Main Charachter Profile

Our opening scene is going to be based on one main character whom the storyline and plot is going to be based around. The main character is going to be female and acted out by the actress: Victoria Thurston.

Another anomalous character may be used in our opening scene. This character would be male and be portrayed as the killer to the audience. His face would not be seen and he would be a complete mystery to the audience, therefore we dont really need to develop this character in more depth.

We decided that a female main character would be best for our storyline and plot. This is because we felt that females are stereotypically portrayed as the victim's in horror films. This would enable us to easily mislead an audience in our opening scene, creating a bigger impact for the climax later on in the film where an audience will find out the truth; that the main character was the killer all along.

In our initial ideas we discussed suitable actresses that we thought we be able to successfully act the role out for our main character. We decided that Vicky was the best suited actress for the part. This is because she is a very talented, experienced actress, who is a quick learner, takes good direction and is extremely versatile. Versatility is an important asset for our actress to posses as our main character has a split personality disorder and therefore the actress has to convey two very different people on screen. Vicky is also visually perfect for our role, who looks good on camera, that an audience consisting of both genders will easily relate to and want to watch.

We felt as a group that we needed to create a character profile for the main character whom Vicky will be playing. This is so we can create a fully crafted, three dimensional character in order for Vicky to have a better understanding of the role she is going to be acting out. In theory we are hoping this will produce a more realistic, believable character on screen that an audience can build a close relationship to, sympathising with thje character and therefore interacting with the film more. We hope that this chemistry between an audience and the main character will produce a more successful opening scene as ther audience will interact more with the main character, letting their guard down and making it easier to create atmosphere and tension that relates to the nature of our opening scene.

Below is a simple character profile that we have produced. There is a picture of the actress in the middle so you can visualise what the character is going to look like as well as being able to understand some of the main characters personality.

The Film Decision - Initial Ideas

Below is a short audio clip which involves all three member of my group discussing our initial ideas for the opening scene we are going to produce.

**VIDEO GOES HERE**

Initial Ideas Summary Document:

Below is a mind map, which consists of the summarised version of our initial ideas that you can hear above in our group audio clip.

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Analysis of Audience Research Questions and Results

Below is my analysis of my audience research questionnaire, this is important for our decisions of our upcoming filming and ideas as this will be vital for our decisions, although i may not directly use all of these results as my two other group members are creating a questionnaire also so they may want to use the information they have extracted from the public.

Question One Results - What age group are you?

This was a basic question to show what age the people completing the survey was, it worked out well as at least one person had completed the survey from each age group, even one from a 62+ year old which i was pleased about as the survey was handed out to an near equal age range of people, also this proves that the age range of my genre should probably be based around the age of a 16 year old as these were the people who seemed most keen, although I could provide entertainment to an older audience.

Question Two Results - On a beginning of a film how would you like the starting credits and titles to be shown?

The results for this were varied, I can disregard the last option 'In short bursts with lots of texts' as this only scored 12% and I see yes this is important but the other two results scored more in percentages. Broken up over a period of time (title, action, title, action) scored the most winning 19 votes (46.3%) and the next was 'All Shown At Once' that scored (41.5%), this has given me evidence to prove that in the film i am making that definitely it should be 'title, action, title, action...' as it was the most popular and it was the idea me and my group had so that we can convey good filming techniques in a swift way where we can change the frames after each piece of text.

This question I thought was vital to ask so it gave me and my group information that we can know how we should create the first scene, this is where 'The Active Audiece' comes into play, because this is a decoding process going on among the active audience who are not just using media for gratification purposes, and they are actively accepting and refining parts of media and breaking it down and looking at the signs inside the text, this is why this question was important because it shows how much the signs in film first scenes and all media influences how you interpret it.

Question Three Results - On a beginning of film in the titles what colour do you think would compliment a black background? (You may select more than one answer)

White clearly won this as its percentage was 75.6% (31 people), this is a clear
choice and I am happy that white will be used in the titles as over three quarters have agreed that it should be used as a colour for text.

AlthoughHayden Simmons a group member on the other hand had the results that red would look most effective on a black background, this diversity has created a dilemma as we now need to decide what colour we will chose, or if it will be a range, this we plan to talk and debate when we have a conversation about our initial ideas.

The fact this differ in results came up is generally because it shows we had different people complete our questionnaires and that people have different modes of address, this is when media is created in a way that it is designed for a specific person or group (age,sex etc..) and over the period of the peoples life who have answered the questionnaires obviously they have differeny modes of address and they interpret some things differently, on the other hand it suggests that white and red is everyone's average colour they associate titles for a horror to be.

Question Four Results - On a the title and credits of a film what type of sound would you prefer?

I have decided looking at the results that the leading result should be used (a full length consistent song) as this I think adds depth to the film as it gives the audience something to hear, using these results we have decided that we will use a song in our opening scene, as this questionnaire and another from my group (Hayden Simmons and Michayla Oglesby) so we decided that having a song would be very relevant and would be good for the audience.

Question Five Results - Do you think looking at the image of nine frames of the film Contact that it was an effective first scene?

For this question I have decided just to discount the eight people who posted 'I Don't Know' and looked at the rest of the results, it is a clear 'Yes' answer and I believe that knowing this has pleased me as now I can look at my deconstruction of the first scene and suggest to use ideas from this film as obviously this worked.

Question Six Results - In Horror films what type of techniques do you like being used to keep you entertained? (ways to keep you tense and hopefully scared)

The results for this were mixed as some said mainly either 'What we hear but cannot see' and 'What we see but the character cannot', but this has given me ideas for our groups own production of the first scene as we think now an aspect like these would be very relevant for the context and would work well.

Question Seven Results (Actual text written by the people who completed questionnaire) - For the question above (In Horror films what type of techniques do you like being used to keep you entertained?) please can you explain your reasons

This was a good question to end on I thought, this was because I had asked many closed multiple choice questions so this gave the audience a chance to write in detail an explanation without asking them too much and boring them with too lengthy questions.

Although this was a good question the outcome of asking this was varied, some didn't do it what I would say there best efforts but i received very relevant comments such as 'Its scary and builds up tension for you and the character' and 'Its builds up suspense when you can see the character from a distance and it appears that you are seeing them from another persons viewpoint as if they are watching or stalking them' 'You are scared for the characters and want to know what is to happen to them and if they will realise what you can see, it can be a tense nerve racking experience!'.

This last question has hints to prove that the Cultivation Theory is in actually a real working thing, because comments such as '..because it's cool that way' and 'I like HORROR' seem to show the trend in that there previous times watching Horror genre films have made them that the Horror element does not have as big effect on them as it would about people twenty years ago people in the same situation. The Horror audience on a whole now seem to be a result of less effect when watching violence, gory and 'scary' scenes. Also it shows in twinned with the Cultivation theory aspects of Desensitisation as people are being exposed to explicit things more and more so they become less sensitive, also it gives the impression of things being filmed to be reflected with real things, for example all around the worlds people thing and associate things with what they have seen on television and now stereotype the people or objects as having certain traits, and this is only good if they are correct, but lots of the time they are not. Also on the good side of Desensitisation it allows you to raise questions about the amount of representations we should be witnessing.

Coursework Update

I feel the course is going well and i am up to date with my work and it is to a good quality, we are now planning things such as the storyboard and places to film the first scene, we all have vary varied ideas which cause a good conflict that allows us to argue our points so generally the best idea wins and we talk about how to develop that.

I will soon be releasing a post about out plot, synopsis, storyboard and explain how we came across the idea as we recorded one of our sessions talking about what to do in our scene.

The course I enjoy at the moment and it allows me to experiment with my skills with technology and try new and different things, using this synergy allows me to combine many aspects of media Incorporated together.

Audience Research Questionnaire Results

Below are the results to my audience research questionnaire. I think it has been very successful as many people have completed the survey and it has given me valuable insight towards the film me and my group are producing.

I retrieved the results using a number of ways to obtain my targets to complete the audience; I posted on my Facebook post asking people to complete the questionnaire and also asked an older person (45 years old) to post the same on hers so I had a range of ages, this worked very well and looking at the many results I have many different age ranges.

Also I created a mass email that was sent to people in my sixth form, some people saw this and completed the questionnaire which is also a positive contribution.

Question one to seven are all closed multiple choice questions, I created this in this way as then you can obtain answers that you can analyse easy and put into a table like i have done rather than just show all different vary varied results. On the other hand i left Question seven as a open ended question so people can write there answers for question six, i thought having one at the end for detail would be effective as you could collate what they really liked about Horror techniques.

Question One Results - What age group are you?

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Question Two Results - On a beginning of a film how would you like the starting credits and titles to be shown?

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Question Three Results - On a beginning of film in the titles what colour do you think would compliment a black background? (You may select more than one answer)

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Question Four Results - On a the title and credits of a film what type of sound would you prefer?

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Question Five Results - Do you think looking at the image of nine frames of the film Contact that it was an effective first scene?

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Question Six Results - In Horror films what type of techniques do you like being used to keep you entertained? (ways to keep you tense and hopefully scared)

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Question Seven Results (Actual text written by the people who completed questionnaire) - For the question above (In Horror films what type of techniques do you like being used to keep you entertained?) please can you explain your reasons

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Some of the text that was completed by people are irrelevant and do not need to be placed but i kept everything obtained there for argument sake so i can say it was not biased in any way and the answers that have key information is raw data from the actual people completing the questionnaire.

Now I have realised that after evaluating the questionnaire many people have decided to view and answer my Audience Research Questionnaire, I have fifth teen more people completed this survey, although it would have been good to analyse these I set a date for when I was to collect my responses. So The results wasn't just discarded as people used there time and effort to I did view this and use the valuable answers for the initial ideas.

Filming Practice

Below is a video of our groups video practice we created around our school, it shows various shots and techniques used in filming. We thought this was beneficial for our learning of different shots angles and techniques, this additional practice added with the preliminary task filming has improved all of our skills vastly. I also have improved techniques i did not used to think about, such as using a tripod instead of a hand to improve the shaking quality.

Below is the updated filming camera footage that was cropped and has had titles added, I thought it was a good idea to add the original and updated version to show a few of the techniques i have used in Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0. I have learnt many more techniques and this will be shown in another post detailing my skills in video and software editing skills.

Practice Camera Angles from Zak Wattiez on Vimeo.

Audience Research Questionnaire

Click here and you will be directed to my questionnaire

I created my questionnaire on SurveyMonkey this way because i thought it was an effective way to create it, this is because the questions are easy and look good enough to be presented to some target audience, I now will send my questionnaire to many people and will post the link to it on things such as Facebook as then lots of my friends and my friends friends can view and complete the survey.