Final Sequence

 

The Final Sequence

This is the final product of my group's project.

CCR Task 4

How did you integrate technologies software, hardware and online in this project?

For this task, I made a website explaining how I integrated the three types of technologies in this project's production stage.

link to my Wix site!

CCR Task 3

CCR Task 3

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

 For this task, I created an infographic documenting how my production skills have evolved over this project.

link to infographic

CCR Task 2

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Considering the nature of our Opening Sequence, as well as the rest of the film, our target audience is narrowed down to males from 15 to 17 as it is an Action/Horror, which is predominantly targeted at teenage boys, and the implied violence also shifts the age range to later teen years. 

Here is the link to a blog I wrote discussing Target Audiences and the reasoning behind having one in mind;

link to my Target Audience blog

How we engaged our viewers

We tried to scatter our sequence with certain details that would engage our audience into the action, particularly our target audience, which can be seen through some key scenes;

We casted a good looking actress to play as the Survivor and her face is in shown almost immediately, this reveals our target audience as they are both of similar age, and of course a beautiful female actress would attract straight teenage boys more. This links back to the typical conventions of a Slasher Horror film, where the good looking female character exists purely to get killed and to entertain male audiences.

This opening shot also establishes the setting seemingly taking place in the middle of the woods, - this engages the audience as woods in films (especially horror films) are often associated with complete isolation, stranded amidst an endless flood of trees, vulnerable to any attacks with lots of space to run, but nowhere to hide…

In the next few shots, she crawls across the hood of a car lying face down and showing off her costume, similarly to this shot from Tomb Raider (2018), directed by Roar Uthaug and distributed by Warner Bros Pictures, where the equally good looking actress Alicia Vikander is in a similar position to our main character; to engage male audiences in a subtle manner without inherently objectifying them (according to the film industry).

The location being scattered with abandoned cars also hooks in the audience, not only visually, but it also creates instant mysteries around their purpose as to how they ended up in that condition, encouraging further thought as to what events happened beforehand that could’ve caused this destruction.

Early on in the sequence, she also lifts up her trouser sleeve to reveal a deep gash in her leg, covered in blood. This again adheres to Horror conventions as bloody wounds would attract horror fans who look out for blood in the films they watch, as well as the male audiences that stereotypically enjoy and can handle gore better than female audiences.

Once again adhering to the stereotypical likes of a male viewer, the main source of danger is revealed to be the approaching sounds of a motorcycle, where the Action side of our sequence becomes apparent, suggesting that vehicles like these will likely be a recurrent theme in the film and that any enthusiasts can enjoy watching one of their interests on film, potentially attracting any mostly male viewers interested in Action conventions centred around anything similar to this, such as car chases.

Fans of the Action genre are further engaged when the main character begins to run away from whoever is on the motorcycle, who is soon proven to be chasing and hunting her down as she desperately limps away to safety from the unsettlingly loud revving sounds. This would encourage the audience to continue watching to find out whether she successfully runs away or meets her fate in another typical Action chase sequence.

Leading to the final shot, the audience is forced to sit through a long and slow-paced one-take where the Hunter tauntingly marches towards the hiding Survivor, where the camera eventually turns away to follow her attempting to escape, leaving him out of view. This follows Barthes' theory on enigma codes as the audience is now unaware of whether she will escape unharmed or not since the threat is no longer visible, this engages them as tension is quickly built when they become invested in her survival and want to keep watching to find out what happens.

Finally, this tension is released in the form of a jumpscare as the camera cuts to the Hunter suddenly swinging his axe down at the camera, another typical Horror convention that excites and engages with audiences through an essentially forced reaction. This also ends the sequence with various unanswered questions, such as ‘Who is this man?’ ‘Why did he kill her?’ ‘Who else will he kill?’... This encourages viewers to watch the rest of the film to answer these questions.

The axe prop also incites a reaction from the audience due to its sheer size and intimidating blood-soaked image, creating more excitement that if we were to have used a prop like a gun - a weapon with no nuance or unpredictability in film, whereas unconventional and unique prop weapons open opportunities for memorable iconography.

Our sequence as a whole follows Blummers and Katz’ theory on uses and gratification and would likely be used as a form of Escapism since it takes place in the unrealistic setting of a post-apocalyptic forest/abandoned junkyard and follows a young woman escaping from an axe-wielding serial killer on a motorcycle… so it can be watched as a complete separation from reality to immerse audiences into fantasy.

Overall, I think our sequence was very successful in engaging our audience, particularly our target audience, as it contains various scenes and popular themes that leave unanswered questions and stimulate curiosity within the viewer, encouraging a full watch of the wider film.

My Poster Design;

The drawing in the poster is taken from my favourite shot of our sequence, midway through the final one-take where the Hunter steps into the shot with the mighty silhouette of his axe, whilst the Survivor hopelessly covers her mouth in horror. This directly references the main scene/plot of the film, where the masked killer sneaks up on his terrified victims and kills them with his weapon of choice - a giant blood-soaked axe, which brings up the same previously mentioned unanswered questions, engaging the audience with excitement and curiosity as they wonder whose blood is on his axe, or even if the girl makes it out alive… the look of pure terror on her face also suggests that its tone will make for an intense and immersive viewing experience as we follow her through her fight for survival.

inspiration;

Link to the annotated version of this Poster analysing how it engages our audience;

Studio and Marketing Campaign

I think the studio best suited to distribute our film would be the American film and television production company Blumhouse Productions, founded by Jason Blum in 2000. This would be a good fit as they are known to almost exclusively produce films of the Horror genre, with some of their most successful films including; Paranormal Activity, Halloween, Insidious, Get Out, Split, Happy Death Day, and Us.

Due to the genre and premise of our sequence, I can’t help but associate it with what would be a larger production as Horror is overall very marketable and widespread, especially if it’s Blumhouse that’s producing it, but its more niche sub-genres would prevent it from being a massive globally announced cinema release. Its marketing campaign would follow that of a conventional slightly upper budget Horror film, such as Blumhouse’s upcoming ‘Unhuman’, through posting various trailers on Youtube and their official Instagram page to gain views and attention from their own fans, as well as our target audience of 15-17 year old males since they generally spend a large amount of time on social media. However, an instance of more detailed marketing is seen with their film ‘The Invisible Man’; since it was about… an invisible man, they maintained high levels of mystery when distributing posters and promotional material about it. This included creating an official website for the film, featuring motion art from scenes in the film with text reading ‘He’s standing right behind you’ to reflect its theme.

It would likely premier at a film festival like the Sundance Film Festival as it also supports independent filmmakers like our group, and its reputation would provide the necessary reach to attract a wider audience. After its initial theatrical release, it would also be uploaded to a streaming service like Netflix or Youtube, This makes sense as Blumhouse are a large company with a high budget and often put up their films to large streaming services as well, with films such as ‘Get Out’ and ‘Happy Death Day’ being uploaded to Youtube and Amazon Prime in addition to a traditional cinema release. Services like these are also easily accessible to audiences, allowing for the somewhat wider reach of an average Horror film whilst inviting a smaller following of its respective genre.

 

CCR Task 1

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

This task discusses our sequence's use of Genre Conventions in comparison to other films of the same genre, as well as considering any representations it may have.

 

Last days of Editing

Since we finished our final cut very quickly, we spent the majority of our editing process focusing on sound design as it played such a large part in our story, mainly from the motorcycle revving and a lot of extra sound effects over certain shots where the original audio was overwhelmed by the wind blowing into the mic.

To fix the muddy wind recording, we simply turned down the original track and added much clearer recorded wind ambience, which fit very well with the vastly empty setting, and the occasional ghostly whistles served as some type of very minimal creepy soundtrack without taking the attention away from the action on screen.

In order to add different types of tension in our sequence, we split it into three main paces and sounds;

The opening third was made of fewer but longer shots and as there was no immediate danger yet, as well as simple wind blowing in the background, rustling footsteps, and minimal effects such as fabric ripping from her shirt, which we had to correctly time very tediously.

Then as she hears the revving coming from the distance in the middle third, we picked up the pace and cut every shot much shorter to add a sense of panic and survival instinct, as well as fading in the motorcycle audio in time with her reaction, making sure to change its volume and the left/right panning with every location change to mirror how she would have experienced it. Not many other sound effects were needed for this section as the loud revving would have overpowered quieter noises like footsteps.

Finally, the final third was made up of our long take, so no cutting was needed except for timing a continuity issue with the previous shot as she opened the door with different hands, so we cut the last one shorter and extended the opening of the one take instead of cutting it halfway through the action. Sound design was crucial for building tension in this section even if silence played a large role in creating it; we wanted to maintain the focus onto the sounds of the hunter as the main source of fear, yet still fill the scene with quiet sound effects, which could have gone unnoticed, but in my opinion really added to the atmosphere and realism. We spent a considerable part of our time trying to perfect this section with every effect;

• The wind blowing was turned down as the camera moved further into the garage, yet was still kept in to maintain the eerie ambience and accentuate the silence

• The revving was also turned down as the motorcycle came to a stop outside the garage

• Strangely of one of my favourite sounds; Tiny metal hinge squeaks from even the smallest opening or closing of the car door as it was clearly such an old abandoned car, which we changed the speed of/reversed accordingly with its direction

• Heavy and boomy footsteps from the Hunter stomping into the garage with his large boots, which we had to make sure to closely time to his stepping movements of course, as well as add variation

• Another favourite was the thud of his axe onto the ground, and its slow, dragged out scraping across the rough surface, which we achieved by significantly slowing down a shorter scraping audio to make it sound heavier, I got very excited once this came together exactly as expected since it worked so well as almost an omen of looming danger

• In the final few seconds before the jumpscare as the Survivor crawls forwards to escape, a rising strings section quickly builds up, which was quiet enough to not be an obvious warning of the upcoming jumpscare, yet still built a sense of unease and served as a perfect bridge between the mostly silent scene and the sudden axe swing.

• The very quick swooshing of an axe was added for realism of course as the impressive weapon came crashing down

• Once the screen cut to black as the axe approached, which we timed with sudden dissonant loud musical notes and unsettling echoes layered on top of each other, perhaps as a representation of her death

Overall I could not be happier with how the sound came together, particularly in the final shot as it perfectly mirror how I had pictured the scene in the moment; a very obvious windy silence in contrast to the loud revving, but in a completely different tone to the opening’s similarly minimal wind rustling as it now reflected how there was no obvious sound of danger to escape from anymore like she did with the revving, rather than a simple lack of obvious danger. Yet despite the resounding silence, a perfect unsettling tension was created from the smaller unnoticeable effects that added atmosphere to an otherwise fairly audibly empty scene, as well as shifting the focus onto the booming footsteps and axe scraping of the approaching threat.

Finally, we were initially unsure of how to approach adding titles to our sequence as it was something we had admittedly not heavily considered beforehand, so we decided to just roughly go for it and add a credit sequence template over the project, cutting them shorter and closer together according to what we thought flowed better, making sure to concentrate them to the first two thirds in order to leave more space for the final shot. We then took turns in adding our friends’ names in the credits’ places to save time instead of coming up with fake names, except for naming our supposed production company after the word printed on the hoodie Max was wearing that day. We also ended up making the final choice of assigning the directing credit to me (which, although was only for the purpose of a smooth credit sequence, I was selfishly giddy about), the editing credit to Joy and the camera operator to Max.

Overall, the similar issue occurred where I unintentionally left a lot of the burden of tedious editing onto the other two as I was unable to spend my Private Studies editing, yet I did manage to come in two activities slots to help out and was a lot more hands on in our lessons. I still felt very guilty about not helping out as much though and made sure to thank Max and Joy for all of their incredible hard work, perhaps a little too much to their annoyance, but I really was grateful as they took on the job so gracefully and impressively. As a group we luckily shared a nearly identical vision to what we wanted the final product to look like, so we ended up all being so satisfied with our project and it was wonderful to see every step of the process as we quietly celebrated every time we managed to make something work perfectly. I generally could not be happier with the finished product considering the time limit we had to complete it.

 

First days of Editing

The first day of editing, my group sat down at our designated Mac and opened up our project to review all of the footage, I would say this was strangely one of my favourite moments from the whole process - at this point we had left a two week gap since our shooting day, so this gave me enough time to look at the footage from a fresh perspective, which only added to my excitement as it now involved an element of surprise. 

We were all extremely pleased with how the footage had turned out and immediately started piecing together what shots looked best onto the timeline, separated by smaller sequences e.g. one for the action of ripping her sleeve off, and another for her chase sequence. Our choices for these orders were fairly straightforward as we had shot them in mostly chronological order, with the last take of every shot being the overall best one. 

We also generally filmed only what we needed, with a few exceptions of some establishing shots we didn’t use as we didn’t want to add to our already slightly long run time, as well as some extra close ups for our last shot in case we decided against the idea of a single long take, which were a CU of Mike’s boots stepping into the garage and dropping the axe into the ground to drag off screen, and another CU of Meadow’s terrified expression in the car before reaching out to open its door.

As we began placing and cutting these shots together into their respective sequences, we started noticing a few very minor continuity mistakes, which thankfully weren’t enough to be considered irreversible, but would prove to simply be tedious to fix, particularly with our often perfectionist nature - luckily this didn’t get in our way as much as I worried it would since we were mainly just so happy with the footage in general and were very excited about how cool it all looked.

Once we had finished a rough cut of the whole project, we ran into the slight issue of an overly long run time of 3 minutes, meaning we had to sacrifice the short sequence of the Survivor pulling out the car parts to put into her bag, instead cutting straight from her opening her bag and finding the zipper broken to pulling up her wounded leg onto the car hood. Whilst it was unfortunate that we couldn’t include those props that I particularly liked the look of, I wasn’t too bothered by this as it wasn’t fully necessary to the story and the scene still ran smoothly without it, we also had plenty of other visually engaging shots to make up for it. 

Our first few days of editing proved to be extremely productive and effective as we had essentially already cut together the finished product (minus the titles and audio editing of course). However, I was slightly disappointed in my own lack of involvement in these first crucial days since my Private Study slot took place just when another Media class had to edit, whilst Max and Joy shared their slot and were able to produce incredible amounts of work in a short period of time, so when I properly sat down with them after just one session away I was both extremely impressed and somewhat guilty for not having contributed as much as I could have since I had effectively passed the responsibility onto them.