Feedback from rough cut 2

Titles

The titles for our film start off with a black background, with white writing in a serif font, highlighted by red colouring.  Our main influence from this was from the film the lost boys. As the introduction goes on, the black background then dissapears and the writing is layered over the top of the footage. 

The Lost Boys opening titles.

Our end title card is also a black background, with an animated red, jagged "horror" font, spelling out the word liar, with an animated blood effect dripping from the words. The soundtrack plays over the title card, with non-diegetic sound effects of a phone dial which has been hung up, before the sound effect of a phone being put on the hook. The soundtrack then cuts off completely.  We got this idea from Scream as they used similar effects with layered noises and a black background, with white writing and red highlighted around the words. We thought this seemed very effective, and had our own go at adapting this idea.

Opening title from Scream.

Our titles used in our film opening.

Characters

For our film opening there is five main characters; a girl running in the opening scene (film within a film), the murderer also for the opening scene, the scream queen for the actual film, the scream queen's boyfriend, and the masked killer.

Firstly for the girl running in the opening we needed a blonde scream queen, who was willing to wear figure-hugging clothing, heavy makeup and would run through a field. We actually chose Poppy Potts to do this, the producer of our film opening, as she fits the scream queen representation and was willing to act. Poppy also knew of a good location to film this opening scene so this was very helpful. For the murderer who chases her, we needed a fairly tall, lanky actor (preferably a boy) to represent an initimidating character, even when masked. Poppy decided to use her brother for this, as he fit the representation and was accessible easily, and is also knowledgable with filming, so was able to help film the footage aswell.

Outfit worn by scream queen Kathy Allen.

For the actual film, we needed a blonde scream queen who was also willing to wear heavy makeup, revealing clothing - and also needed to be confident with acting skills, as this role includes a lot of speech. Poppy and I wrote down a list of possible girls to fit this role, we had a choice from about 5 people. We then asked the first girl on the list, Kathy Allen, and fortunately she was willing to participate. We did Kathy's makeup heavily and gave her a strappy, figure-hugging pyjama top and pink pyjama shorts. We tried out a practice shoot with Kathy and her acting was a success.  Poppy and I both agreed we would not need to ask any of the other girls.

  We used the same technique when choosing the actor to play the scream queen's boyfriend, and fortunately again, the first boy we asked was willing to take part, Alex Osborne. For this character there wasn't too many specifics required for representation as the actor is not shown up close, but only on CCTV. We just made sure Alex was wearing suitable 'teenage' clothing, such as a t-shirt, jeans and trainers. This was easily acssesible as Alex himself owned many of these clothes.

Scream Queen Research and Examples

The decision making on choosing our main actor was based on the stereotypical "Scream Queen" taken from the slasher genre. We researched a variety of slasher films to analyse the representation of this character. We looked at films such as Scream, Halloween and Psycho. We mainly adapted our idea from Scream. 














Drew Barrymore plays the scream queen Casey Becker in Scream, who is represented with blonde hair, which is almost essential for the scream queen character. Casey is in the first opening scene and within this scene there is a
phone call where she has to answer a question to save her boyfriend Steve. The actress we used will have long, blonde hair which we thought would fit perfectly for the character. In Scream, Drew Barrymore wears quite covered up clothing, such as jumpers and jeans. However in the

Steve is a stereotypical teenage boyfriend character.

majority of horror films we researched, the scream queen was wearing revealing, figure-hugging clothing and was heavily caked in makeup. We decided that representation would fit better with our film opening as it is more stereotypical.

Similar to Steve in Scream, the actor in our film opening who played the boyfriend will also be tied up in a chair. In the opening scene, Casey Becker thinks that it is her boyfriend that is on the phone at first playing a joke on her. We adapted that idea into our film opening as it showed that the scream queen is naive, vunerable and sexually active.



Halloween

Another scream queen we researched was in Halloween. This character was called Judith Myers.

Michael Myers (the murderer of the film) killed Judith on halloween night because she betrayed her brother by choosing to be with her boyfriend rather than babysitting Michael. Michael uses a knife to kill his sister, as he goes upstairs to find her he follows a trail of his sister's clothes. When he reaches her he finds her naked, this scene really signifies her as a sexually active character.

This was a significant movie in cementing the stereotypes of the slasher movie genres. Judith has long hair and revealing clothing (or no clothing at all), is sexually active and isn't shown as caring for school or anything deemed 'nerdy'.


Psycho
The scream queen in Psycho was the actress Marion Crane. In Psycho Marion has blonde curly hair, wears makeup, and is dressed in her dressing gown. She undresses fully and enters the shower before she is brutally stabbed, and collapses in a heap naked in the shower. This tragic scene signifes possibly a sexually active character, and enhances the male gaze theory.

Location and props

We chose the bedroom location in our film opening, based on the main character - the blonde scream queen. We needed the bedroom to emphasise the stereotype behind her character, by using a pink, teenage, girly room. The room is almost entirely pink, however the bedding was not pink before so we changed it to a pink duvet. The room was also quite cluttered with school work before hand, so we tidied these away as they would not of worked well in the mis-en-scene, as it did not fit with the representation of our character- as she is not perceived as studious, but a more "dumb blonde" character.

Bedroom before, light duvet and cluttered.

Bedroom after, tidied and changed duvet.

Warp V Working Title Strategies plan

Plan;

Working title-

-A-listers, in comparison to unknown actors from Warp

-Genre variety/recognisable Genres, rom-com, children's films, horror etc- in comparison to social realist from Warp

-Franchising- several franchises e.g Johnny English, BJD, compared with Warp - no franchising only one TV series TisEngland 

Film Opening Feedback

This is the feedback we got for our film opening. It includes film evidence of a class feeding back after watching it, post-it notes and a short video summary of the main comments we got.