Planning for final task - early idea stages

After completing our preliminary task, we started working on our final task, with the same group as before as we worked well together. The task is to create the opening two minutes of a film. Our idea is to do a film in the horror genre, as it is an exciting angle to take, revolving around a possessed young girl. Demonic possession is a staple of the genre, from 'The Exorcist' to 'The Rite' to 'The Last Exorcism', so we wanted to show our take on the concept.

We first decided to lay out the basic elements of a horror film before going into any serious detail:

Then we had an ideas session to decide what we wanted the film to be about, including who the characters would be, what sound effects and editing techniques, and the setting, makeup - lots of blood will be a consistent theme throughout the clip to create a gory horror effect - and costumes we will utilise. We also had a vague idea in mind to de-saturate the colour like in the final shootout sequence in 'Taxi Driver', as there will be a lot of red blood and desaturation on film has an eerie and creepy look.

Once we had decided on the plot, about an innocent girl followed through the woods by a Satanist cult man who possesses her, later changed to a teenager followed through the woods by a possessed girl, we considered ideas for titles, including "Macabre Dusk", "Dead End", "Night of the Damned" and "Possessed in Pink", before deciding on "The Woods Have Ears". We thought about the titles of other successful horror films, such as 'Night of the Living Dead', 'The Hills Have Eyes' and 'Paranormal Activity', which combine relatively tame words in a mixture that sounds creepy.

To get some visual ideas, we put together a mood board with screenshots from horror films featuring camera angles and imagery we intended to replicate, such as 'The Omen' and 'Halloween'. We also put in some ideas for logos with the title in Cool Text Generator and WordArt to set the eerie and ominous tone for the film. We want the film to be very bloody and gory, as such horror films as 'The Descent' and 'Saw' tend to be. We included images of bloody hands, indicating guilt and sin. We also added in pictures of the kind of setting we want for the clip and actual photographs we took of the locations we will use. Some other pictures give an idea of the kind of lighting and atmosphere we want, as well as some costumes.

Storyboard with Annotations

This is the animatic section of our planning for the clip we will be creating, as you can see from the document there is a thorough explaination of the actions we want to happen in our scene. There are a few descritions of initial camera angles and movements we would like in our clip as well as the locations we will be taking each scene in. Some of the proprs that we will be using are includeds in the descriptions below.