My final reflection will be a round up of all my thoughts on this project, where I think I could have done better, and where I think I excelled. I wanted to do this section by section to keep this blog clear and organised and to discuss each topic in more detail. I will also be linking the blogs I am referring to throughout, this will help link my reflections to the initial blogs of ideas, research and planning. This blog will be about the research, idea development and planning I did for this project and then I will do another final reflection about the practical skills, audience reaction and overall conclusion.

Intentions: My intentions for this project weren’t initially what my project ended up becoming, I initially was going to do a re-make of last years FMP, a horror film trailer and social media promotion campaign. Although I did not end up doing this after all, my final project still had some similarities to this initial idea, for example, the genre, the style and the platform. Soon into my research and idea developing, I decided I wanted to create a short film on its own rather than a trailer along with a campaign that i initially wanted to create.

Developing Idea & Research: First, I wanted to discuss this initial idea a little more and which aspect of this idea I ended up using in my final work and which aspects I completely abandoned. Looking back at my very first blog, I mentioned that I wanted to focus mainly on the 7 deadly sins and their punishments; I wanted to focus on this as the horror campaigns main topic as I felt it would be an easier subject to create an understandable storyline from. I very soon abandoned the idea of using seven deadly sins, as I remember feeling that I couldn’t single handedly create all the very detailed special effects and practical effects to convey the extremely gory punishments for all these sins.

The next stage of developing my idea was looking into Satanism, I spent a lot of time looking into, researching, and planning my project around the idea of Satanism. At this point in time though, I was still planning on creating a trailer and social media campaign, and this didn’t change until quite far into my researching stage. I first mentioned my idea to use the subject of Satanism in my plot in a blog about starting my project, at which point I was planning on making my horror trailer very gory and so wanted to incorporate a lot of SFX. To make this very gory and slasher-like, I decided the best way to do this while still focusing on Satanism would be through the topic of rituals and human sacrifice. I, of course, ended up changing this idea and, although still focusing on Satanism, I wanted to work more on the ‘supernatural’ sub genre than the ‘slasher’ sub genre.

I ended up doing a lot of research into Satanism, which then translated into a lot of my planning and production too, the majority of my research around satanism was from one single book, The Satanic Scriptures. I felt it was a good choice to use a book like this for my research as it was written by a member of the Church of Satan and so is very reputable in terms of what Satanism is and what they worship. I also used this book to look into parts of the religion such as rituals and symbols etc. This book helped my develop my ideas massively, as I learnt a lot about what Satanism actually is and that I wanted to focus on the more ‘fictionalised’ version of Satanism. In a blog titled “what is satanism” I said “Of course I have read some horrific things about many satanic groups – most of which aren’t true anyway, for example the “baby-eating” cult in London – however, through research I find that their fundamental values and the bases of the religion itself is really not what we see portrayed through thee media and in the horror genre specifically.”

By the time of deciding I was going to focus on the more trivialised version of Satanism, I had also already decided that my project would no longer be a trailer and campaign but instead would be a short horror film. I wrote about why I was changing my idea to a short film in a blog titled “change in direction“, in this blog I said, “I was also very interested in the idea of cults and rituals to help build my story line and plot, however since starting my research and reading into and about the Church of Satan and satanic cults I have come to realise the ‘torture-porn’ I was planning on may not be necessary – although I will still do some research into Saw from an SFX point of view, I do not plan to make my work as gory as I had initially intended.”

Although I decided to focus more on the trivialised and fictional version of Satanism, I still used this book to add in some aspects of realism, for example, using it to help decide on an idea for a symbol and giving my research a starting point with looking into rituals and deciding how I wanted mine to looks, as well as wether I would direct my ritual scene based off of a real ritual or just fictional.

My idea for this project started properly forming once I had thought more about what I actually wanted the plot to be, since I wanted to focus quite heavily on my films story line, the plot was something I wanted to start considering quite early on in my research and planning stages. I went back and added to and changed the plot quite a few times during the research and planning stages of this project as I wanted to make sure I could see a clear growth of my idea. In this first blog about my plot ideas, I started exploring the idea of using nightmares or night terrors to help structure my story: “I have also decided that I would like to base the structure of my short film around the idea of nightmares and/or night terrors as I think this may be a great way of helping build a plot/storyline.”

Through more research into other films, topics and ideas, I developed my idea from what once was a ‘torture-porn’ film trailer and campaign to a supernatural and phycological short horror film. From deciding roughly what I wanted my plot to be and what sub-genres I would be focusing on most, I then felt I could move on to looking and researching into other films of similar sub-genres as well as some short horror films to get an idea of subject matter, style and length, as well as many more technical aspects like lighting and framing inspiration. I looked into many films such as “As Above So Below”, “Saw” and “Hereditary” for inspiration on everything from shot framing to special effects makeup, as well as looking into other films and developing my idea from them, I also continued to research and gather ideas from Satanism. For example, I used the Satanic Aesthetics chapter in the book I mentioned earlier to develop my ideas on how I wanted my film to look and the overall style and subject treatment of Satanism, this also lead to some research into surrealism to, again, develop my idea and to get more prepared for my planning.

Once I was well into my research and almost at my planning stages, I realised I would need something to tie in the nightmare aspect into the film, so I decided to look into subjects like Tarot Cards and Ouija Boards to pad out my plot and to help make a clear and coherent storyline. Once doing research into that I was ready to get onto the official planning of my short films storyline, I think my research into so many different topics and subjects definitely helped me create the final storyline and plot that I am very proud and happy of.

Audience: I also did quite a bit of primary research into the horror demographic and therefor my target audience, I wanted to show my awareness of the genre as well as showing that I understand who I am going to be targeting with my film. I think by understanding the genre I am working within as well as showing my knowledge and previous work within the genre really helped me with the planning and evaluation parts of this project. I used a bit of previous work I did during this course for some of my contextual research, the project before this one started was an essay about horror and the popularity of this genre and what makes it up. I used this essay as contextual research as well as to discuss my target audience.

As well as using this essay to get more insight about my demographic, I also did some primary research and sent out a small questionnaire to my classmates and to friends and family on Facebook, I did this to get some statistics to back up who I already thought/knew to be the target audience of horror. This I think, again, helps prove and further my understanding of the genre and who I am marketing towards and who I will be getting feedback from. Getting my target audience stats also helped me decide where to post my final project and where would get best engagement with my audience.

Pre-Production, Planning & Organising: Although planning, pre-production and organisation is obviously a very important and ‘make or break’ part of my project, most of what I planned wouldn’t have been thought of without the amount of research into different subjects I did. Much of my planning was pretty much just putting most of what I had already talked about in my blogs into a more professional and official document or action. There were many different stages of planning I went through, most of which was just in my head while researching and gathering ideas and that eventually became my final plot and storyline, shown in my treatment. However other aspects needed some more detailed and professional planning, such as getting my locations sorted and putting together a shot list, script and storyboard.

First I wanted to discuss the planning I did around getting a location for this film, part of this was easy as I was always planning on filming 3 out of 4 scenes at my own house so there was barley any prior planning needed for this other than a location recce and sorting out props etc. However, my location for my nightmare sequence was incredibly hard and frustrating to organise, granted I could have always been a little more pro active but never-the-less it still took a lot more planning that I had thought it would. Initially, I contacted a historic building that parts of had been abandoned and left alone, after getting in contact with them, who didn’t reply for a week or two at least, they explained that there was construction going on at the site and so there wasn’t really an option for me to film in this. That was fine, so I then did a little more research into other places locally that I would be able to film in, no luck there either, so I then contacted the local council thinking they would know about the buildings in the area and who I would have to contact for permission, no reply for them either, sadly. Finally, a family friend got in touch after talking to my mum about my project, and offered the use of a barn at the back of a old building up in Cumbria, and it was perfect and is what I ended up using as my location for that nightmare scene.

Next, I started tying up loose ends on my films story, this meant writing a synopsis (linked earlier in this blog) for the film and from there creating my script and shot list. I wanted my story to be told through the visuals rather than a dialog, and so, in order to tell the story this way, I wanted to plan my shot list and script first before planning to much else so that I could start seeing everything come together and get an idea of how my final film would look. As well as the visual spect of my film I planned other aspects such as the title of my film and some of the props and SFX, including the symbol carved onto my actors skin and its relevance to my story.

Since I did individual blogs on all my separate planning documents, I don’t feel there’s much else to talk about here other than how I feel they contributed to the overall success and finalisation of my short film. A lot of my planning and research kind of merged into one another in terms of where I was getting inspiration and when I was applying it to the planning and production of my project. I am especially happy that I spent the time I did focusing on the story of y film and how I wanted to portray that through the visuals, as well as how I wanted to tie in the elements of supernatural, satanic and cults, and the gore. One aspect of my planning and organisation that I feel was miles better than I have ever done it before in previous projects was the communication between myself and my actors. I printed out copies of the shot list, script and call sheets that I gave to each cast member and had a copy of myself, I think this helped massively when on set with keeping track of my planning and keeping everyone of the same page about their roles and their involvement with the filming. I also feel I did a good job of implementing and embedding all my research and contextual awareness into my planning an therefor into my final product.