Genre could be described as a categorisation for film depending on its mood, tone and setting. Some of the most popular genres include drama, thriller, horror and comedy. One of the purposes of genre is to give audiences a better idea of the film they're considering watching; this is why genre has a massive impact on the audience of our short film. Particular people don't enjoy particular genres, and so it's a good idea to try and appeal to the 'mass audiences'.
As i've mentioned before, we wanted to avoid making a horror short, mainly because student horror films always tend to turn out a bit of a mess (and also neither of us admire the genre too much). However, some scenes from our short film seem to have fallen into the conventions of a horror film; suspense, dark tone and death included! Even so, we're managing to avoid falling into the trap of cheap horror, and the film still remains a dark drama with elements of horror; as i've also mentioned in a previous post - "drama has the potential to incorporate elements of many genres into one eventful film".
Drama also has the potential to be succesful even on a shoestring budget, compared to action/adventures which fashion huge hollywood sequences with big name actors. Becuase of the shoestring budget of some dramas, they also have the possibilty to be hugely profitable based on ROI (Return Of Investment). Regarding ROI, Dramas, Romance and Comedies have the second highest ROI right behind blockbuster action/adventure films.
Paranormal Activity, the film with
the highest ROI; 655,505.52%
Keeping in mind the results of the audience questionnaire, we decided to grant the film a certificate 12 considering its mature themes. This certificate allows for a wide range of possible audiences, although I would still expect that the film wouldn't attract the attention of those under 15 simply because of its subject matter. I believe this is probably why the majority of candidates taking part in the questionnaire chose the 15 certificate as being the most suitable; a a 12A allows for children under the age of 12 to see the film if accompanied by a parent or guardian, but we wouldn't want that, so it seems most reasonable to opt for a certificate 12 - however, the certificate does not equate to what age group 'want' to see the film, but at what age viewing of the film becomes prohibited.
According to the BBFC, films granted with either a 12A or 12 certificate must handle mature themes in a manor that is appropriate to that of a young teenager.
Much like the certificate of the film, the genre also changes the potential audience of the film. I would say that a drama, for the most part, is a character driven story focusing on a series of events; they can be gripping, exciting and even emotional. This then, allows for a wide range of audiences to be interested in the film, thus creating a much larger audience range. If you think about, there is probably a sense of 'drama' in most films ever made - you can see from film websites such as IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, a film may be classed as a thriller, kids movie or even mystery/suspense, but they all may be labelled 'drama' too. This is why the drama genre bodes well for the short film; many may not be interested in horror movies, sci-fi or romcoms, but drama has the potential to incorporate elements of many genres into one eventful film.
A short list of films, illustrating how varied a 'drama' can be; there are kids
dramas, sci-fi dramas, fantasy dramas, mystery dramas, etc, etc.
We would expect our short film to be watched mainly on YouTube. Other places it will available to watch are on Facebook and our blog. Each website allows for a different type of audience; Facebook and YouTube are more likely to attract the average viewer - considering the sheer number of uploads on YouTube, it's highly unlikely that friends and family will find our short film without guidance, so we will be pointing friends/family toward our film upon its completion.
YouTube - home to thousands of short films.
YouTube has always been great for aspiring video and filmmakers, with some short films gaining upwards of 10 million views. Judging by the views on YouTube, audiences tend to lean toward drama and action, with very little successful horrors. I think dramas prove so popular on YouTube because they can tell short, sweet stories in a small space of time.
Adie had the idea to use flames in conjunction with the word 'Reborn' for our company logo, as though to portray the phrase 'rise from the ashes'.
There's a large quantity of free stock footage across YouTube of flames, although some aren't quite what we were looking for. We may probably even film our own flames, that way we can get the exact look we're hoping for.
I went ahead an experimented with stock footage I found from youtube -
With this original footage at hand, I wanted to speed up part of the sequence so that slow motion wasn't used through the entirety of the clip.
We also had in mind the idea of adjusting the flame in a way that it looked hand drawn; an effect we'd seen in a previous A2 students logo. With regards to the title 'Reborn', we simply wanted it to appear alongside, or behind the flames.
(The below video is just a first draft of the production logo, incorporating a handful of our ideas)
Final production logo; added bloom effect to the black underlaying writing.
The title sequence of a film can be very important; it can even in some cases give us a subtle insight to the nature or themes of the film. So how exactly do filmmakers avoid boring the audience with cast and crew names fading around the screen?
On Her Majesty's Secret Service's Title Sequence
The Man With The Goldren Gun's Title Sequence
Goldfinger's Title Sequence
A particular website, 'Art of the Title' dedicates itself to "the artists who design excellent title sequences".
Some examples include 300, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and Casino Royale.
Keeping in mind James Bond films, the franchise has almost always used their title sequences in a way that depicts the topic of the film, 'Goldfinger' for instance shows women painted in gold as well as scenes from the film with a gold overlaying colour. A couple of the earlier Bond films also chose to reminisce on previous of the series' entries, as though to recap other of Bond's adventures. Whereas some simply chose to show silhouette's of women; an iconic image associated with Bond.
The artists behind these title sequences make them bearable with stylish imagery and dazzling colours. Perhaps most importantly is the theme song for the film; with the title sequences acting almost as an unveiling to the new Bond theme.
Many other title sequences from various films follow these traditions and incorporate their artistic style into the titles, affecting the fonts, music and imagery. A prime example being 'Juno'.
Just a handful of 900 still images composed to make Juno's title sequence.
Juno's title sequence went through a lot of work, including 900 still images of Ellen Page walking on a treadmill and drinking SunnyD. These images were then run through a Photocopier to degrade their quality and achieve the hand drawn look that the final sequence offers. Finally, they were physically cut out and scanned back into a computer on top of digitally drawn backgrounds to achieve this colourful, quirky stop-motion title sequence. Shadowplay, the studio behind the title sequence have had the pleasure of working on other Jason Reitman films including 'Thank you for Smoking' and 'Up in The Air'. The studio are good at what they do because they don't just write the names of the cast and crew across their titles, they treat the sequence as a separate project of its own, and therefore provide the audience with often colourful, unique approaches to title sequences.
Of course, with a time restriction of 5 minutes, we cannot afford to have a long title sequence, and so will effectively 'cram' our titles during the introduction of the film, after Ivy has woke up for the first time from her nightmare. Like most short films, we won't put too much emphasis on the title sequence except for the title itself.
I have chosen to analyse 'The Sixth Sense' because of the similarities it shares with our short film (plot and character commonalities rather than title sequence).
The lead character in both 'The Sixth Sense' and our short film are children, suffering with issues revolving around the dead; Ivy, our lead character, is tormented by someone, something, in her nightmares. The nightmares are recurring and affect her day to day life. Cole, the lead character of 'The Sixth Sense' is able to see and speak with the dead leaving him troubled and isolated. - both film has a similar structure, in the sense that the endings have revealing twists which help us further understand the plot.
There is in fact very little to say about TSS's (The Sixth Sense) title sequence; it doesn't use any of the discussed methods to keep the audiences interest, consisting of only bland text and James Newton Howard's accompanying orchestral score.
In fact, the only factor of the title sequence that portrays the subject of the film is the score itself. Its violins reach crescendos when the films title appears through the sequence, and the composition is constantly haunting and slow.
Each frame of text utilizes both tracking and size to try and make for a more interesting title sequence, but the affect quickly wears thin. Below is my own attempt to recreate this 'growing text' effect.
I key-framed both size and tracking to create the 'expanding' effect,
I also changed the font colour to that of The Sixth Sense's.
The only interesting aspect of the title sequence is the reveal of the title itself, which as said, builds to a crescendo, but also appears to be coated in moving shadows referring to theme of the film.
The title sequence lasts for around two and a half minutes; as the music begins to fade and the final title screen begins to dim, the shot very slowly fades in to a lightbulb - the start of the film.
Although these are the style of titles we wish to use (simply because we don't have the time or skill to do otherwise), we will use them alongside the film, rather than seperately. This way the audience don't feel they're watching 2 minutes of text!
It's been difficult to think of similar films to ours off the top of my head, but there a couple that spring to mind featuring similar aspects of other films. My first thought was 'The Sixth Sense', considering it involves a child who is troubled by the dead. It was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
M. Night Shyamalan
It was his third film as a director, and one that gained him international recognition, going on to recieve acadamy nominations and numerous other accolades. A particular scene where the lead character encounters a ghost in his tent ranks among Bravo's top 100 scariest movie moments -
The film went on to become a massive commercial success, making $672,806,292 worldwide whilst simultaneously receiving praise from critics alike; 85% of which gave positive reviews of the film. M. Night Shyamalan continues to make horror films today but has never since enjoyed such success with his films.
The lighting in particular in the above clip also links nicely to our film, considering that we were discussing the many ways to light the child in the scene. In the Sixth Sense, the child holds only a torch, and yet we see much more of the scene illuminated. By using extra lights to illuminate the child whilst they're holding the torch, we give the impression that it is only the torch the is a source of light in the scene.
Our main focus for our first day of filming are the indoor house shots, if we manage to get the majority of these finished then the only scenes left would be the outdoor street shots and school shots, this would mean that we have more time to edit the film and play with music. For this day of filming we will require some of our props and also lights for the 'nightmare' sequences which take place indoors.
Props
- A torch
- A picture within a frame
- A school bag
- Perhaps flowers (if we get this scene done)
Equipment
- Lights
- Zoom recorder
- Camera
- Steadi-cam
- tripod
- Boom mic
Although Benj is doing the actual audio for the film, we thought about having a song at the end when the credits roll. The problem with this is finding a song that can be distributed and copied without violating any laws, as we did not see that as an option for our film. This in general, is a very hard thing to do because normally permission would be needed from the band itself to use the music. But fortunately I have been looking and there are websites where lesser known artists put up their music and allow certain songs to be used at an extent. The great thing is that some of these artist have better music and would deffinatly be more fitting to our film as we wanted something that has similar themes as the theme itself. One of these websites is called The free music archive. The good thing about this website is that it tells you how the music can be used and how it can't which means that if everything wen't according to plan there would be no copyright issues.
This website is linked to every song that is posted on the website which means that for every song you can check whether and how you are able to use it especially with 'Youtube' and other sites that are high on checking songs for copyright issues. So far we do have a few possible options one in particular that we are very fond of although we are in the process of checking what we can and cannot do with it as for the credits it would have to be shortened.
The link above is to the song that we are fond of it seems very fitting for the story as it links with the actual plot and yet has an underlying serious note to it.
With filming to commence very shortly, I am already thinking ahead to the editing stage. The more practise and preparation I put in, the better the final product will look and sound.
A large portion of our film will include the child hiding from the 'monster'; creating the monster however is no easy task, and I think considering we will only show glimpses of the girl playing the monster, sound design is very important here.
Many TV shows and films choose not to actually show the monster straight, but rather to build up suspense with sound, often giving the monster a memorable or iconic sound -
The 'smoke monster' from lost is a perfect example; for the entirety of the first season it terrorises a number of the survivors and yet we never truly see it; we hear stories from victims and begin to envisage our own interpretation of what the monster could look like. More importantly, because we don't see the monster, the noises that it makes quickly become more memorable than usual considering it's the only thing we can associate it with.
Many films may not use sounds, but choose not to show the monster early on to build suspense and hype for the reveal of the monster - or in some cases (Cloverfield, 2008) barely shows us the monster at all throughout the film.
The sound I hope to create for the 'monster' in our film shouldn't be too big, but needs to sound good enough to aid the illusion of making it seem more like a movie! I plan on recording a couple of conversations between the lead character, Ivy, and Beth, her sister. I'll then manipulate the conversation with various effects such as reverb, delay and whole array of other plugins. Hopefully the conversation will still be somewhat understandable, but the voices will drone over the banging of the bedroom door. Combined with a few undecided sound effects, the end result should work well.
Using two sound bites from Kill Bill, Vol.2 I tried to achieve the effect I had planned using 2 'warped' reverb effects and EQ. I lowered high frequency signals (the speech) and raised the low frequency signals to make the words less understandable. The process was simple, and quick.
Here is the end result -
EDIT:
After editing together a rough cut of the first 50 seconds of the film (including music), 'monster' sounds are no longer appropriate considering the tone and context that the film has adopted.
Sound effects are however still used to add eeriness and tension.
The costumes we will be needing for the actors are fairly simple and do not require us to go out of our way majorly to find them.
Ivy, (Megan) overall will need need two costumes. One for the night scenes and one for the day scenes, these will be a pair of pyjamas and a school uniform.
Below are examples of these:
Beth (Katie) will only need one costume to signify the clothes that she died in.
Below is an example of this:
Ivy's dad (Nick) will need two costumes, the breakfast scene and the night scene for this he will need one set of clothes that are smart and imply that he is going to work and the other will just need night clothes, predominantly a dressing gown.
Our film idea is rather strange when it comes to selecting a genre. This is down to the fact that at first it seems like a completely different style to what it turns out to be in the end. At the beginning it gives off the impression that it will very much be a horror/thriller but at the end it changes quite dramatically when you find the conclusion of the film which in itself seems very much more along the lines of drama. From last year we both knew from experience that there were certain types of genre that we wanted to stay clear of for example pure horror as we felt that when it comes to student films they can have a lack of story (or a unclear plot) character development and are not always pulled off to the best of people abilities which is why we tried to focus our ideas mainly on the genre of 'drama'. We felt that making sure our film was understandable yet interesting and nice to watch was one of the main things we needed to focus on and when it comes to genre you really need to get a clear view on what you are portraying.
A little bit of information about genre itself:
Genre is defined by the elements within a film and there are certain elements for certain categories and this is what gives us genre. There are so many different sections and sub-sections of genre nowadays that it very hard to classify a film within one genre completely. Films have so many underlying elements that the genre of a film needs to be shown in a way that critics, viewers and media theorists need to be aware of. Genre is normally recognised by some form of descriptive or functional approach that you may take note of within the film, perhaps by looking at one of the following; location, character archetypes, plot content, costume, or shot transitions. The functional approach is more inclusive of asking questions about the film and seeing how the answer turns out, this could e an obvious giveaway to the genre.
Characters- Drama
Locations- Drama
Themes- Soft horror
Costumes- Drama
etc..
Most of the elements within our film suggest a slight genre hybrid of drama/ horror. Perhaps not even to the extent of horror as the only horrific element is that of the ghost of her sister. Though some of the connotations of our film such as death, nightmares and even having the main character as a girl may lead to believe it is a horror, we see it more as a drama with dark themes and especially do not see it as a horror that involves gore or violence. We have tried to create an illusion of suspense to enthral the audience with these themes not just throw it in their faces with shock tactics.
Continuity is possibly one of the most important things within a film that needs to be pulled off with the highest standards possible. If the continuity isn't right then the whole film will look and feel completely unexplained and well delivered as well as disjointed. Continuity can refer to the plot of the film to make sure things make sense and it can also refer to how the film is made. In terms of the plot, it means the film just making sense to the viewer, discontinuity can be observed when someone notices a plot hole and there are some pretty famous plot holes out there.
Some are quite funny when it comes to the writing of the plot, for example, in 'Transformers' (2007) We are told that the glasses the 'Decepticons' so desperatly need are the very glasses that young Sam Witwicky has placed on Ebay for sale. Yet later in the the film we are also told that the 'Decepticons' can very easily hack into the United States military network, which leads to the question, wouldn't placing a simple Ebay bid be an easier option?
Another example can be seen in 'Back to the Future' (1985) Marty Mcfly goes back and alters his family past changing the future for the better, and meets his parents at the same time. Yet neither of his parents seem to remember the kid who brought them together and inspired his father to write sci-fi, has the same name as the famous 'Calvin Klein' and who happens to look exactly like their own son?
Of course the producers could be leaving it up to the audience to just look over it and enjoy the film but plot holes can sometimes ruin a film if they are just too unbelievable.
When it comes to the production it can become a lot more complex in terms of making sure everything runs smoothly. These concern things such as editing and most noticeable visual errors which can occur with props, costumes, makeup or anything that is changed day to day with set or scene such as weather. The problem with large scale films is that they are never normally shot in order which means that if something goes wrong with continuity the best way to deal with it is to edit it out or edit it cleverly but sometimes it just cannot be avoided. Smaller things such as change in the length of cigarettes or the amount of water in a glass can completely ruin the illusion of reality for the viewer if they are extremely noticeable. Editing can be a problem when certain rules are not followed for example the 180 degree rule. If this rule is not followed and the characters that are involved in dialogue or screen time, are not looking towards each other when they should be, by keeping each character looking in the direction of the other and are kept to either side of the screen, the viewer may become confused or not fully understand the scene which can completely ruin a film. Below is a short video from the New York Film Academy explaining continuity and the 180 degree rule.
This is a rough presentation of our soon to be made short film, 'Nightmares'.
The finished film's shots will be much longer, creating tension in the appropriate scenes with much more fluent editing. Eleanor Lewis portrays Ivy in the photographs, Megan Squires portrays her sister and I portray Ivy's father. These casting decisions are simply placeholders until we can come to an agreement on the actors for the film. Location is also likely to change, prop layout, plot structure and cinematography will remain largely the same.
After researching into a number of title sequences from popular films it is clear that their success can swing either way. On one hand, a title sequence can pass by the audience completely unnoticed. On the other, it can leave a brilliant lasting impression. The title sequences that tend to leave an impression, however, are those with impressive effects and imagery. In these circumstances then it would be beneficial to aim for a less striking title sequence, including a simple title card perhaps with a 'fancy' fade-in of some sort, and then progress to the cast and crew's names displayed over the introduction of the film.
I'm going to take inspiration from my previous film that I made for AS Media. The title cards that slot between each scene of the film were plain black with a white serif font.
I aim to take even less focus off the title cards by simply placing them over the video rather than cutting the video to make room for the title cards. This way the audience can enjoy the film whilst we display the necessary credits. I do however want to put emphasis on the title of the film, and perhaps have that over a black background, with enlarging text.
The 'Tracking' option for text in Final Cut seems to widen the gap between each letter in a word. Finding the right balance of tracking seems to give the text a great 'cinematic' feel to it. I could perhaps also use key-framing to go from less-to-more tracking of the title.
For the cast and crew, I can place the titles over alternating sides of the screen, for example:
Directed by Benjamin Squires (bottom left), Story by Adie Grimbley (bottom right). This gives the title sequence a small amount of movement, stopping it from being a complete bore!
When we got the chance, we experimented with lighting and colour to see what effects we could achieve;
We thought a particularly good use of lighting was the silhouette achieved when the light was behind the actor; although we're not sure when we'd be able to use this effect.
Although colour adds a nice touch to the shot, we'll only be using it subtly compared to how we used it in the video.
After we liked the silhouette effect we accidentally stumbled across last practise, I went out and purposefully experimented with silhouettes and lighting. The final shots are actually quite nice!
When it came to doing our storyboards, I tried to leave it vague but to allow some room for change within the overall look of the film. This was mainly because when it comes to filming, you never know what could change on the day or whether you can even manage to get some shots due to the location. This happened to me last year and I felt that having a vague yet instructive storyboard would be the best way to go about it. Along with the images I added notes about sound,lighting and even some of the connotations that would go along with the scenes. I felt this was important to give us some guidance, as well perhaps giving us some more ideas when it came to the actual days of filming. Below are the large images of the storyboard I created, and beneath them is a small slideshow of the closeups.
Shooting on film looks great, but it's expensive and not an option for student film. Luckily, there are countless numbers of tutorials and explanations on youtube regarding how to achieve the film look.
But why is that film look so desirable?
There are a number of differences between film and digital with arguably, the biggest contributing factor being colour. Many YouTube film-makers try to achieve the film look with colour correction through software such as Adobe After Effects or 'Color'. The colour in film seems to be much more contrasting, vibrant and deep. Another factor that contributes to the film look is FPS (frames per second). Films are shot at 24 fps, and although the average moviegoer won't be able to tell the difference between 24fps and 30fps, there is a difference.
Control of the camera also has a major affect. If the camera is shaking everywhere, not focused properly and controlled in an amatuer fashion, it won't look like it's been shot by a filmmaker, just a student with a camera; filmmakers should use tripods, dollys and steadicams to a achieve a much better image.
Perhaps another very obvious giveaway in regards to film vs. digital is the aspect ratio. When you see a film on TV, you'll notice the aspect ration becomes letter-boxed (most of the time). This is because televisions are made accustomed to the 16:9 aspect ratio whereas film is usually shot in either 2.35:1 or 1.85:1. The camera that we and the majority of other student film makers use shoots in 16:9 which is why during the editing stage, many choose to add the 'letterbox' effect to achieve that film look.
The video below shows a great comparison of digital and video including the main differences between each. The point of the video is to see how closely the film look can be replicated on digital. The end effect is quite impressive.
Achieving the film look may not be not necessary, but as Tarantino was saying, it all helps to create the illusion of what a movie really is.
Taking these things into account I tried to make a short video of my dog playing, look more filmic;
A screen shot from raw, unedited video.
As you can see form the still, the colours are a little dull and could do with some correction.
Using the technology that I have available (Final Cut), I only went through a couple of stages to get to the finished result.
1. 'Widescreen'
The cheap effect of altering the aspect ratio of my video from 16:9 to 2:35:1 by simply adding the 'letterbox' effect. 2. 3-way Colour Correction
The most important step of the two. As you can see from the visual colour correction diagrams below, there are a number of things I changed. First, the saturation, which refers to how 'bright' the colour is. No saturation will make the video black and white, whereas full saturation will show an unnatural, vibrant picture. I bumped up the saturation slightly to enhance the colours, but not ruin them.
I then made both the blacks and the mids slightly darker to create more depth, and made them both ever so slightly blue, whilst moving the whites more toward orange.
Original
Colour Corrected
The process was purely experimental, seeing what suited the video best, and colour correcting accordingly. I assume each location will require different colour correction and alterations, but practising these skills before the editing stage will surely help me in the long run.
Here is the end result -
The image looks deeper and colours are more vibrant because of colour correction.
Because of work schedules and availability times clashing, we have decided to use another location to film and another actor to play the main role. She is a little older, but it works out best for the group considering she is the sister of the 'monster' in the film.
The location is a house belonging to a close friend of Adie's, only five minutes from where she lives. This makes borrowing and moving equipment easier for us considering we won't have to get various buses and trains to the location.
With these changes, we should be able to commence filming very soon.
Some aspects of the story have also changed; Ivy, the lead character, now actually suffers from nightmares, rather than experiencing them in real life. This conveniently fills a couple of plot holes, one being why Ivy believes she's safe in a closet rather than just her bedroom. The fact that a lot of the film takes place in her nightmares also allows us to bend the rules a little, playing with lighting and colour to accompany Ivy's emotions in the nightmare.
Shooting in enclosed or smaller spaces
For some of the shots, especially the closet shots it may be difficult to do and we may have to think of another way of how to shoot it, depending on what we decide when it comes to actually filming it. The problem will probably come because of the size of the camera we are using as well as any sound or lighting equipment we may need. As neither of us have really had any experience in dealing with a problem like this before this may be one of the hardest to deal with and pull off.
Finding a younger actor
As we wanted our film to look potentially very good we wanted to find a child that would have at least a little experience with acting. And although it would have been easier to find someone related to us that option was not possible. So we have two options; one is using a boy from my dance school who does musical theatre, I have seen first hand that even when he was younger he was very capable of behaving well and acting to a good standard and now that he is older he is even easier to talk to. Our other option is by instead of using a boy would be to use a girl for the main part of the film. The actress that will be playing 'the sister' has a younger sister which gives the advantage that they look very alike. Also the good thing with this is that she is slightly older but looks young so it will be easier to work with and talk to her.
Locations
Our film has three major locations, a school, a house and a street. The street part will be easy enough as long as it fits in with the whole look of the film for example if the house was quite big and nice but the street looked very dirty and grimy. The school will be okay if we can get permission to film outside it and to record the sound of one class. The problem with this would be trying to recreate a classroom, it would have to look believable and not as though we had just stuck a few drawings on a wall somewhere. The hardest part for this was to find a house that would have all the appendages that we would need. At first we were going to use my grandparents house which had all the necessary parts but the downside was that it was in Sheffield. For us to get all the equipment and every actor and helper to this site would have been extremely difficult, also because it is not the largest house for moving around and setting up lighting it would have been quite hard to get the effect that we need. Luckily my friend Beth has agreed that we can use her house which is quite big and has all the things that we need. Although it does not have a closet to hide in per say it has a very small bedroom that with a few props can be made to look how we would envision it.
Getting everyone to be free at the same time and in the same place
As both me and Benj have college almost five days a week as well as work it is very hard finding a suitable length of time where we will both be able to film with enough time to get the work done. When you add other people into the mix this just gets more and more difficult, as we have three actors there are times where not all of them are in the same scene together. This will make it slightly easier to schedule. Everything also has to be scheduled with Beth and when someone is in at their house, so that we do not trash it.
Our locations for the film are very few in total but finding them and having them fit the feel of the film has been more difficult. The scenes that require separate locations are the main house, a street,
The following pictures are of the house that we will be using;
From inside the study
The study is not a location seen very much within the film
yet it may be visable from the scenes within the kitchen.
From outside the study
The study may also be used near the end where Ivy runs upstairs as
she sees Beth downstairs, this is where she may come from.
Dining room and living room
The dining room is where Ivy will sit when her mother is questioning
her about her nightmares, she may face away from
the living room or facing it.
and again
The living room is where we will see Beth when Ivy runs away from her.
Dining table and kitchen
The kitchen is where Ivy's mother will be preparing her
lunch in the morning and speaking on the phone.
Front living room
The front living room is not used very often during the film
but it will be seen when Ivy come downstairs
in the morning to the kitchen
Stairs to second level leading from front living room
From the top of the stairs during one of the nightmare scenes you
will be able to see the light pouring from the
small bedroom to signify its safety.
Landing at top of stairs
The landing which leads to her mothers bedroom will be seen
at the very end of of the film in the scene with beth and also
slightely seen when her mother knocks on
the door of the bedroom.
Small bedroom (closet) to the right of the Landing
This is the room where Ivy hides during her nightmares,
at one point we will have lght pouring out of this
room to show it is her safe place
Inside of the small bedroom (closet)
she sits upon the small bed right behind the door with her
back against the wall
Bathroom to the left of the landing
Out of this room and her mothers room lights will also be shown
with faded colours to represent how
she feels about each room .
Large bedroom at the end of the Landing
This door will also show a muted light.
Beth's bedroom and the very top of the stairs to the left
This room is only seen when she passes it on the way to
hiding in the small bedroom. It gives a
clue to who she is being haunted by.
Our other locations are mainly very simple other than the need for a school. The main other being a street where we see flowers left at a streetlight, this was very easy to find as the location of the house had some perfect 'neighbourhood' looking locations that would give the idea that you would not expect something like this to happen here.
Our last location was the school which was difficult to get permission from but as we were not shooting during school time they graciously allowed us to shoot at my old primary school which has an excellent community feel to it, which again makes the viewer think 'how is this going unoticed'
