Little Curiosities - FINAL

4 - Use of technology

3 - How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

At the beginning of the year, I was unfamiliar with the different kinds of techniques used in filming and the terminology. Through research of similar series and the analysis, I have become more confident in using different shot types and ways to describe them.

Planning and organisation skills have been somewhat poor at the beginning, but this project was one of our first larger assignments, which greatly encouraged us to communicate better and manage our time well. As we needed to use a lot of our free time to film and edit, we agreed on meeting on Fridays for filming, and edit our content within class time or weekends. This left us enough time to concentrate on our other subjects as well.

This project was a great way to help develop all kinds skills necessary for media. I believe it was essential in teaching me to use programs like Premiere Pro CC and AfterEffects, as I did not have the opportunity to use these before this project.

Creative confidence was not something I possessed at the start of the year, but through discussing ideas with my peers and executing our plans with satisfying results has led me to become more confident in my skills and work.

2 - How does your product engage audiences and how would it be distributed

Our target audience is/are? young people interested in the horror theme. Using Yougov.co.uk we identified that the most likely audience we would attract were socialist females past their forties. These are the most commonly found audience for movies and series similar to ours like ‘American Horror Story’ or ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’. We find the use of a cat in our credits is essential, simply due to the fact that most people that we found were interested in our type of movie are cat people. Unlike the average UK viewer of these shows, we decided to aim ours more at younger people, mostly teenagers. In order to shift the age range of normal horror/thrillers, we included a theme of childishness through cuddly toys and such which we thought would be engaging for younger audiences to watch as they are much closer to the age range that interacted with these toys, thus allowing them to feel more strongly about any actions that may occur to the item.

Films with similar themes: American Horror Story

Our friend who fits most of the criteria gave us some feedback. “I like the mystery … Like was the kitten part of the discovery and how someone can make it seem horrific.” This supports the importance of the HOW DOES IT APEAL TO OUR AUDIENCE:
Firstly, the choice of music is music box based, which leads the audience to think back to their old toys. This should set the mood for the rest of the credits, where more elements linked to childhood should appear. As we aimed for teenage audiences, this should be more effective because they are closer to the period of time that they should have experienced their childhood in.

At closer inspection, certain people may discover that the character has Neo-Nazi elements to her. In this shot she is burning a picture of baby Hitler, and has a shrine to Mengele with candles. The element of fire represents the danger of her ideals. The antagonisation of Nazis is an element that attracts adults and history enthusiasts, which are not necessarily within our target audience but we still reached in order to catch their interests.

When we discovered that our audience were cat people, the use of the kitten within our video became more essential. This would drive the audience to become concerned and scared for the kitten. We though evoking emotions of sympathy would be easiest if there was a living subject to stir that emotion. We hid the human character to create an air of mystery, so the cat was used to create that tone of danger.

kitten in our film.

For distribution, we would choose to submit our movie to a horror film festival in order to gain publicity. If it should become popular, we would release it to the big screen. Regardless of its popularity we will allow it to be viewed online through streaming on platforms like Netflix, which is available everywhere and commonly used by younger people, wherein our target audience fits. To excite the audience we can create fake websites related to our film which has exclusive content that the audience can decipher and/or view.

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

In our opening credits, the main character featured was the antagonist, whose face was not revealed but instead their character was shown by many closeup shots of their hands and mise-en-scene. This is part of a trope used in the opening credits of Se7en.

The character belongs to a group of antagonists which represent intelligent villains. In order to convey that, in one of our final shots we briefly reveal their past occupation to be a surgeon, in reference to Nazi official Mengele as well as serial killer Harold Shipman. Both of these murderers fall under the serial killer sub category dubbed ‘Angel of Death’. We also hint this through the surgeries that our character performs on the teddies.

In order to divert from the purely cold and clever antagonist, we decided to give it an air of childishness which would add to the creepiness of the credits. In order to achieve this we selected a soundtrack that was light, but presented a dark tone as well.

To add onto that we also chose a font for the credits called Two Turtle Doves, which looks like  a child’s handwriting. They are also presented in a pink to present the infant side to our character. The colour itself has been muted down because we wanted it to reflect a kind of old tape style.

Furthermore, we selected mise-en-scene like teddy bears to reflect more of the child-like nature the character has. In order to creepy-fy it we used glitchy jump-cuts, a trope commonly used in credits from shows like ‘True Blood’ and ‘American Horror Story’ .

We aimed to create an air of enigma with our opening credits akin to ones like ‘Se7en’, which create more questions the more is revealed.

Close-up of highlighting from Se7en. This shows the attention to detail the killer has, a common trope in thrillers based on police investigations.

An anomaly we used was the kitten, which was used to represent innocence alongside witchcraft which are starkly contrasting ideas but both interlink with the antagonist being childish as well as messed up.

Closeup of mise-en-scene, a common trope in mystery movies. As it reveals the lifestyle of the killer it still raises more questions than it answers, as there is more detail shown but no bigger picture.

Closeup of teddy’s face as it is investigated, which is a reference to a short film called ‘Teddy has a surgery’. The closeness creates an air of discomfort for the audience as well as suspense. What is she searching for? What will happen?

Another trope we followed was creating discomfort in a safe space. Doctors require a great amount of trust from patients, but we attempt to make the audience doubt their trust with closeups on surgical tools which reinforce discomfort and shake the audience’s feeling of safety.

In many movies, people are upset with the idea of animals in the movies ‘dying’, which is a common feature of typical horror movies like ‘Insidious’. A small snippit of the cat being approached by a dark silhouette is foreboding and alarms the audience as potential danger to an innocent pet is presented.

Lighting of the candle with a shrine of photos behind shows that the character worships/ looks up to another person. It is a hint to their inspiration and motives in their work, which may be due to the death of someone (Mengele in the photos) and

In reference to Black Swan, we used extreme closeups of oil pastel sketching to represent the childishness the character possesses, and also the messiness which contrasts the control and tidiness a doctor should have.

The cutting up of something cute and innocent like a toy rabbit has a more sinister meaning and gets the point across without using any gore

In our shot we did not include gloves which makes the sewing seem unprofessional. The comparison shot is from ‘Teddy has an Operation’.

Burning of childhood photos in reference to American Horror Story. This represents the character’s potentially broken childhood and gives them a freudian excuse for behaviour characteristics. Childhood trauma is also shown through their care for the cat, who is treated like a baby suggesting that the main character shown in the credits has issues surrounding their early years.

Inspired by Mengele, who is a figure of interest to the main character, thus they follow his footsteps in (what is suggested to be) human experimentation.

Typewriter logo

Referenced from this tutorial!
Sound

Image used

Rough cut - Critique and improvements

A frame displaying both of the most visible problems

The majority of critique we gained from peers and our teacher was that the cast credits (where we highlighted their names) was unclear and could be overlooked as credits. To fix this problem we opted to not redo the scenes but instead add digital credits beside it like the other non cast had. To make it look better, the letters will change colour as they are highlighted (from black to pink).

The second most obvious problem identified was that the old movie look that was overlayed looked repetitive. To fix this we made it less visible.