in her right hand.
- As she goes up the stairs we could have another cutaway to her hand on the stair handle.
- We need to re-shoot the scenes with the phone, with the phone actually ringing as we realised it would be too hard to match the phone and sound together- We would loose the diagetic sound.
- There is a lack of lighting in the last shot, making it look very grainy and unprofessional. We will add more high key lighting to make the copy look of higher quality and more professional.

So there is quite a lot of re-shooting to be done but it should be finished by the end of this week so we can get on with serious editing next week!

Here is a page from the storyboard I drew for our group. It came in very handy as we knew exactly what shots to take and roughly how long they should last. It prevented us from wasting time and shooting un-necessary shots

Real shoot and editing

REAL SHOOT
On saturday 29th December we had our first real shot - it went better than planned! As soon as all the members of the group has arrived we got started straight away and worked right up till the end with only one (fifteen minute) break! We took three of more shots of every shot as we figured this was essential after the number of suprises we had whilst viewing our test shot!
EDITING
We started editing today - began capturing and saving every shot seperately. Looking back at the shots, they looked really professional. The sound and lighting was good throughout, apart from a few at the end of the sequence. Next lesson we will start choosing which shot we liked most out of the three we took for every shot.