Preliminary Task

For our preliminary exercise, we had to film a continuity task which involved filming and editing someone opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with short dialogue between them. The task had to incude and demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

After filming this, as a group we edited our preliminary task, using 'iMovie' and evaluated what we thought the positives of our filming and also aspects which we would have to improve and work on, therefore allowing us to get the best grade possible when filming our horror film opening.

We realised that our framing was very off key, as when reviewing the filming back was at a slightly tilted angle and did not incorporate the rule of thirds. Also we discovered that the aspect of hand held camera work needed to be addressed, as in parts of the preliminary task shots were very shaky.

The positives of this preliminary task were that we realised we are able to exicute good close up shots, and zoom movement, which could be useful for when we film our opening.

This has allowed us to consider the depth of that we need to go into when filming our horror opening, making sure the framing, camera shots, camera movement and all aspects of mise en scene are taken into consideration, to allow us to succeed within this task.

Institutional Context

We had to create a case study for an Institutional Context guide that we are working in. We decided to focus on the Institution of Lionsgate as it has successfully represented many popular horror films such as American Psycho and Saw, which was our audience's favourite film when analysing our audience questionnaire. After we found this out, we thought Lionsgate would be a good Institution to work with when creating our slasher, horror film opening.

We researched about Lionsgate, where it was founded, its distribution and production element, what other media companies Lionsgate owns and if that was relevant to our film opening and also discussed how it is significant to our film opening. Below are a few of our slides from the powerpoint presentation.

Textual Analysis Summary

Throughout the lessons on the 25th and 26th January we pulled our 8 essays each together to figure out the key codes and conventions for the opening of a horror film. We then created a powerpoint presentation to produce back to the class defining what we felt was needed to create a sucessful horror film opening. Such codes and conventions as lighting, editing and camera shots created a clearer perspective of what needs to be inputted within our opening and gave us a clearer view on all the aspects of mise en scene, sound etc. we have to include.