Our Complete Ident

Our Group Ident - Grey Moon Pictures

We collectively decided as a group to use this ident to represent us. We felt that the wolf symbolises alarm, as dogs commonly howl when something is wrong. The moon is also associated with the horror genre, as a large portion of horror films take place at night, with the moon representing the setting. We chose to change the colour of the moon from grey to red, as it is an intense colour that symbolises blood, and fits in well with the horror genre. Overall we feel that this ident looks professional, and delivers the message we're trying to send from the off.

Change of Direction

As a group, me Megan and Dan decided to re-shoot our production, as thanks to audience feedback, we were able to realise that our film was not up to our standards. Within the production, there was little dialogue, and the lighting was generally dark resulting in several fuzzy and unclear shots. This could have decreased the amount of marks rewarded, therefore we decided to start from scratch, which was risky, however has now paid off. Caitlin Wevill said the following:

'The production did not have an impact on me as an audience member, as I did not find it engaging and felt that it lacked a clear storyline. There are also some issues with the lighting and the way that certain shots appear to be at completely different times of the day. I felt that because of things like this, it will not have the effect on the audience that you were aiming for.' 

Lighting
Together, we felt that the lighting overall was too dark in some shots, which resulted in a low quality resolution, and therefore an inconsistent quality. The production was inconsistent from another point of view also, as our establishing shot was filmed in the daytime, whereas the rest of the production was set in the evening/night time. As well as this, the area gets considerably darker by the time our character gets downstairs, despite it realistically taking 20-30 seconds, in which it would never get dark so quickly. The following two pictures show you both the difference in time of day, and the second shows just how dark some shots were, to the point where you can't make out Caitlin's face.

Narrative & Lack of Dialogue One of our teachers brought up how the narrative was difficult to understand. This was worsened by the lack of dialogue in the production. For example, when Caitlin enters the caravan, she says nothing, and her reasoning for going there in the first place was made unclear due to her not speaking along with the fact that the shot of the caravan curtains closing was from afar. The following image explains this. This was the defining point in the narrative, therefore if an audience member missed it, they wouldn't understand what was happening throughout the remainder of the film. Everybody involved with the filming of our production agreed to restart our project, as it was made clear to us that it required a lot of work, but would be easier to start with a new plot rather than altering the old one.

Sound Manipulation

Once we had collated all the footage and ordered the shots chronologically onto IMovie, I decided to do some independent research into typical, suspenseful sounds that would enhance the climax of our production. Using 'FreeSound.Org', I explored the various, existing sounds that had associations with the words, eerie, ambience, suspesne, climactic. This allowed a narrow search of specific sounds that would be of benefit to our production and therefore, was more efficient. For example: I found audio files that replicated a tense, climactic-build up, with 'clang'-like sounds embedded into the audio which gave the desired effect we were after. The fact that this audio was 'reversed' allowed the climax to be magnified further and this contributed to the tense atmosphere.

Afterwards, we decreased our search variation and focussed on the particular diegetic elements on freesound that were of better quality, rather than using original audio from our footage. Examples of sounds we collated included an old-record player (to synchronise with our own vinyl), an opening of a door & the washing of hands. Sounds such as these allowed the disruption of the narrative to become even clearer, as oppose to the quiet, confusing sounds generated from the audio footage. In particular, the use of an old-record player emphasised the eerie quality to our piece and therefore, created the impression of terror through the use of an out-dated feature. Our decision to use this record-player was influenced by our previous research of Sinister - where we established that the opening whirring sound of the video-recorder created a supernatural feel to the introductory shots. Therefore, by using a similar prop with an overlay of a static vinyl-recorder, the prop became more stereotypical of the genre & added to the peculiar aspect of the sound.

We also used 'Garageband' to manipulate existing soundtracks in order to add a more surrealistic pitch, tone & rhythm to the audio. We started by searching on Youtube for tracks that had influenced us from the Fallout movie sequences. An example of the soundtrack used in the opening title sequence was called: "Ink Spots-Maybe" & "Ink Spots - I don't want to set the world on fire". We believed that these tracks generated an eerie, slow paced atmosphere to the narrative, although, "InkSpots-Maybe" was decided upon as the music that is able to be most manipulated. This is an essential part of the editing so that we are able to manipulate original sounds in order to eradicate the copyright restrictions. - Dan Neary