CONSTRUCTION: SCRIPT

 Our group decided to write our ideas into a script on Celtx.

PLANNING: INSPIRATIONAL FILMS / GENRES

 For my planning, I decided I should make a list of all the horror movies I have watched, and mark the useful ones with comments explaining why they are effective. I also included films that I haven't watched, but will during the planning process.

FILMS I HAVE WATCHED:

The Paranormal Activity series- this is a found footage film series exploring the possession of lead character Katie. This film is extremely useful as it utilises most paranormal horror tropes. It also looks at the dynamic of using a possessed character, as it shows Katie and Micah's relationship, and Demon Katie and Micah's relationship.

 I decided to look at a case study for a promotional package, and I chose Paranormal Activity (2007)

The Synopsis

A couple start having paranormal experiences. They set up a night camera and see that Katie has been sleep walking. They contact experts who claim the poltergeist is gone. However, things get worse, and Katie attacks Micah before leaving the house. 

Characters

Katie- a young woman who unknowingly has been possessed.

Micah- Katie's husband who gets haunted and later attacked, left for dead by Katie who is possessed by a demon.

Techniques

The director wanted to create realism and named the characters after the actors. 

He filmed all of the movie in 4 days, filming in real time.

The actors moved into the house as if they were a real couple, and improvised much of dialogue.

Promotional Package

Posters

The posters are extremely dark with mostly a grey-scale colour palette.

The title is in red, the only colour featured on the poster.

Website

Unlike most websites, Paranormal Activity does not have a website, to keep the illusion that it contains real events.

The Wikipedia page only went up once the news broke it was fake and that the actors were alive.

Trailers

The trailers featured only shaky cam shots and bits of dialogue commonly seen in some documentary trailers.

The Campaign

To keep the realism from the film, neither main actors turned up to the premiere, which helped the audience think it was just a documentary. The actors even took it to the extreme and didn't appear in public anywhere until the film was revealed to be fictitious.

The Insidious series- This will not be useful in creating my piece, as it heavily uses CGI, and is not in the general found footage style.

The Conjuring Series- The characters within my film slightly mimic those within the Annabelle series but overall there is not much correlation.

PLANNING: MY TARGET AUDIENCE

 I have planned what my target audience is likely to be:

Having found several surveys from a widespread audience, I found a general idea for my audience. A total of 32% of respondents watched horror films. Of that 32%, 36% are males under 35. 33% are males over 35, 44% are females under 35, and 22% are females over 35. The majority of watchers were parents and fit the social class C2. 

My target audience is likely to use social media to find films that they are interested in, in particular the visual platform Instagram. They are risk takers, as evident by the amusement when watching jumpscares, and they often watch these films in order to get a thrill. Similar films they have watched include The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. They often watch films on streaming platforms, rather than in cinemas and live on a lower wage. They can have any career but are likely to hang out with a tight knit group of friends.

(ADD RESULTS OF AUDIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE)

CONSTRUCTION: SMASH CUT

 (As GIBBY finishes his tirade, the camera focuses on the spill of coffee on the table, and it fades to an identical stain of blood in the grass in front of the Belvedere. Suddenly, the music swells as the audience get flashes of scenes, of EMILY possessed in front of the Belvedere, a pin of an article about Claremont being haunted, EMILY leaving the boys to use the bathroom, EMILY possessed again, a pin of a ghost, EMILY staring in the mirror, a pin of the interior of Claremont, EMILY's reflection shifting and distorting, EMILY possessed again, a pin of ghost hunting equipment, EMILY touching the violin player on the shoulder, a pin of their plan, the boys running out of the mansion, EMILY presenting a book to the boys, EMILY's torch laying on the ground up to the Belvedere, the passage about demons within the book, the boys running up to the Belvedere, the book being closed with a slam, revealing the title (Daemonology), a black screen. Suddenly the audience see EMILY at the top of the back balcony, about to enter Claremont, looking back at the boys, as she says the words:)

This passage in our script utilises smash cuts, as shown in Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll. We aim to increase the pitch and volume of our soundtrack, potentially with a violin, to create an impact and create the tension of the scenes while the scenes smash cut.

This technique was modelled in films such as American Beauty, within the alarm clock sequence, and Psycho, where the mother kills. We looked at these scenes for inspiration in forming our own sequences.

CONSTRUCTION: WEBSITE

 (Fill this out later!)

https://cbtaylor1238.wixsite.com/charlotte

PLANNING: LOCATION RECCE

 

As we are using Princess Charlotte as an established historical figure, and we currently attend the school in which she lived and died, we felt it would be accurate for our filming location. We were met with the challenge of having school supplies, and the layout of a school rather than an abandoned set. Therefore, we decided to still use our own school to film, but to make it canonically a school which is abandoned due to the 2020 pandemic.

PLANNING: PROPS

 For our props, I found 6 key ideas. I put some images into a collage to show the rest of my production team. 

We decided to use a pin board to mimic the crime investigation plots as this is what Emily wants to do. We will need electronic devices, of which, the camera is obtainable. We may need to use a similar looking prop to mimic the EVP recorder. We will need a baby's christening gown, and  a georgian style night gown for the ghost plot line as we need to establish the characters of Princess Charlotte and the baby who died in the horrific incident, which left them both dead. Lastly, we will need torches, to set the scene, and a fake daemonology book for the same purposes.

PLANNING: INITIAL DEVELOPMENT

 

PLANNING: PINTEREST

 As a production team, we felt creating individual pinterests based on characters and social groups within our piece. After discussion, we felt that the social issues we would cover would be: strong women, the role of the male (subverting and adhering to the stereotype), the paranormal, the belief in evil, and the female victim, royalty and the absent social group of the absentee school population. There are also two more social groups; people who believe in the paranormal and the teenage risk takers.

The Main Group;

This covers the social groups of people who believe in the paranormal and the teenage risk takers. I used Buzzfeed Unsolved and Loey Lane's YouTube for inspiration. These teenagers are mostly not afraid of anything, a common feature in horror movies- the characters become too arrogant and take too many risks. They also believe they are experts- especially Emily, which then becomes their hamartia. As we have decided to use paranormal characters in our trailers, I decided I needed to look at why people believe ghosts exist. I went onto YouTube to research the sort of encounters people have had with ghosts. The majority of the channels and their videos are by ghost hunting teams, professional and amateur. Many channels, such as Sam and Colby, AndrewTMI, Hailey Reese, Loey Lane, and other smaller creators, have been around for a while and built up quite a library of ghost hunting videos. In order to get the sense of the dynamics, I looked through the catalogue of videos and found a few common areas of interest. All these channels started off as amateur detectives, that have honed their videos and become more professional with the equipment they use. Loey Lane and Hailey Reese started off using mobile apps to talk to the ghosts, but have since bought official spirit boxes and evp recorders to communicate properly with ghosts. All of the channels feature more than one person if investigations happen. Loey Lane, Hailey Reese and AndrewTMI used to go together in a group called the soul siblings, although it has since been disbanded. Hailey Reese will take her mum and sister often to hunt for ghosts, and many paranormal youtubers collaborate on videos such as the Sam and Colby channel and the TFIL channel. All of the channels go to spaces that conventionally look scary, such as old churches, creepy old castles, or places such as Griffith Park- where serial killers took many of their victims, or tragedies have happened. Often these buildings will have more than one death in their history, and the channels have always done their research. I found it significantly easier to watch Loey Lane, Hailey Reese and AndrewTMI's videos, as the mix of gender, as well as mix of attitudes works very well as a dynamic. Therefore, if possible there should either be 1 girl and 2 boys or 2 boys and 1 girl. There should be one confident ghost hunter, the leader of the pack, one hesitant member who will be timid but still go ahead with it, and one totally scared member who in turn will freak out the other members with their antics. They should be almost total amateurs, using rudimentary ghost hunting tools.

Princess Charlotte;

Princess Charlotte is the ghost figure in Charlotte. Her pinterest takes inspiration from the real figure as well as Claremont, where she lived and died. This board highlights the royalty of the time, especially through the clothing and paintings of her at the time. She also presents as the female victim, although the main story reveals she was the victim before, and that's why the demon chooses her persona. She appears innocent, and taken too early, which highlights Emily's supposed fate.

Strong females/Female victims;

Emily subverts expectations by being the expert within the group that pushes the group to their limits. However, she also fits the category of female victim as she is taken by the demon, and the trailer insinuates that she does not survive the events of the movie. This pinterest shows posters and images of these two ideas around women in media and life.

The Role of the Male;

The male stereotypically comes in to save the female. In our trailer, the boys actually are the cowards in the group although they pretend to be brave. They also do not reach Emily in time which subverts the stereotype of the male saviour. The pinterest highlights the stereotype that the boys do not fit.

The Belief in Evil;

The reason the demon manages to succeed is because the group fears the demon. They have to believe the demon is real because otherwise Emily would have taken herself into harm's way. Emily also is very knowledgeable about daemonology so she would know the demon is real, therefore believing in evil. I took examples about demons in literature and drawings to highlight that demons have been recognised for centuries.

PLANNING: TREATMENT

 'Charlotte', our film, follows a group of teenagers who enjoy ghost-hunting to an extent. On the anniversary of Princess Charlotte's death, they decide to visit her death place, a school abandoned in the midst of a pandemic. Emily, the avid paranormal expert, pushes Gibby and Jack to the limits when communicating with what they believe to be Princess Charlotte's ghost. However, when Emily becomes separated from the amateurish boys, she finds that the once friendly spirit may not be who she first thought after all. It becomes a challenge for the boys, a race against time, in order to save Emily from the demon and get out of Claremont before they are lost forever. 

This treatment acts as a baseline of our film that explains the narrative simply. It is concise but allows directors to see the vision of the film.

We watched Frank Ash, a BBC Creative Consultant, and learned of the topline and big questions.

I decided the big question for our film was 'Will they make it out alive?' which stemmed from questions such as 'Will they find Emily in time?' and 'Will they discover the demon's true nature?'.

PLANNING: CASTING

PLANNING: PARANORMAL CHARACTERS

 As we have decided to use paranormal characters in our trailers, I decided I needed to look at why people believe ghosts exist, and the evidence. 

I went onto YouTube to research the sort of encounters people have had with ghosts. The majority of the channels and their videos are by ghost hunting teams, professional and amateur. Many channels, such as Sam and Colby, AndrewTMI, Hailey Reese, Loey Lane, and other smaller creators, have been around for a while and built up quite a library of ghost hunting videos. In order to get the sense of the dynamics, I looked through the catalogue of videos and found a few common areas of interest.

All these channels started off as amateur detectives, that have honed their videos and become more professional with the equipment they use. Loey Lane and Hailey Reese started off using mobile apps to talk to the ghosts, but have since bought official spirit boxes and evp recorders to communicate properly with ghosts. 

All of the channels feature more than one person if investigations happen. Loey Lane, Hailey Reese and AndrewTMI used to go together in a group called the soul siblings, although it has since been disbanded. Hailey Reese will take her mum and sister often to hunt for ghosts, and many paranormal youtubers collaborate on videos such as the Sam and Colby channel and the TFIL channel.

All of the channels go to spaces that conventionally look scary, such as old churches, creepy old castles, or places such as Griffith Park- where serial killers took many of their victims, or tragedies have happened. Often these buildings will have more than one death in their history, and the channels have always done their research.

I found it significantly easier to watch Loey Lane, Hailey Reese and AndrewTMI's videos, as the mix of gender, as well as mix of attitudes works very well as a dynamic. Therefore, if possible there should either be 1 girl and 2 boys or 2 boys and 1 girl. There should be one confident ghost hunter, the leader of the pack, one hesitant member who will be timid but still go ahead with it, and one totally scared member who in turn will freak out the other members with their antics. They should be almost total amateurs, using rudimentary ghost hunting tools. 

PLANNING: PROMOTIONAL PACKAGE CASE STUDY

 I decided to look at a case study for a promotional package, and I chose Paranormal Activity (2007)

The Synopsis

A couple start having paranormal experiences. They set up a night camera and see that Katie has been sleep walking. They contact experts who claim the poltergeist is gone. However, things get worse, and Katie attacks Micah before leaving the house. 

Characters

Katie- a young woman who unknowingly has been possessed.

Micah- Katie's husband who gets haunted and later attacked, left for dead by Katie who is possessed by a demon.

Techniques

The director wanted to create realism and named the characters after the actors. 

He filmed all of the movie in 4 days, filming in real time.

The actors moved into the house as if they were a real couple, and improvised much of dialogue.

Promotional Package

Posters

The posters are extremely dark with mostly a grey-scale colour palette.

The title is in red, the only colour featured on the poster.

Website

Unlike most websites, Paranormal Activity does not have a website, to keep the illusion that it contains real events.

The Wikipedia page only went up once the news broke it was fake and that the actors were alive.

Trailers

The trailers featured only shaky cam shots and bits of dialogue commonly seen in some documentary trailers.

The Campaign

To keep the realism from the film, neither main actors turned up to the premiere, which helped the audience think it was just a documentary. The actors even took it to the extreme and didn't appear in public anywhere until the film was revealed to be fictitious.

Social Media

Paranormal Activity uses Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to effectively promote the film including character posts and shots from the movie as seen below. I aim to use a similar style in my own campaign by introducing character shots with backstories and also revealing subtle clues about the plot through mysterious posts like Claremont shrouded in mist and pictures of Princess Charlotte. 

PLANNING: GENRE

 For our promotional pack, Harrison, Jake and I decided to focus on the horror genre, with a deeper focus on the paranormal and found footage sub-genres. I have already watched many horror movies including the insidious series, The Conjuring series and other stand alone movies like the Blair Witch Project.

The horror genre has two common directions, found footage and narrative. Found footage is commonly teamed with action, with a focus on a group of people who have gone through the events of the footage already. The films often take place in woods or old houses. Narrative films show a more structured film, with more emphasis on the tropes as well as well-rounded characters.

There are four main sub-genres that I looked at within my research. 

Paranormal:

Often has a ghost as the antagonist which is defeated by a group of teens.

Case studies include The Paranormal Activity series (2007-2022), The Conjuring Universe (2013-2021), the Blair Witch Project (1999), the Insidious series (2010-2018), the Grave Encounters series (2011-2012) and the Quiet Ones (2014).

Slasher:

Often the goriest of the horror genre, slasher often has a group that turns on each other or a murderer as the villain.

Case studies include The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Happy Death Day 2 U (2019), The Babysitter (2017), Halloween (2018), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), the Saw franchise (2004-2021) and The Human Centipede (2009).

Psychological:

Often has the danger as an urban legend or the uncanny which plays with the audiences' minds.

Case studies include A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), The Purge Franchise (2013-2021), Psycho (1960), Frozen (2010), The Ward (2010), 347 F (2011), The Descent (2008), Inside (2007), The Strangers (2008) and Buried (2008).

Zombie/Virus:

Like the title says, the main threat in this category is either a zombie or a virus outbreak.

Case studies include Night of the Living Dead (1968), Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), Dawn of the Dead (1978), 28 Weeks Later (2007), Resident Evil (2002), Pontypool (2008), Rammbook (2018), White Zombie (1932) and Zombie (1979).

I also looked at relevant horror tropes that I knew we could use in our own work. The most important one is the Final Girl trope. Often the sole survivor of the group is the girl that often has abstained from drinking or sleeping around. She will often be the one to defeat the antagonist. Others include the Mirror trope (often the protagonists will look into a mirror and see a glimpse of the antagonist, but not a major look so the mystery remains), the no signal trope (where characters don't have signal, so can't contact for help- entities drain batteries to try and manifest from the stolen entity), the Basement trope (where the basement is the single most haunted place- no characters want to go down there but they do anyway), the Shaggy Search Technique (instead of showing characters actively search for clues, they stumble across them like Shaggy from Scooby Doo), Credibility trope (where often for audiences, a sign that says based on true events will make a story scarier- especially for stories with a paranormal plot device) and the Constant, Lurking Evil (by showing brief glimpses of the antagonist, the audience keeps the mystery but are satisfied with speculating about the antagonist).

PLANNING: TARGET AUDIENCE QUESTIONNAIRE

 Ahead of creating our a2 work, Harrison, Jake and I decided to create a questionnaire to send out to identify our target audience more closely. We all undertook this task separately to ensure that we reached as many people as possible. I decided to use Google Forms as the platform to host my questionnaire as I used it in my AS work, and found that it was easy to format both for me as a creator and the people who answered it.

As our group has decided on doing a found footage, paranormal, horror film, we decided to show some trailers and posters specific to the genre of our ideas. This meant that I needed to be aware of who I could send the questionnaire to. As some of the trailers use flashing scenes, jump-scares and gore, I decided to preface the trailer section with a trigger warning as well as an email describing the warning, and a reminder that if the respondent knew they did not like horror, they did not have to fill in the questionnaire.

I decided to format my questionnaire in three sections and a thank you page. The first section looks at the respondent's category (female, 15-35) and an intro to the genre of horror as a whole. The second section looks at three trailers: The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and The Amityville Horror and asks about the effectiveness of certain aspects of the trailers including sound and pace. The third section also focuses on the three films above, however, it looks at the film posters and how effective aspects such as institutional information and colour are used.

 

Upon creating the first question, I realised in my as questionnaire, I did not cater to non-binary identifying audience members and so I reached out to a potential audience member and asked how to phrase it.

I checked previous horror film demographics and the categories were 15-35 and 35 up, so I decided to utilise the same. The other factor to consider was that an audience member may not want their age within it and so I factored in a prefer not to say option too.

This category was extremely important as we needed to know what sub genres for horror were the most popular. We have already decided on our sub genre but felt we needed to see an overview of the genre as a whole to find our target audience.

Within this header I included a warning and a way for the respondent to avoid answering questions pertaining to the trailers to ensure the comfortable experience of answering the questionnaire was maintained.