Synopsis and Target Audience

John is taking a run through his local woods after work on a dark October day. However, his life will take a turn for the worst - he becomes, "bait".Straight from the start the audience is fully aware of both the sense of danger and malice that is shown in copious amounts, aswell as the dark twisting storyline of "Bait". John is lured from an everyday life and is thrust into a world of confusion, trickery and extreme violence.Whilst trying to survive from the grinding tools of a psychopath, John tries to tap into the mind of his captor and try and desperately find a way out. After an anonymous provocative message is sent to authorities the search for John begins after several days missing. The plot thickens as discoveries are made into the identity of the blood thirsty killer and where John is being held from escape.As the search for John becomes conclusive, John becomes aware of the twisted plan of his captor and realises he has become bait for a simple minded mass murder. - His rescuers are being tested.Fast action and slow tension building scenes capture the true evil contained in the darker rural areas of the UK.

(The poster was created by Olli Cannon and the group worked on the synopsis together.)

Open publication - Free publishing - More video

This synopsis got us thinking about who is our target audience?



We thought it was more or less about 18+ as our story is a convention of a horror gore film which would be rated as an 18. However we do not plan to use language, violence, drugs or scenes of a sexual nature which would bring our small clip down to a 12 or 15 at the highest. But this i feel was only due to our lack of resources, if we had the money for fake blood make up and false limbs then i suspect we whould have used it.

Scenery and Props

So as we had a rough plan of the storyline we needed to find a location to film it. I thought that this was very important as it could make or break the film, as we needed a certain type of atmosphere. Also it would need to be a safe area that isn't to public so as to reduce possibilities of brack ground noise; but accessable and close to where we lived so as not to take over a day filming.

We knew we wanted a rural setting in the woods so we picked ashridge forest. which was ideal as it was as it was close to both Harry and Olli's houses. We scoped out the area taking pictures of the areas that we would use to shoot, it seemed relativly quiet but still public. However, on the day started to film there were tons of screaming children and too many members of the public wandering into shot.

The solution was Harrys idea, he had been working for a woman who had a private pine wood forest, so we went to her house and asked permition. With is grantted we started to film. This wood was infact more ideal, with dense trees and a thick canopey giving us just the right lighting; and in fact it worked better than our previous idea.

The main prop was a rusty saw which we used as the weapon of choice for this phsycopath.

I shall include picture in my next post once i get them off Olli.

Reseach

When we started to research for our film opening we started by looking at films such as “Creep”, “psycho” and the “Bourne ultimatum” trilogy because of the chase scenes hoping to pick up a few techniques.






I could not get the chase scenes i wanted on youtube but this is the trailer.


Throughout the all the films i noticed that the music and diogetic sounds had big impacts on the intensity of the film. For example the chase scenes where always fast with quickly paced music to fit the rush of being chased or chasing and also that silence was a good tension builder when something is going to happen.

Here are some other classic horrors that we looked at and concidered as a style, but the main problem was that these were heavily gore based and we did not have the special effects departmet for such props. So the films were "No Country of Old Men" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: in the Beginning





No Country For Old Men








As well as looking at films for our style of filming we also turned to our potential audience and took a short servey which helped us determine what people expected in a thriller film.
We asked 30 people all between the ages of 16-18 years of age. The reason for our age range being so small was due to the fact we used our school for these questionares, but this was fine because it was the age range that we wanted to focus on and appeal to. The questions that we decided on asking were simple one such as:
What do you think is the most important bit of a movie?
a) the chase
b) the action
c) not knowing what is going to happen, ie suspense.
From these questions we determined that to best hold our audiences intrest was to do a chase scene with quick tempo music and to have it very fast moving.

At this stage i think we ruled out and dialoge in the film as that is a whole different level of planning with scripts and boom mics, for quality sound and convincing actor voices.
over all these questionares helped us a lot with planning how and what we wanted to do and to see if we needed to change anything.

rough planning

so we as a group decided to go with a thriller/horror type of two minute film opening so we brain stormed; and came up with a few good ideas such as we wanted it to be like a chase type of scene which would allow for some fast pace music and quick cutting shots. We came up with the final story board of a man saving a woman or child from a locked room but he gets locked up. All these are just rough ideas that to me sound really good and if we can recreate some of the scenes that i am playing in my head then we should have a very scary and exciting film. However I recognise that we have to budget and in a production team of men we would need to hire a women, so there are still some problems to overcome.



The short synopsis of the film clip is that we see a man drive up to a wooded area and get out. Time would pass and we see a jogger run past the car, when he hears screams. We want to flash images of the woman looking gray like the girls or flash backs from the shining. So as the jogger runs to help the tension builds as the audience sees the man from the car following the jogger. When he gets to the source of the screaming, an old shed, and when he goes in he sees the girl in the corner as he walk towards to help the doors close behind him.


that is the basic plan.

preliminary task.

Here is the finished product of our preliminary task. i think we attcheved the desired fluency of the cuts; but problems such as background noice made the cut more obvious and clunky. the video doesn't have a story its just a attempt at getting the basic camera angle and editing.

The Begining!

First Who are we?

This is me (Martin Aberson)

this is Harry Phillips

this is Olli Cannon

Back in september I started media studies for the first time and this year’s practical course work we were asked to make a two minuet opening for a film. The choices of genre were horror, comedy and documentary, we chose horror/ thriller. The reason we chose this type of film was because it is very hard to create a script for a comedy that will be funny to everyone and not just to the writers, also a documentary was not an interesting idea.



All of these ideas dont mean much though if you dont know how to film so our first task was to make a preliminary. This was our first time with the camera; and the preliminary test allowed us to know how to create a story board and a work with camera angles to see what works and doesn’t work. But the bit that i liked doing the most was the editing; making the transitions smoothly was one of my personal goals in making this short film. At the end I would have like to get a reverse shot in so that we could see the girls face but we didn’t have enough time to film it.