Genre Trials

Horror
On our first week of genre trials week we had the task to create a minute and a half of a horror scene.

Conventions

• Make decisions that you would never do e.g. investigating a scary noise.
• Dark lighting to make big shadows.
• Dark figures 
• We are interpellated to like the family and they normally start with a happy jolly scenes.
• Jump Scare
• Scary Children
• False escape.
• Eery music

Challenges

• Time Management, we all need to film at the same time.
• Filming at night, as it is a horror scene we needed to film late at night. As it is also summer it gets dark late so we had to film at 10/10:30.

After we made our film, we uploaded the clips onto serif movie maker, the programme we use to edit our clips. We then set out to find a suitable soundtrack for our film. We used Incompotech to get free copyright music. We listened to many soundtracks but in the end we found the right one, it was called 'Bump in the Night'. Its very eerie and has lots of loud jumps in it which we used to correspond with jumps in our film. It took a while to edit as we had lots of clips and had to use audio from one camera and overlap it with the picture from another. This took some time to get it to fit the times of the clips.

Overall I think that horror could be a good genre for our final piece as we have some good locations to film at.

Poster Analysis

This poster of Warner Bros, A Nightmare on Elm Street, conveys the horror genre in several ways. The serif font looks sharp and the colour red is a convention of horror films. The colour red is polysemic as it shows danger but also symbolises blood. Bothy of these ideas are iconic and stereotypical to horror films. There is also what seems to be blood splatters which shows death which is a typical trope of a horror film narrative. The dominant colour in the poster is orange. This is symbolic to danger and fire. These are typical; tropes of horror films.

The rule of thirds is used in this poster to draw attention to two main images. The top third is to show a shadowed figure. This gives the sense of mystery as we are not sure who he is. This figure has knives for fingers which gives him a scary theme and we are interpellated to fear him. He is stood behind a women which seems to be rising from a puddle of blood. The blood connotes a scary and gory theme. The proxemics between the shadowed figure and the women suggests the man is more powerful as he stands above her. The bottom third is used to draw attention to the name and slogan of the film. "He knows when you sleep" is a very scary and freaky slogan which might fear people. This would appeal to horror fans as most of them enjoy feeling scared. It also gives a hint as to what the narrative is about. At the bottom of the poster is a URL to a website about the film. This offers people to go to the website and learn more about the film and see some more clips of it.

The film is part of a franchise of horror films and is a remake of a classic film. This might make fans of the previous film to watch it as they have enjoyed the other films in the franchise. It offers some intertextual references as the remake will be similar to the old version.


Children Films
Our second film genre we studied was ch8ildren films. In particular we looked at stop motion films. We saw some examples like Fantastic Mr Fox, Coraline and the Lego movie. This gave us a variety of possible mediums to use. we noticed some conventions between the trailers and films we have seen.

Conventions

• Animals
• Appeals to both children and parents
• Different mediums like Clay, puppets and Lego
• Animal sidekicks
• Some mild adult humour

Challenges

• Not moving the scene, we found it very hard not to move the objects in the scene as we had to reach for things and often our arm would hit the house and move it.
• We also found it hard not to move the camera as the tripod was quite thin and unstable.

Our first clip we used Lego as our medium. We filmed a car crash scene. We used a soundtrack called Urban Gauntlet. This is a soundtrack using symbols to build tension and drums as the person is hit by the car. The symbol in the soundtrack Is as he leaves his house. We also used some sound effects of a car skid and crash as the man hits the car and a car alarm at the end.

Our second clip was using a rock and leaves. We tried to film the sunrise but the lighting wasn't very alike a sunrise.










Comedy
For our third week of genre trials we have been given the task of filming a short clip from a comedy. To be specific we had to make a mockumentary which is a documentary which is funny. Some examples are Bruno, Kenny and Its all Gone Pete Tong. These were films about ordinary people's lives going through day to day stuff. However there was funny elements about their life that made the films funny. For example Kenny was a portable toilet salesman this made him funny, Bruno was a stereotypical gay male character. To begin our film, we first had to come up with a funny storyline. We decided on a basketball team with a particular player that thinks he is really good and part of the team but is the opposite. We looked at trailers or segments of these examples and found the conventions of the mockumentary genre. This will help us make our short film look professional.




Conventions

• One main character
• Usually Male
• Handheld camera
• Diegetic sounds
• Naturally funny
• Day to day life
• Normal people
• Interviews

Our Film
For our film, we had to make a mockumentary. We took a lot of time trying to think of a narrative. We thought about filming teachers in class as they become angry at their students. However that became too complicated. We also spoke about work experience and filming someone at work. However we thought it would be impractical  and would not have been able to film as one of us worked.

In the end we decided to go with a sport theme. We are filming the life of a nerdy teenage boy on the school basketball team. However he thinks he is really good and fits in with the team but he doesn't. We will be filming him as he plays basketball and the teammates reaction. We will also interview him, the coach and also one of the better players on the team. We will use some of our friends as the teammates. Henry will be the main lead called Bobby. We will use one of the school P.E teachers as the coach and Me as one of the teammates being interviewed. The comedy will mostly be from Bobby and his antics and from the teammates reactions.

To conclude we found that making a comedy short film was the most difficult out of the three genres. We thought this as we found it hard to imagine what would make audiences laugh. However we did find it easy to organise the production of the film as we could do it in one of our free periods at school. We also managed to get some of our friends to act as the basketball team. I also think the structure of the film was similar to the examples of 'Kenny' and 'Bruno'. We included interviews with teammates and supporters which all shared a view on Bobby.

Media A2 Mockumentary from Will Thomas on Vimeo.