In my previous blog, I wrote about and reflected on a lot of the beginning stages of my work, research, planning and development etc. However in this blog I wanted to discuss and reflect more upon the other perts of my work, the production, feedback and any final thoughts I have about the pros and cons of this project. First off, before getting into evaluating my production and practical skills I wanted to briefly re-cap my last blog and how I feel my research and planning helped me massively. My production skills and many of the choices I made, such as lighting and angles etc, were made due to the research I had done into horror in general, as well as the other films and short films I looked into.

Production & Practical Skills: There are two main areas of practical production that I feel are the most necessary to cover in this section of evaluation, these are filming and editing. Although I have written blogs on both of these subjects, I feel it is necessary to discuss the pros and cons, as well as the skills I may have developed and learnt throughout this project. Both of these aspect of my project are the areas I feel most comfortable in and I feel I have excelled in during my other projects I have done. Although these are the areas I felt most confident in, this doesn’t mean I didn’t meet some issues while in production and post-production, which is what I want to discuss in this blog.

Filming this short film was officially planned to be done over two days at the end of April, however due to the amount of clips I wanted to re-film and some filler shots I wanted to add into the nightmare sequence, my filming ended up being over 5 different days. This was not really an issue, although my time management could have always been a little better. Even though I met some issues that lead to my re-filming, this had nothing to do really with my planning and I am still extremely pleased about how much my planning helped my work and how the actors documents and organisation helped the production run as smoothly as it possibly could.

I did write individual blogs for the two first days of filming and then a blog for re-filming planning and a blog once my re-filming had been completed, first I want to discuss the first day of filming and how I feel that went and what aspects may have gone better than others. This first day of filming was for scene 1, 2 and 4 and involved only myself and my main actress Ella Ward, who also had her own project to complete while we were working on mine. Due to the setting of my film being at night, I decided to start filming late rather than filming during the day and editing every shot from day to night, so we started filming at around 9pm and finished at around 2am. I had made sure prior to this shoot that my actress had a copy of the script, shot list and call sheet, that I gave to her a few days in advance, so that once we got to filming it could go as smoothly as possible and as quickly as possible.

Although Ella and I were both as prepared as we could be, the first 30 minutes of this shoot did go quite slowly, but this was mainly due to my nerves and insecurities that were soon gone. I wrote about this in my filming blog for this shoot and said: “I am definitely a perfectionist so when my first few shots weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to I got very discouraged very quickly. I of course wasn’t thinking about the fact I was going to edit the way my shots look through shortening the shots and colour grading etc.” My nerves soon went though and this shoot ended up going very well and I am very pleased with the shots that resulted from this.

In both my filming blogs I wrote a little about the equipment I used, how I felt this helped me, as well as any changes I made while filming, either in terms of the shots I had planned to film vs what I actually ended up filming or any change in the equipment I made. I made no changes with the camera I had planned on using and the settings I planned on using (“which is either ‘night portrait’ or ‘night scene’ mode”) however I did make a change on my first day of shooting with the lighting I had planned on using that ended up translating to my next day of filming too. I had started the first few shots of this shoot using my ring light as my light source but ended up switching it off completely and not using it and only using my fairy lights as practical lighting in my scene. My reasoning for not using the light is as I wrote in my blog: “I felt that, even with the orange filter AND my dressing gown draped over it to dull the light a little more, there were still some moments where the light was way too harsh and made quite a few of the scenes way too over exposed. Honestly very little of my final footage involved the ring light, however I did still use it on a few scenes where it seemed beneficial to include, though this wasn’t always the case.”

In terms of last minute changes I made, I also changed some of my shots while on set, in my blog I wrote: “Although I did pretty much keep to the shot list and film many of the shots the way I had planned on, a few were slightly altered, for example; scene 2, shot 2 was originally planned as an over-the-shoulder shot of Ella looking into the mirror and rubbing out the rules. I ended up taking multiple shots with different angles and shot sizes so that I could use the multiple different shots and put them together in editing, rather than just sticking to this one shot that I ended up not being too much of a fan of.” This, I feel, was to my advantage as this particular shot ended up looking much better than it would have if I had filmed what was on my shot list.

The second day of filming was much the same in terms of the equipment I used and in the fact that I did make a few changes to the shot list and added some extra shots of the candles or mirrors etc. This second location for scene 3 (the nightmare sequence) was filmed up in Cumbria, so myself and Ella travelled up to film this scene on the day of filming, we first went to gather all the props then headed over to the location to set up. I focused a lot more on the set design of this scene than I did with any of the other scenes, mainly because I felt this scene was the most representative of the horror genre and so i wanted to show that through the mise-en-scene and iconography of this scene.

This shoot, although it was less involved in terms of the amount of time and shots we had to do, I had more people to rely on as I had another 3 actors for this scene, I also did much more detailed special effect for this scene. In the beginning stages of my project I had looked into some SFX in films such as Saw so I was really eager to include some more detailed and impressive special effects for this scene. I feel that this scene showed my skills a lot more than the other scenes did as I feel like my skills in special effects makeup are some of my strongest skills out of the whole project. I was also quite pleasantly surprised with my set design on this shoot, I was a little nervous about my set design that it may look stupid or tacky or like objects had just been randomly placed but I really think I did a great job of putting my knowledge of mise-en-scene in horror to use in the set design for this scene.

Once I had filmed all this, I had a chance to review my footage before going into the editing stages of my production, I am glad I gave myself the time to do this as this gave me the opportunity to decide wether or not to re-film. I did end up re-filming quite a few shots, most of them due to some focus issues I was experiencing during filming, as well as filming a few filler shots in Cumbria of blood dripping and splattering etc. Since I have linked the blog to this, there is not much else to say about my re-filming as carrying this out was pretty much the same process I did for my original filming dates.

Now onto editing, I stretched my editing blogs out for 3 blogs, each one concentrating on a specific area of my editing. Firstly in my editing I did my basic visual editing, I started this by putting my clips in an order that both followed the shot list and script and that looked the best and most entertaining. Once i had done this I then went through and added in my place cards and from this decided what shots I wanted to re-film, I did this before planning my re-filming so that I could see how these shots would look along with the others and so I would have an idea of where they may look best. I then decided to focus on my nightmare sequence in a little more detail, so I started going through this scene and altering the order of my clips and the lengths, as well as deciding if I wanted to add any more shots or not, I decided I did.

I started roughly editing the style of the nightmare sequence before anything else as I had more of a clear idea of how I wanted this section of my short film to look and feel, earlier in my planning I already had and idea of this: “I like the idea of creating the visuals to be quite distorted and glitchy as I want the nightmare section of my short film to feel very uncomfortable and disturbing.” 

After this basic editing I then moved on to the more advanced editing, once I had all my re-filmed shots in of course, this was the colour correcting and filters etc. This blog was very important in terms of changing some of my re-filmed day shots into night shots, this also helped me make sure all the shots looked like they went together and seemed a little more sinister by making the colours a lot less bright and more dull. Colour correcting and editing in general is an area I feel very comfortable and confident with and so I made sure I would be able to show my skills in this section as this is where I feel I excel. Here is what I wrote in this blog that explains some of what I did, “I did colour correcting in two ways, either through the actual colour corrector, by adjusting the tones, saturations and colours, or by using coloured filters to help further this effect. I ended up using mostly a filter called “cool tones”, which does exactly what the name says, makes the colour of the clip more cool toned.”

My final piece of editing I did was all the audio editing, in horror the audio and sound queues are extremely important in creating the right atmosphere and mood, and so I feel I spent quite a bit of time perfecting this. I first edited my ‘chanting’ track, this was my main audio for my nightmare sequence that I recorded myself and edited in Adobe Audition, I edited a few different clips of this and sent them out to my audience and peers so that I could gather some primary research and audience feedback at all stages of my work. I am very glad i spent the most time focusing on this piece of audio as this, in my opinion and many others, really helped create the mood for this scene and created a very creepy and sinister atmosphere that I feel tied in with the context of the film and the visuals of this ritualistic scene.

Once I had done some audio editing to the chanting, I then moved onto the rest of the audio and music for my short film, again, I wrote a full blog about this but will go over the key points here. To keep with the idea of creating a very uncomfortable and disorienting scene I decided to add in some audio tracks of reversed sounds like some reversed chanting and reversed glass breaking. I feel both of these added an element of discomfort to the viewing experience of this scene and I am very pleased and impressed with how this worked in the final project. I also then moved onto looking at and adding the music to this clip, I tried my best to find music that was both creepy but also free for me to use, I thought I had found some but after receiving a copyright strike once I had uploaded, it seemed I hadn’t. I then looked into the strike and it seemed this wouldn’t effect my work in anyway so I didn’t feel the need to replace the music as the only effect it had to my video (making it non-monitizable) was irrelevant to the project and the outcome.

I included plenty of screenshots in these blogs I wrote about the editing process and since this is an already very long blog, I feel no need to add them again.

Audience Feedback: Moving onto the audience reaction, I was so overwhelmed with how positive the feedback on my film was, I had practically no negatives to consider and so I feel that means my project was an overall success. I uploaded my short film primarily to YouTube and attached a questionnaire in the bio of the video to gather feedback, I also did a small amount of promotion on my Instagram account as this account reaches the same target audience that I was trying to reach with this film.

I got the majority of my feedback from YouTube as this is where I could see all the analytics on the actual video, whereas on Instagram all I could see was if my posts lead my audience to click my website link, which was the YouTube link to my video. I was very pleased to see that a lot of the choices I made in order to reach a wider audience, for example putting “short horror film” in the title of the video, actually worked in my favour.

I wrote a separate and in-depth blog analysing and reflecting on my audience feedback so will not say too much here and will just link that blog here.

Final Thoughts: Comparing this final short film with what I had initially planned on creating in my proposal and pitch, I can definitely see how my work, majorly my research has shaped my idea into becoming what it did. I think combined with my exciting knowledge of the genre, my research helped me understand more about the themes and subjects I wanted to use to create the story of my short film.

Overall, I am so so pleased with my work and how my audience reacted to my hard work and I definitely feel I made some very good decisions along the way of researching, planning and production that contributed toward the overall success of this project. If I were to do this again, which I hope to in the future, I think my biggest downfall would definitely be my time management and organisation as I am, and will probably always be, a very frantic person. Despite this though, I feel through this project and the last two years of this course I have gained so many skills and have developed my knowledge of film and specifically the horror genre MASSIVELY.

To think I started this course with no knowledge of media or how to create a film or even write a shot list and to see where my skills are at now is amazing and regardless of what grade I get at the end of this all I am so proud of myself and want to say thank you to all my teachers, Andrew especially, for helping my along the way and essentially getting me to the point of creating this short film that I am so so so happy with.

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.

This is going to be a very short blog just to reflect on my actors, I wanted to discuss how I felt my casting helped or hindered my filming as I feel I very much glossed over that in last years FMP even though it is quite a big part of the hopeful success of this project. I only had 4 actors in total, one main actress who appears in all my scenes, Ella, and my other 3 actors who were casted as cult members and were in the background of the nightmare scene, scene 3.

I chose my actors based on different aspects depending on their different roles, for example, I had more to think about with my main character casting than I did for my background actors as their faces were covered and all I needed from them was their voice and shots of them in completely covering cloaks. Whereas my main actress had a lot more acting and emoting to do in order for my short films storyline to make sense with the absence of dialog. I ended up casting my mum, dad, and brother as my cult members, my brother is actually enrolled in an acting course, but my parents talent for acting is not quite as committed. Saying this, they all had one line and other than that their job was to stand around Ella and chant this line, and they did their job. Working with them was surprisingly easier than I had thought and their presence in this scene I think really completes the scene.

I cast Ella based on a few things, first of all she had the look I was hoping my main character would have, she fit many horror stereotypes and I felt she looks like the character I was trying to portray. Secondly, Ella has acting experience and, although not the best actor ever, she seemed more capable of taking directions and following the script and my instructions a lot better. And finally, I chose to work with Ella as, because we are friends, and I was acting in her short film, I knew she would be ok travelling to Cumbria for some of the filming and we could find a way of working around each other’s filming schedules.

Although I am glad I cast Ella into this role for all these reasons, I had to accept that it wasn’t going to be an Oscar winning performance from anyone of my actors. Being the perfectionist I am, I would have loved to produce a film that looks like it was directed by Stephen Spielberg and acted by Jennifer Lawrence, of course this is not going to be the case as they both have a lot more experience than two level 3 media students. However, I am still extremely pleased with what I have and what I think I’m able to create with the footage I have.