Planning material

Initial Idea

Paranormal activity, CCTV footage and amateur filming , Family memories, Background happenings, Moving objects, Students renting house, Haunted house, Newspaper headings, students find ghost whilst filming, carry on filming to seek out ghost, final girl has family history linked to horrible findings in house.

Characters

Charlie- final girl = Sophie
Dan = Ryan
Andy = Owen
Emma = Kate

Props required

Car, pitchfork, cloak, prop camera, blood, make-up, blood packs, beer bottles, shot glasses, newspaper clippings

Shots 1-16 to be filmed during the day.
Shots 17-31 to be filmed during night time

Film Schedule

15th December- Day time, shots 1,3,5,6,7,8,11 and 12.
Props needed: car, suitcases, drinks, camera
Personnel needed: all

20th December- Day/night, shots: 13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 and 24
Props needed: newspaper clippings
Personnel needed: all

7th Janurary- Night time, gory scenes: 21,31,25,26,27,28,29,23,22
Props needed: fake blood, blood packs, pitchfork, make-up
Personnel needed: all including Ben

Rest of shots were not planned specifically, but were inputed after seeing footage already obtained.

Location 

Almost all filming took place at a group member, Owen's house. We decided in order to create a horror that the audience could relate to, that it should take place in a realistic setting.

Storyboards for Off Campus

Further audience research

Due to the fact that my previous audience research was using a focus group of media students I decided that in order to gain a more representable view of the horror audience, I would ask a 17 year old male; who enjoys horror films to watch my trailer and give his comments on what he liked about it, and what he did not.
To present this, I created a short video in which you can see his comments directly, as he told me them.

Audience Research Results

Questionnaire results

View more presentations from katejpritchard.

My Audience Research

To conduct our research, our group decided to create a questionnaire on the website 'surveymonkey.com', we used a series of open and closed questions in order to gain qualitative and quantitative data that would give an insight into the kind of things our audience would like to see in a horror trailer. Click on the link below to see our questionnaire.

Audience research questionnaire

There are many advantages and disadvantages when it comes to choosing a method of research. For example, the type of data that you collect, qualitative data allows you to gain very descriptive data that the audience write themselves. Quantitative data is much less descriptive and is usually presented in a multiple choice format, however this data is much easier to compare and to produce graphs and charts to present the findings.

Also the location of this research determines the reliability of results, we conducted our research online and found all of our answers in one place. We advertised our survey on the social networking site Facebook to encourage people to do the survery, but the range of people who answered our survey were quite limited. We could have used a Face to Face method of collecting data, but decided against it generally for convenience and time.

Luckily, most of the people who answered our survey were actually our target audience which made our results very valid. It would have been pointless in asking a middle aged woman what she thought should be included in a trailer, mainly because she is not our predominant target audience; her opinions may not be applied to 17-24 year old males who actually are our target audience. However, our sample size only consisted of around 30 which is not a very representative sample and so in future a larger size may be better.

Group Notes- Narrative idea

• Handheld cameras
• Paranormal Activity
• CCTV in corners of rooms
• The characters film it
• 4 Students moving into a house together
• Haunted house
• Final girl- she's linked to the horrible history of house
• Man kills 8 people, could have been 9 but one killed him
• Ghost of killer tries to punish 'final girl' for his death as her grandmother was his killer
• Friends die leaving only her
• Newspaper clippings
• Girl doesn't know about g ma.

Horror Mood Board

In my mood board I included some images of eyes, bugs; including spiders, and needles. This is because these are the things that I find scary and so I put together a collection of pictures to illustrate my fears and give me inspiration for my horror trailer. I also decided to include a picture from the human centipede as I thought that the film itself contained some of the themes that I find scary, such as insects and also surgery scenes. 

Narrative Proposal

The narrative follows a 15 year old girl named Alison; she was recently orphaned as her parents and younger brother were brutally murdered in their home by a mental asylum escapee. Her grandparents move in and begin to take care of Alison, but strange things start happening in the middle of the night such as knives go missing and the pet rabbit is also killed. Alison believes that the murderer is back for her, because previously she hid in the wardrobe and he did not find her. Alison was found hours later after the murders still crouched in the wardrobe, covered in her mother’s blood.

Alison tries to warn her grandparents, friends and even the police about the return of the killer, but no one believe her, and she is banned from leaving the house. The strange things continue happening and gradually get worse, so Alison becomes increasingly scared. Soon, her grandmother is killed and Alison has to find help. She realises that the police will not help her and so has to take matters into her own hands to defeat the killer.

She visits the asylum in which she believes the killer escaped from, but finds nothing. After looking at newspaper articles she finds out the horrifying truth, that no one escaped, but there was someone who was released. As Alison tries to discover who the killer is in order to defeat them she soon realises that the killer is not who she believed it to be. She wakes up with her grandmother’s blood on her hands and it soon becomes clear who actually killed her family.

Alison is the killer, she was released from the mental asylum and within hours of returning home she murdered her entire family. This is the horrifying truth that is revealed at the end of the film when Alison is taken back to the asylum. That in fact Alison was behind the murders the entire time, including her grandmothers, and her memory loss was just a coping mechanism from the terrible deaths.  This is shown very subtly throughout the film, mostly through the responses of people surrounding Alison.  It ends with Alison grieving over her family and locked in a cell, swearing that she will find out who killed them.