Damnation Narrative

This is the narrative for our film/story Damnation. Naturally we couldn't include everything mentioned in the narrative in the trailer so the bits that are high lighted in green our the scenes that should be featured in the trailer. 

Beginning

In South -East London, England, a teenage girl named Angela is mysteriously looking at a church. A flashback of her at a younger age is shown where she is constantly going to church with her mother. Suddenly, her mother disrupts the flashback and we return to the present stage and her mother asks if she is going inside the church. She then states that she will come into the church within a few moments and hence her mum goes in without her. She continues to stare at the church but suddenly sees her friends across the street and a smile is illustrated on her face. They quickly greet and Sammie states that they are going to Freddie’s house to watch a movie; she then states that she is going with them and therefore ditches the idea of going to church. She looks back at the church worryingly but soon forgets about her betrayal to her religion when she converses with her friends.

Once inside Freddie’s house they settle down and begin to watch the film. They then begin to watch a horror film and she is reminded of her betrayal to the church in which this makes her feel uneasy. Then, some religious connotations are portrayed within the film and she begins to panic as she thinks about her own deception. Her friends try to snap her out of her madness and once calm, suggest that she should go home and rest and she follows this advice.

She arrives home only to find her mother extremely angry with her missing out on church. The two argue until the mother hits her and states that she should repent her sins. She runs to her room, cries and then falls asleep. Once awoken from her slumber, she realises the time, 3am however, decides her mother was right and that she should go and repent. She gets her coat and walks silently out the house, trying not to awake her mother. She walks to the church reciting versus’ from the Bible. Once in the church, she kneels by the alter and starts praying. Suddenly, the door opens but she cannot see anyone there, she then decides to hide away in fear thinking that God has arrived in the room. It turns out to be a thief trying to steal ornaments from the alter including a Bible, a cross and some money from the offering. Angela then beings to become more and more scared and then hear voices within her mind telling her to kill. The voices then begin to get louder and before she can control herself she beats him to death with a candle holder. She then stops and realises what she has done and runs to the bathroom to try and wash away the blood. She then looks in the mirror once, thinking that something is behind her. She then looks again in which her eyes go red and the scene fades to black.

A mysterious person who has witnessed the event goes to Angela’s mother and tells her about the event that happened within the church. Thinking that this person is wild, she refuses to believe the story and tells the person to get out of her house. The person tells her to beware of Angela, and then runs out of the house whilst Angela’s mum is left bewildered.

Later her mum is sitting in her chair and waiting for Angela to arrive. The doorbell rings and her mum slowly approach the door, baring in mind what the witness has said about Angela. She slowly opens the door to find Angela with her head held down and her clothes ripped. She then goes to touch Angela’s head but Angela then quickly raises her head and her mother realises that she has glowing red eyes. Her mum runs away in fear but Angela catches up with her. She then stabs Angela in the stomach but Angela laughs and then takes the knife out showing that it has had no effect. The scene then ends with Angela going towards the camera but at an audience’s point of view coming towards the camera. 


Middle
The next morning, Leyla and Sammie arrive to Angela's house to pick her up for school. After ringing the doorbell and waiting for a couple of minutes they soon find that the door is open and decide to go in. They search around the house and fail to find Angela. As soon as they are about to leave, Angela jumps from nowhere and Leyla and Sammie scream. Angela laughs, greets her friends and they all go off to school.
 
After school, Freddie and Angela walk to Freddie's house to do their English project together. Soon after arriving at Freddie's house, Angela gets restless and tries to kiss Freddie. Freddie backs away and states that he does not want to kiss Angela and that she should leave. Angela gets angry and Freddie then states that he'll find another partner for the project. Angela then transforms from normal Angela in to evil Angela and then passes the curse onto Freddie. Angela leaves the house when she hears Freddie's parents arriving back to the house. Freddie's mum asks if he is okay and Freddie does not reply and instead passes the curse onto his parents. The scene ends with the family laughing manically.

Clips of Angela and Freddie killing and cursing people are then shown. Even a clip of Mason is seen with Angela stating that he'll have fun before giving killing him and sending him to hell. The whole of South East London are then told about the violent attacks through different media texts.

Sammie wonders why all of this is happening and decides to do some much needed research. We see clips of her reading books, searching the internet and find out what Angela is and how the curse is spreading. Suddenly, Angela calls Sammie and states that Sammie should stop what she is doing whilst Sammie is confused and then the two argue on the phone. Sammie throws the book and holds her head with her hands.

A couple of weeks later and Leyla and Sammie are sitting in Leyla's front room pondering about all the attacks. There is a new curfew of 5pm for children and 6pm for young adults and 7pm for adults in order to ensure everyone's safety. Sammie then states that no one is safe and the two then share stories about the kind of attacks they've heard. Suddenly they hear glass shattering from the other room and scream only to find out that Leyla's mum had accidentally dropped her glass of water and then begins to cry. The two girls comfort the mother until she is calm again. They smile and then Leyla's mother then goes upstairs to rest. Leyla states that she has become this way because of all the attacks and they return back to the front room. 

Ending

Sammie then gets a strange call from someone calling from unknown. She picks up and the person is frantically telling her to stay away from Angela as she is spreading the curse. The mysterious person is then revealed to be connected to Angela’s past. Sammie listens but then demands for evidence and the mysterious person tells her to look outside her window. Leyla hearing the conversation then looks outside the window to find the "evil Angela" grinning. Sammie drops the phone and the two decide to run upstairs into Leyla's room. Angela breaks down the door and stops Leyla from going up the stairs. Leyla is crying and shouts to Sammie to save herself. Sammie then tries to save Leyla but is flung to the dining room door. Leyla is then taken to the front room where Angela blocks the door. Leyla screams in agony whilst Angela laughs. Sammie screams and runs outside.

After giving Leyla the curse, Angela then tracks down Sammie and finds her at an abandoned house. Sammie screams and short dialogue is spoken between the two. There is then a final standoff between Angela and Sammie. Sammie then tries to run away but Angela drags her by feet to her previous position. Sammie frantically looks around to find something to kill Angela and comes across a knife. As soon as Angela tries to possess her, Sammie stabs Angela in the heart and Angela screams in agony. She says her last words then drops to the floor and returns back to the "normal" Angela. Sammie remembers that Angela had been possessed; this drives her to call an ambulance. Sammie then runs back to Leyla's house to find a "normal" Leyla. The scene is left with the two of them hugging.

The narrative ends with Angela missing and Sammie, Leyla and Freddie laying flowers for Mason.

First attempt trailer

This is the first attempt at creating our horror trailer using the clips filmed on deep-learning day. Admittedly the trailer looks pretty pants, but that's mainly to do with the facts that the shots we took were rather poor since we ran into a lot of errors when shooting and there were various things we hadn't considered at the time (such as: lighting and reflections, misplaced props etc). The trailer itself just barely outlines what our final trailer is going to be about since we have no dialogue and many of the key scenes needed in order to make the narrative come alive. However, when creating this video we did get a feel for how the editing works (e.g. adding music, shortening/lengthening shots, adding text into the timeline etc) and so that we know what to do once we start to film our final trailer and also how much seconds each shot in the trailer consists of (roughly 2 seconds per shot).  

First taste of filming

My group and I have recently had a taste of what it's going to be like when we actually starting filming our horror trailer. This was done by us using the equipment provided by the media department (e.g. video cameras and tripods) to go out and film some of the scenes used in our story boards (as well as experiment with other shots) just so that we could get a rough understanding of what the trailer could look like and the process of creating it. At first we were rather excited about this since we could get to grips with the technology and how to use it correctly so that we can capture the best shots possible. 

It turns out the filming was more difficult than we anticipated since even though we took a lot of shots and they weren't hard to film the actually end result didn't turn out nearly as good as we thought it would. There are many reasons for this but because of these reasons we now know what we have to avoid so that the trailer is of high quality. The first problem we had was lighting, since we were filming in the morning the lighting was far to bright and didn't give off a scary atmosphere, also when we used electronic lighting there were several instances where the reflections of the ones filming we seen in the windows and it look awful, granted we had a limited time to film the shots so we could shot at night but this was still a valid mistake and our teacher said that "you can use this bright lighting to your advantage since it can create very strong shadows". 

Another mistake we encounter is that a lot the shots consist of to many pans and shots that lasted far too long. The main problem with this is that in most films, pans are useful for establishing the scene/setting, however in a trailer this is not advisable since the shots only last about 2 seconds and there isn't much point of using pans since pans often last a rather long time and when we watched this we could see that it would make the trailer seem incredibly slow, plus often the pans were quite blurry since the camera was constantly moving and couldn't fully focus. To redeem this, our teacher advised us to use more still since we could cut away from different shots much easier and it is easier to focus on a single point which would get rid of blur problems we had with the panning.

The last problem we had with filming was the mise-en-scene. Now this was mainly to do with the fact that were had a limit time to film and couldn't use our desired locations but it still as issue I must address. The mise-en-scene in some scene didn't fit with what we were trying to establish since when taking the shot of the church a car was in the way which was rather distracting and looked out of place and also the shot where we were practicing the blood scene with the sink didn't fit together at all since the sink looked way to modern (since we used the facilities in this school for that since instead of inside of a church) and didn't look the least bit scary, also in that scene we stupidly left the fake blood tube on the side and it was caught in the camera (misplaced prop).

We also had a problem with playing back the record shots from our camera since the camera was automatically set to play back using AVC HD video program. In order to make it possible for use to view our videos on any computer we had to use Transcoding (basically means video conversion) to change the AVC HD settings to Microsoft AVI PAL in order for it took work. To do this we simply had to use Adobe media encoder to Transcode all of our shots in the require format so that it could play back on any computer. In then end even though we ran into a lot of errors and the shots didn't turn out how we wanted them to, we still got a good feel for and understanding of how to use the camera and take the appropriate shots thanks to the feed back we got from the teachers and observing what went wrong in our shots.

Story boarding process

Before starting to create our horror trailer my group and I had to first storyboard how the trailer would play out and how we would show of our film (e.g. showing off the best bits or key scenes). When deciding how the trailer should play out, we had to look at other horror trailers and how they are structured and the techniques they used, after observing various horror trailer (e.g. Grave Encounters, Woman in black, Jeepers creepers 3 etc) we could see that the majority of them used very fast edits with a large variety of shots (roughly 60 for just a minute and a half), fades and text appearing during action sequences. Also it was interesting to see that a lot of the time the trailer weren't shown in a linear fashion (they didn't tell the story from beginning to end) which was mainly because the trailer was to show off the best bits of the film. 


The first stage of creating the storyboards was to highlight the key scenes in our narrative that should be shown in our trailer since they are what we thought to be the best scene and would entice the audience to see the film. After selecting the 10 best scenes we had to decide how they should play out so that it follows the structure of most trailer (i.e showing the narrative in a way that gives the audience a general overview of the plot without giving to much away). This was one of the more difficult step through out the entire process since there were various different ways in which we could portray our narrative and everyone in the group had the own opinion/idea of how the trailer should be structured, plus even though we were heavily influenced by other horror trailers we didn't want to copy them completely and show a lack of originality.


The next step was to decide on each shot that would be used within out trailer. For this exercise the other members of my group were responsible for deciding what the should be in each shot as well as the music/dialogue, the camera movement/edit, and the description of each shot as well as the reason for this type of shot. My job was to draw out each shot based on the description given by my other team members, in total we came up with around 60 shots that would be used in the trailer though admittedly we have may have to create more in case those shots don't fill up the necessary time gap or just aren't enough to make the trailer seem compelling enough. 


Finally I had to draw out each shot. When creating the trailers I had to use quite a lot of template images from the internet in order to draw out how they should look since a lot of the characters movements were from different angles and it's difficult to draw these type of actions from memory. I got the template images from the internet and it made it much easier for me to draw the images accurately, also I had to go over all of my pencil drawings in black fine-liner pen so that I could scan them into the computer and save them as JPEG images so that we had back ups of the images just in case something happened to the originals. 

 

Deciding our Horror title

When creating the title for our horror film myself and the people I were working with came up with 10 potential names for the film. They are: 


. Perdition
. Damnation
. Condemnation
. Destruction
. Malediction
. Domination
. Possession
. Repression
. Profanity
. Absolution 


Each of these film titles have some connection to religion or religious connotations because the film is about devil-ish possession so these title seemed fitting. Also all the titles are simply one word and this is because we thought that one word titles were more powerful that longer ones since some of the scariest titles for horror films have been simply one word (e.g. Halloween, Scream, Psycho, Alien, Carrie etc). In order to decide on which title would be best we had to get audience feed back on what they thought was the best title, so we diced to only had out cards for people to tick, we also put the question on survey monkey to try and increase are overall feedback and have more reliable results (though admittedly I thought that absolution was the best title). 

After tallying up the results it turned out that the top 4 title that the audience chose were: Damnation, Condemnation, Domination and Perdition. In the end we deicide to go with damnation since it got the most votes and personally we thought it best suited the type of film were are going to make. So now that we have chosen a title we also have an easier time on choosing a tag lines but what's different about our tag line is that we can link it to both the meaning of the word to the meaning of the film since most tag lines reflect the film rather than the film title which happens a lot with horror films (e.g. Halloween's tag line is "the night HE came home"). 
 

What makes ‘Halloween 1978’ so scary?

After watching John Carpenter’s Halloween I have chosen it to be the second greatest horror film of all time (next to ‘Alien’) which is quite interesting as it’s a independent film and it has very little blood in it. There are many reasons as to why it is so effective as a horror film but there are three reasons in particular which make Halloween such a scary and effective horror film.

The first factor is the music. The score created for ‘Halloween’ works perfectly for creating tension and suspense throughout the film. This is because the main theme is used constantly through out the film whenever Michael Myers is near or present in the scene, this helps to build tension because the audience knows he’s there. The music itself is very creepy and gradually builds along with the tension it’s creating, also the second piece of music which is used when Michael attacks someone is incredibly creepy and uses high-pitched notes similar to Psycho’s famous ‘Psycho strings).

The second factor is the atmosphere. The film takes place on Halloween night which helps to set the dark and creepy mood of the film, and identify all the iconic imagery and themes associated with Halloween (e.g. jack ‘o’ lanterns, skeletons, death, blood etc). Also the location is rather scary but also rather different to most horror films because it takes place in a quiet neighbour hood which isn’t exactly isolated but it’s not exactly an open environment ether. The neighbour hood setting gives the film a strong sense of realism and helps the audience connect to the film more since they could live in a similar type of location.

The final factor which makes Halloween so scary is the killer ‘Michael Myers’. What makes him such a great killer is that not only is he a human killer (which makes the film seem more realistic), but also his lack of motives or goal which makes him a very unpredictable character. What’s really scary about Michael is firstly the fact that he appears various times with in the film yet we don’t know when he’s going to strike, for instance there is one scene where Michael is standing outside the door and Laurie’s friend has her back turned yet he doesn’t kill her until she gets in the car and he appears out of nowhere. Michael’s appearance is also rather menacing because the mask he wears has a completely blank expression and it makes him look like he has pitch black eyes. Another factor that makes Michael so scary is that he doesn’t say a word. This makes Michael seem like a silent killer and could strike at any time and the only noise he ever makes is his incredibly deep breathing.     

At the end of the day there are various reasons why Halloween is so scary but I believe these three factors are the most important and it's because of these elements that Halloween is considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever, since horror films are about scaring people and let's be honest "every one is entitled to one good scare".

Horror Movie Questionnaire results analysis

In this post I will be showing the result of the on-line questionnaire that I conducted and the result/answers from the questionnaire which can be used to construct the basic elements of my horror movie trailer (e.g. the type of genre, the scariest elements of horror etc) since it will feedback to the general opinions of those who watch horror films.


Question 1 

I was rather surprised with the response to this question since horror films are often viewed as being more male oriented type of film due to the often large amounts of violence and the very often used male gaze. This just goes to show that cinema is no longer a male oriented type of media which shows a great contrast between say 20-30 years ago to now. 












Question 2

I did rather suspect this type of answer since these people are now the right age to watch horror films where as they were previously to young. This helps to narrow down my target audience and understand how I can use various different types of media within the construction of my horror trailer and poster in order to connect more with this particular audience (e.g. posting both my trailer and poster on popular websites like Facebook and twitter etc). 








Question 3

These results show that horror movies aren't something that is view on a regular basis and is more of a cult sensation rather than mainstream viewing. Because of this I have to try and make my trailer stand out so that it can raise awareness about horror films in general but also so that it doesn't get over-shadowed by other horror films or films of other genres.












Question 4

These results have presented me with a very difficult decision since the top rated answers (psychopathic horror and ROM/COM's) are completely different types of film genre and I can try to meet them in the middle since psychopathic horror is often very serious were as ROM/COM's are just for laughs, the decision about which of these genres to use for my trailer will be determined based on the result that will follow. However what's interesting is to see that these days horror films are seen as both very serious but also very funny which is and odd contrast since horror films have got more realistic but also sillier. 


Question 5

I wasn't very surprised about this type of answer since the majority of horror films these days use this type of killer (e.g. paranormal activity, devil etc) which shows that audiences are more inclined to being scare of what cannot be seen or defined. This helps to understand what type of narrative my films show have since this type of killer often plays against the character within the films and makes them act strangely which means that the narrative and tone of this trailer will more than like be a serious one since it's not a case of escaping a killer, it's more about understand what's trying to kill them. 


Question 6

I honestly didn't know what to expect from this answer what scares people can vary greatly depending on the type of person. What these results show is that most people find the tension trumps other aspects of horror films since it helps to put the audience on edge and then when the scare arrives it has more of an impact (e.g. Halloween, pyscho etc). This means that in my trailer have to build the tension through out the viewing of the trailer and the end gives the audience the scary moment which show result in a more powerful scare and help to make my trailer stand out. 


Question 7

This answer seem the most plausible since the main purpose of a horror film is to scare people with the type of chills that are often felt in real life. This means that like with the previous question I have to try and make my trailer as scary as possible since it will entice the viewers and will again help my film to stand out  which will be achieved through the use on tension with the trailer. 












Question 8

This answer plays into the answer to question 6 and this basically means that I need to use the music within my trailer to add to the tension that I will be aiming to achieve. This can be done in various ways (e.g. psycho strings or being non-existent/silent) but I believe the best way to achieve this type of tension is to have the music gradually build as the trailer progress since it will help to tie into the speed of the trailer and it's a technique used within various horror films like Halloween and in my opinion it works very effectively. 




Question 9

This type of answer didn't strike me at all since the previous answers all tie into this type of narrative and often the scariest horror films are based on real life events or have realistic elements to them (e.g. Halloween, Texas chainsaw massacre, psycho etc). This shows that my trailer has to have a sense or realism to it since something supernatural or just plain strange may strike the audience as being out of place or just plain odd which will make it more than likely from them to nor take the trailer seriously.






Question 10 (Final question)  

The purpose of this question to see what I should avoid doing within my trailer in order to make the trailer seem like a serious films rather than a ROM/COM or horror parody. Over the top violence seem like the most likely answer since violence isn't something than is taken as seriously as it was in the past been we have been over exposed to it (relates to the desensitisation theory) and using to much violence can over-shadow the tension and atmosphere that the film has which often makes violent horror films less scary and more like thrillers instead of horror.