Decision on day of filming

Main brief recce pictures

It was my responsibility to provide the recce pictures as we plan on using my house as the setting. By using a house, we can convey the sense of realism, innocence and safety to the audience. However, the people in the house are not safe. The audience may feel scared and uncomfortable as they come to realise that there are large windows which can be easily smashed and people are able to see into the house.



By filming in a house, we are able to easily change lighting whereas outside can be difficult as the lighting can change quickly. We are also at an advantage because we do not have to worry about what the weather may be. If we were to be filming outside, we would have to avoid the days where it is due to rain to prevent the filming equipment being damaged.

The narrow hallway can portray the sense of being trapped with no where to escape. The living room is where the dead bodies will be as well as a shot of the clown being inside the house, standing amongst the bodies.

We decided to make use of a bedroom in which we will include shots as they are asleep and the mysterious clown person sneaking into the room. This will create suspense due to the characters being unaware which results in the audience being on the edge of their seats.

Clown makeup research

In order to know what makeup to do for Luke (our clown) in our opening, I thought that it would really benefit me and my group if I were to carry out clown makeup research.After observering many pictures of clowns, I noticed a few aspects which are very similar in all clowns.

My first observation was that they are always very pale or have white face paint all over the face. This can be frightening as it can portay the sense of death. I am yet to find a scary clown without a pale face.

Secondly, they always have a large smile drawn on their own mouths, generally in red. This exaggerated smile is seen as being quite creepy as their own mouths are generally frowning underneath. When people see a fake smile draw onto someones face, most people automatically link it to clowns. Also, due to this, we were able to create a title for our film.

Thirdly, some scary clowns tend to have their nose coloured in either red or black just like normal clowns. The audience can then be positive that it is a clown instead of them being confused as to what the person is trying to be.

All scary clowns have makeup around the eyes. This makeup on the person is normally either smudges or diamond shapes. The diamonds around the eyes can be seen as being scarier as people can link it to normal clowns they may be familiar with from their childhood. It also portrays animation due to the bright colours which may be used.

Due to the observations I have found, I will now gather the aspects together and take into consideration the eyes, nose, mouth and skin when i do this on our actor. I will also take into consideration which colours of makeup i shall use and what i can do to make it scary.

Main brief character analysis

It was Harriett's responsibility to create the character analysis for our main brief. Our main character is Luke Scrivener who will play the scary clown. We also have four extras to play dead.

Clown - We decided to use a clown as the murder due to the media on clowns going around the UK and the US. Our clown will be mysterious and come across as though he is mental. We will portray these characteristics without the clown having to speak. This can then put the audience on the edge of their seats due to the unknown.

Dead bodies - The dead bodies are a group of four friends who have gone to someones house but are then murdered by the clown. Our dead bodies consist of two boys and two girls in order to follow the stereotypical genders in horrors.

Main brief props and costumes

For the clown, we plan of the character to wear the clown mask, a black tracksuit and possibly gloves. The clowns murder weapon is going to be a large baseball bat which we plan on covering in fake blood to ensure the audience knows this is the murder weapon. 

There will be 'dead' bodies on the floor which will be wearing casual, everyday clothes. This helps to portray their innocence.

Main brief risk assessment

In our group, we came up with four main risks which are:

• Falling down stairs
• Injury from using a baseball bat
• Allergy to fake blood
• Tripping over the bodies

To avoid any of these from occurring, we will need to clear any objects which may be in the way or any objects that the actors may trip over. When using the baseball bat, we will need to work in a sensible and mature manner to prevent any injuries. Before using the fake blood, we plan on doing a patch test for each one to check if any of the actors may have a bad reaction to the substance. Lastly, we will need to be very aware of our surroundings in order to not trip over any of the actors playing dead. 

Smile script

Characters
Joseph Deighton: News reporter  (voice over clown footage)
Luke Scrivener: Clown 

(Starts out with Breaking news reports, clown outbreak across the UK. Archive footage appears with a Breaking News overlay.)

News reporter: Breaking news! There has been killer clown outbreak across the UK. Reports from   London to Glasgow have come out of clown sightings in local parks, alleys and some even going so far to break into houses. Petrified civilians have called the police but to no prevail. Out of a reported 156 clown sightings, 15 have been arrested and 7 seven charged. The police have urged civilians to stay out no later than 9:00pm for the time being, until the craze is over however this leaves the question on everyone’s mind. When will this end? 

(The newsreport stops and the diegetic sound of footsteps starts. Cuts to a clown breaking into a house faint use of soundtrack in the background [eerie tone]. The clown takes a few seconds to walk up to the door.The clown is holding a baseball bat.The clown hits the door with the baseball bat and the diegetic sound of the hitting can be heard along with a faint chuckle from the Clown. The clown walks into the house and switches off the light switch.  Screams in the background as a black screen appears for 8 second. As the lights come back on, a jump cut is used to show the clown standing over a pile of ‘smiling’ dead bodies. The soundtrack has become louder.The institution logo appears on screen and the word ‘presents’ appears on screen. The screen fades to black and the film logo ‘Smile appears on screen’)

Google form responses

We used google forms surveys to be able to see what our target audience our opening should be based on. From the results we have gathered from 14 different people, we decided to target males ages 15-18 as these had the highest percentages on the pie chart. Females are targeted as they also took part in completing our survey as well as people over the age of 18 years old.

Our third question on the survey was asking which genre to you prefer. The results came back and showed us that our idea of a psychological horror was successful as 78.6% said that they prefer psychological horrors. We also saw that 21.4% said that they prefer slasher films. Paranormal and action horror did not receive any votes. 

Our next question was to see if our idea of a scary psychological clown horror would scare our audience. Thankfully. the majority of our responses voted yes which was 71.4% of the results.

Unfortunately, the options we had asked for which setting would they find the most scary are all out of question due to the sudden outbreak of clowns. We have now decided that the idea place we should film would be in a house.

Target audience questionnaire

To find out more about our target audience, we created a questionnaire on google forms. This will fill us in on further information that we should then take into consideration which could then determine where and what we film.

Passive Audience Theories

Effects Theory:

The effects theory is a theory that suggests that for the audience to be passive, they must believe the text said in the films. It can have a negative effect on the audience as they are unable to control themselves from believing the text.

Hypodermic Needle:

This theory suggests that the audience are metaphorically injected with the information they receive from the text and instantly believe it. The media's message is like a drug to them.

My group have decided that we do not intend on using these theories in our opening due to the fact that we want our audience to look and discover hidden meanings in out dialogue, therefore we want them to be an active audience.

The Bobo doll experiment 

This experiment involved young children watching a video of an adult being violent towards a clown toy called the Bobo Doll. After watching the video, they were taken to a room with toys that they were not permitted to touch. Then they were moved to another room but this one had bobo dolls in it. The results gathered from this were that 88% of the children acted violently towards the doll and 8 months later, 40% of the children repeated the same violent behaviour. This experiment strongly supports the passive audience theories.

Active audience theories

Stuart Hall Reception Theory - Encoding and Decoding
Stuart Hall believes that many media texts and made and encoded with a hidden message. This text is encoded(added) by the producer based on the society they are living in at the present time. Then the audiences would then decode(understand) the hidden message. An issue from decoding the message is that not all individuals correctly understand the message being conveyed.

Stuart identified three different ways the message can be decoded. These are:

1. Dominant reading - where the audience decode the message the producer wanted them to and       agrees with it.
2. Negotiated reading - Where the audience partly agrees and disagrees with the message conveyed
3. Oppositional reading - Where the correct message is decoded but the audience disagrees due to political, cultural and ideological reasons


Uses and Gratifications Theory:
This theory was created by Blumer and Katz and they believe that the audience uses the text instead of the text using the audience. Therefore, the power lies with the audience and not with the producers and what message they want use to gain from the text. The audience simply use the text for their own gratification and pleasure. The audience may use the text to gratify needs for:
- Information
- Escapism
- Making comparisons
- Sexual stimulation

My group plan on using these audience theories in our own horror film as we can encode a message as to why the clown my be attacking which the audience can then decode for themselves. This would lead the audience to being passive as they are engaged with the film to work out the reasonings and explanations of events throughout.

Clown outbreak research

Events across America and the UK have occurred involving people dressing up as clowns and scaring innocent residents. Police across over 20 states have been recorded clown incidents from members of the public.

 As this is a popular topic on the news, we had to change our horror opening idea which has been difficult due to the short time space but fortunately, it has improved our narrative.

It is said that this outbreak was influenced by the film 'It' which in being remade and is planned on being released in 2017 in which Bill Skarsgard will play Pennywise, the clown. Images have been released promoting the new re-make but people are starting to believe the the fictional killer clown has influenced people around the world.

An incident that has occurred recently in Manchester was a mother in the car with her two children aged four and three years old, when a clown showed threatening behaviour as it climbed onto her car bonnet at the traffic lights. There are many more incidents that have been worse in which a resident was approached by a clown holding a hammer.







The picture on the right is an image taken by a man who's car was approached by two clowns who emerged from the bushes.

The police have warned residents that the clown craze will increase as we come closer to halloween.

We as a group have all agreed that we should film in a house and not in public as dressing up and threatening residents is illegal. Even though scaring locals is not our intentions, we can't help people seeing our clown and seeing it as a threat. Therefore, filming in a house is safer to the actor playing the clown.
The sudden outbreak of clowns has also improved our narrative as we are able to use real clips of clowns causing threat in public which we have turned into our own news report.

Main brief storyboard

Main brief planning

In our groups, we had all decided to create a psychological horror which involves a clown who is the murderer. This will begin with a series of short clips showing scary clowns chasing innocent people. We will present these short clips as a news report which would give the audience a sense of realism. 

We have decided to change our original pitch idea due to the sudden outbreak of clowns around America and the UK. Therefore it will be very difficult to film our opening in a forest or anywhere else in public as it may cause harm to our actors. Instead, we will be filming in a house to prevent any issues that may occur.

On our basic planning sheet, we have decided to hold auditions for the role of the clown as an additional part of the overall film. For this role, we have two potential candidates, Luke Scrivener and Joseph Deighton. For this opening, we also had to decide on what the target audience should be. Therefore, as a group, we decided that our film would be for ages around 15 -18 year olds . This is because we feel as though teenagers of this age range are most interested and enjoy the thrill of horrors. Furthermore, as fifteen year olds can watch it, we are able to include sexual references and activity, violence and strong language which all should not be in a great amount of detail.

Main brief responsibilities

To begin our planning for our main brief, we have given each member of the group a responsibility in order to complete this task in time and successfully.

Joe's role in the group is to ensure that the storyboard is completed to a high quality and to also write the screenplay and script for our opening. Callum is responsible for the out-takes and removing any shots we decide not to use as they will not be needed. He is also sharing responsibility over the script with Joe. Harriett's responsibility is to create a list of characters in our opening with an analysis of each one. She will also be sharing the role with myself and Callum, on making sure the production schedule is continuously being updated. My role in this group is to make a list of props and costumes which we will be using in our sequence. I will also be taking pictures of the recce as we plan on using my house as the setting. 

As a group, we will all take part in the overall narrative planning, sound research and any required re-filming if needed. These responsibilities require group discussions and decisions in order to create a successful opening to our horror film.

Focus group: Favourite horror film

To find out more about our target audience, we put together two groups, a female group and a male group both ages 16-17. In our groups, we discussed what films were our favourite and least favourite with a explantation as to why they think this. This can be beneficial to my own opening as this additional information would help us greatly when creating the narrative which audiences our age would thoroughly enjoy as this age group watch horrors the most.

YouGov - The Horror Channel

From using YouGov, I have carried out some secondary research which presents the type of audiences that enjoy 'The Horror Channel'. This British television channel presents horror films and series of all genres ranging from slasher to paranormal.
This research led me to gain an insight on the target audiences for horror films. The average age range for people who enjoy this channel are ages around 18-25 year olds. I am also able to see that mostly males watch horrors on this channel. This may be due to male interests being used in horrors such as violence. Whereas women come across and being less intrigued with the male interests. Lastly, I was able to see the films that these audiences enjoy to watch. From this, I am able to identify that these films are either horror or action-adventure films which also have a high chance of containing violent and graphic scenes.
For example, the horror 'Dawn of the Dead' is about a zombie apocalypse which included many violent and gory scenes. In another film genre, the action-adventure film, 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' also contains violence as fight scenes and deaths are included.
Therefore, from observing this table, horror audiences seem to be largely interested by the horror conventions, such as gore and jumpscares, more than any other genre. Furthermore, this will help me with my own horror opening as I can include many horror conventions to ensure that I target the correct audience.

YouGov profiles

Purge Anarchy

Scream

People who enjoy going to the cinema

These target audience YouGov profiles for both, 'The Purge' and 'Scream' help me realise that male and female genders can like one horror film more than the opposite sex. It also informed me that the age bracket for people who enjoy these films are 25-39 years olds. However, the age group of people who enjoy going to the cinema is 18-25 year olds. Therefore, our target audience also targets 18 years olds as we feel as though from these profiles that they would watch and distribute our film most. Also by carrying out this research, we gained the idea of distributing our film to many different cinemas. Both film profiles I have researched also have hobbies based around the media, therefore, this is beneficial when we would be in need of young adults to distribute our film.

Pitch questions and answers

As a group, we created a pitch with included the plot, character information, who we wish to work in synergy with, recce pictures, target audience and certification.  

After sharing our work with the class, we then had to answer a few questions our classmates wanted us to answer. We used an element of google slides in order of them to be able to ask the questions online and anonymously.




Questions 

1. If your demographic age group is 15-18 your cutting out the 19-25 year old's, wouldn't you rather have a wider age range to attract more people ?
2. In synergy to produce or to distribute the film?
3. This sounds like a scene from a film maybe half way through, how are you going to make it clear it is an opening?

Answers

1. Yes, we wish to have a wide range of viewers enjoying this film, however, we chose 15-18 age range to base an age certification on it. From having this certification, it shows that only 15 year olds and over can watch this film. As it is a 15, we are able to show violence and gore but not in great detail.
2. Miramax have experience producing and distributing films therefore, if we work with this company, we are able to do both. By working with this institution, we are able to create good advertising as well and producing as they have more experience.
3. In order to ensure the audience is aware that it is an opening, we decided to make it appear as though the scene was just a bad dream. However, when she walks to the bathroom to rinse her face, the audience can see a red balloon floating past. This then gives the audience the idea that the horror is only just beginning.

Pitch

Ages of people who go to the cinema

This graph contains secondary data which shows information on the percentage of different age groups that go to the cinema during an 11 year period. From this line graph, it shows ages 15-24 have the highest perentage from 2003 to 2014, therefore go to the cinema the most. However, this percentage varies due this period. For exampe, in 2003 it was arund 30% but fell in 2004 to around 26.5%. It continued to vary with a peak of around 35% in 2011.


In contrast ages 7-14 had a lower percentage. For example, in 2003 12.4% of children went to the cinema, however, the percentage increased to 17.8% in 2004. The percentage had continued to vary but up to 2011, it was 14.6%.


These variations could depend on the type of films that were released that year. There is evidence for this due to the percentage of 7-14 year olds increasing at the same time the percentage for 15-24 years olds is decreasing from 2003-4.


Due to the largest audience being teenagers and young adults, this shows us that they have the biggest interests within media. We are able to agree with this data due to this age group being known as being at their most sociable with friends and going on dates, therefore they could go to the cinema.


This secondary information has helped me with my own opening as it has ensyred me to target my film for this age range. I could do this by making them feel as though they can relate to this film through different ways such as making using teenage characters in the film.

Narrative structure: Vladimir Propp's Narrative theory

Who was Vladamir Propp?

He was a literary critic who founded the idea that a certain type of character was to be used in a narrative structure.

He believed that in a narrative there are eight different character types. These are:

- The villain

- The helper (aids the hero during or after their mission)

- The dispatcher (sends hero on a mission)

- The princess or prize

- Her father - (Rewards hero for his effort)

- The doner (someone who provides an essential objects) 

- False hero

- Hero/Victim