We also cast our female protagonist as Louise Chick. As a young, blonde girl she looked the part of a horror film victim and was very convincing in her audition, where we asked her to read out a basic script, improvising and crying. This is her audition tape.
Please double click videos to open in a new window, as embedding them cuts off the side, making viewing difficult.
We have also cast our two minor parts of the stalkers. Although these characters are integral to the film, they have no dialogue in the opening two minutes and are only seen fleetingly. For this reason, we didn't need to hold a proper audition, more ask for volunteers and then check they were okay for the times when we are filming in January and were old enough. These are our stalkers;
Stalker #1 - Keegan Featherstone Stalker #2 - Matthew Bonner
Me and Rosiee have been discussing what kind of props and costumes we will need for our film. As in most horror films, we will make use of fake blood, probably on several of the shots of the victims laying dead, and possibly use makeup to create a brusing effect.
We'll also need a set of house keys for our main female character to drop, as this motion alone leads into one of the flashes of film showing part of what has happened after this point.
Our male characters will be wearing hoods, so that their faces are almost entirely shadowed, so the hoods are essential, this also adds to the ambiguity of the characters and the film as a whole. As for the female character costumes, they will be wearing formal or casual attire, to show that there is a range of victims and that no particular class is targeted, but there will be nothing particularly defining about their costume, for example we will avoid using red in their clothing, as this is a colour usually associated with the antagonist.
We were planning on holding our main auditions today; however, due to the main person we were auditioning for the lead female part is off ill and there were issues with the sign up sheets, we have rescheduled for early next week. We have had several people interested already and so we will still audition them today, but they are for the minor parts with little or no dialogue. Once the final auditions are done, we will put up the auduition videos and photos, and then a final cast list. Over Christmas we will send consent forms home with each person we have selected for their parents to sign.
We've set up the use of the drama rooms in our school on Friday for holding our auditions for our film. We've prepared a script for our main character to use, but the majority of it will be improvisation to keep it spontaeneous. As well as our main character we need five other girls to be the other victims and then around three hooded males to be the stalkers. The only person who will be heard speaking is the female main character and so she will have to be able to cry on demand and sound panicy without sounding cheesy. We've prepared consent forms for both the person auditioning and their parents to fill in to make sure that they are fully aware that the footage of them will be put online and used in our coursework.
Me and Emmaline have been working on writing a script for our film recently. The only real dialogue is right at the very start of our film when the screen is blank and so the script itself has to be very believable and able to stand alone without video to go with it. This is our first draft and we plan on developing it several times before filming, but it is useful to have something to work with when we start holding auditions, which are hopefully being held within the next week.
Script First Draft
*heavy breathing* (muffled voices, loud door slam and the sound of a key turning in the lock)
We've been finishing off our Similar Media Works powerpoint and sorting out the storyboard recently. The powerpoint was very useful in that we had to do a lot of research into the horror genre, making the planning of our film easier in that we had more ideas of camera angle and lighting. We've so far produced a basic photo storyboard, and plan to later create one with voiceover explaining what shots we want to make use of where and why we've chosen to do this. This will be quite useful to work from when writing a script and actually filming. We've created our film brief now, and decided on the over-all plot of our film; the basic theme is the stalking of six seemingly unlinked girls. Those behind it are not only psychopaths but scientists who want to create the "perfect" person, but we'll stick predominantly in the psychological side, rather than the technical sci-fi. The scientists identify six girls they believe together have the perfect features or limbs and set about torturing and mutilating them, with the actual film seeing two out of the original six victims surviving. The opening 2 minutes of our film will show part of one of the victims attack, as she is followed home. The flashing video and still frames at the start just before the film title comes up will also show the rest of the victims, with the body part the scientists have identified as being perfect marked with a black "X"
Please double click videos to open in a new window, as embedding them cuts off the side, making viewing difficult.
For our coursework, we had to film a re-make of a horror film, and our group chose Scream. We had to film the kitchen scene in the opening of the film, where the young woman is on the phone to an unidentified male character. Due to the fact that we were in school and had to make do with what we had, we ended up filming in the food tech rooms, the closest we could get to an actual kitchen. For our original film, we'll be able to make use of locations out of school grounds, something that will make the film instantly look more professional and polished. Because we are a group of all girls, we got a friend to be the male voice on the phone, giving us an idea of what it'll be like to audition actors for our own horror film. We were working from a script taken from the film and tried to stick to this as much as we possibly could, although for certain parts, such as the part where the woman plays with the knives, we had to improvise. By working from a script, we got used to the layout of it and how much detail is needed to be included, something that will be helpful when writing our own scripts. Due to our poor time keeping, the film isn't as polished as we would like it to be, and doesn't make very good use of continuity. However, by filming this, we got more experience with using the equipment, such as the dolly and how to keep it steady when tracking someone. If we were to film this again, we'd definitely allocate ourselves more time to film in, as we underestimated how long the filming and editing process would take.
