Storyline for our Short Film!

For a while now myself and the group have been discussing narrative for our short film. We are still waiting for a response from the cinema but will hopefully be arranging a meeting with the cinema owners shortly, ideally in the next week to discuss further plans and times etc. However, in the meantime we have been brainstorming different ideas to present to them so that we appear more professional and I think that we have finally created a strong narrative. Below are some of the notes we brainstormed in class...

Start:

The start of our short film could begin with old styled black and white footage of the cinema in the 50's, showing a group of teenagers going in there to enjoy a film. News paper clippings could then come flying onto the screen showing how the group of young teens never came out of the cinema and went missing ever since. A black screen could then appear saying that the case was suspiciously closed and now in 2013 it marks the 50th Anniversary.

Middle:

Back to the present day, a young girl becomes very interested in the case and wants to find out more. She decides to go to the cinema with her friend with her hand-held camera to question the cinema owner and find out more. Everything looks normal and she meets a man who claims to own the cinema. After asking the cinema owner what happened the day the teens went missing he begins to tell stories about the old Gaol that once stood there before his cinema. He thinks that the prisoners of the Gaol still walk the screening room and he believes that the paranormal were responsible for the missing teens. The young girl begins to believe what he is saying especially after unusual things happening during her tour around the cinema.

End:

The young girl begins to explore on her own and finds a golden watch with one of the teenagers names carved into the back of it lying in the owners office. She immediately begins to panic and finds herself running out of the cinema. She contacts the police and urges them to come back to the cinema with her and arrest this owner for being responsible for the missing teens. When they arrive at the cinema there is nothing there but an abandoned building. Nobody was in there. Including the 'owner.' She couldn't understand what had happened and it wasn't until later that night when she was searching for answers on the Internet she stumbles across a website with the history of the cinema. There she sees the cinema owners face but there he wasn't a cinema owner. He was a prisoner of the Gaol who had killed himself in his cell before the teens even went missing. The last shot could show the young girls face staring blankly at the screen. The audience are left with many questions and it's up to them to form their own answers.

Audience Theorists.

Today I have been looking deeply into Audiences relating to what scares them and why. This led me onto researching some theorists on Audience. Here is what I have found...

The Hypodermic Needle Model

This sounded very complicated to me but it is actually very simple. Basically, it suggests that an audience passively receives information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to challenge the data that they have been given.

The theory suggests that as an audience, we are passive and are manipulated by the creators of media texts and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media makers.

My opinions: In my previous Blog I posted a video of a thriller film being watched by a large audience in the cinema, when you watch each individual carefully you can see that they all have very similar reactions to each other of the movie, for example, they all shriek at the exact same time, pull their bodies back  simultaneously when they believe something is about to happen. Why is this? They look as if these reactions have been programmed into them and I believe that the media have almost trained them to be scared at the parts in the movie that they say they should be scared at. It is quite a scary thing in itself when you think about it.

However, another thing  that I noticed when watching their reactions, is that some individuals would turn to their friend or partner to see what their reactions are. Could this mean that, yes, we are influenced by the media and what they inject into us but could the power of our peers opinions have a stronger influence? Then I found this theory...

The Two-step Flow of Communication Theory

This theory believes that even though the media had power to change people's minds, this could be
re-affected by the way in which this information was discussed by influential people, such as Party Leaders.

I think that this theory talks a lot of sense, however I believe that it doesn't just have to be high, influential people to change your opinion on the media, it could be whoever is influential to you. That could be your parents, family, friend's etc..

I also believe that in this day and age where social media and voicing your opinions online is a huge thing, the media doesn't necessarily shape our opinions anymore and were not as passive as we once possibly were. We are now heavily influenced by our friends comments on Facebook and celebrities Tweets, basically we all shape each others opinions now. There is no longer a selected group of people (the media) that single handedly have control.

This is also quite a shocking realisation but this could be used to our advantage when creating our short film. Especially because we want to take the post-modernism, viral route to creating our film, we can use the concept that society influences each other through the Internet to our advantage. For example, we can try and make people believe what we want, this could be through posting different facts about the cinema, making out that new information has just been released, to even creating our own newspaper articles pretending that a  story relating to the cinema has just been discovered. The possibilities are endless, we now need to take action and put these ideas to use and hopefully make at least one person believe in what we are saying! This would then disprove both of the theories and help people realise that we are now all influential people, who have control over not only our own opinions but others too!

Film ideas.

Whilst doing some research today I found a clip on YouTube. The clip showed an audience at the cinema watching Paranormal Activity 2 and filmed their reactions to the scary parts in the film. The clip was shot in night time vision which instantly made it creepy to watch! They have even managed to make their reactions to the film very tense to watch and very scary. I thought that this was extremely clever and made me want to go and watch the film myself!

 

 

 

This could be a great idea to promote our short film and we could even use some of the shots of the audience's reactions on our ancillary tasks, such as the poster or the magazine article, to make people want to go and experience the thrill of the film themselves...

 

The glow in the dark effect is very easy to create and instantly makes footage have more tension and ambiguity. I will show this clip to the group and get their opinions, I hope we can use this research and idea and develop it ourselves to make something extremely scary but exciting! 

Our Target Audience.

Our group has been thinking carefully about what type of people we will be aiming our media product to. After researching different Thriller/Mocumentary (Fake Documentary) style films and their target audience, here is what we found:

Cloverfield: 15-25 students

The Blair Witch Project: Both male and female 17-30 years old

Paranormal Activity: 15-30 years old both male and female

So, after this research we came to a conclusion that our audience would be quite wide but mainly start at the age of 15. We found that the reasoning behind this is that most of these films used viral marketing, especially social media to build the hype and the age that most use the internet is the younger generation, starting from 15 years old. We definitely want to build hype with our short film and use sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build parody profiles etc. to create an exciting buzz leading up to our release. We decided that our Target Audience should be both male and female from 15-40 years old. We think that a slight older age group would still enjoy our short film because of the history of the cinema that we will incorporate into the story line; I think that they would be intrigued by this and the younger generation would be most interested in the hype of the film and the scare factor.

Age Classification

All of the films above are obviously suitable for a 15- year old to watch, meaning that there is no gore or severe explicit content. They have still manged to create a scare without this and that is what we also aim to do. Sometimes the less obvious and smaller the event the scarier it becomes. Below is a link to the BBFC website for film classification, this is so that we can make sure what we can and can't include in our film and further our understanding of what age we should classify our film at. At the moment I believe we will use a 15 certificate.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/what-classification/15




after making our decision on our target audience, we wanted to start to reach out to them and find out their opinions and most importantly what makes them scared! I created a short questionnaire on fears and emailed it out to our target audience so that we could get a better understanding of what to include in our film. Below are the questions we asked in the questionnaire:

Age:                Gender:

1.      Which one of the below are you most scared of? (Please write Yes beside your choice)

a)      The dark

b)      The Supernatural (ghosts)

c)      Aliens

d)      Criminals (Murderer etc)

2.      Could you explain the reason you are scared of the option you chose?

3.      In a dark situation what is the main thing you would be scared of happening?

4.      Are you more likely to watch a horror film that is, (Please write  yes beside your choice)

a)      Based on a real life event

or

b)      A work of fiction

 

5.      Do you find yourself more jumpy in,

a)      The day

or

b)      The night

 

6.      Before something jumpy happens in a film do you find yourself more scared when there is a soundtrack building the tension or complete silence?

a)      Soundtrack

b)      Silence

We have already received a few replies but we are still collecting the information. Once we have the information (ideally the end of next week) we can organise the results into a table and analyse our findings. :)