Film Sequence Evaluation

In our horror film sequence I focused on sound, in doing this I spent time adding non-diegetic music to create the dark mood and diegetic sound where I mainly concentrated on speech to help provide the narrative. As shown in this picture, at the beginning of the sequence the victim is running down the stairs, I used the loud sound of feet stamping to show the victim was panicking, making her seem more vulnerable. In addition to this we filmed the door slamming as the victim stumbles through to purposefully make the victim seem shocked and in order to impact fright upon the audience.

The genre we picked influenced our decisions as we worked towards making our film sequence conventional of a horror. This shows in the background music I picked, as it was a high-pitched orchestra which steadily speeded up pace and became louder to build suspense towards the climax. Using this tension I aimed for the sound to create an impact on the audience.

The sound used also helped develop the narrative as it provides a feeling of panic amongst the audience as it is a girl being followed. This is clearly represented in a close up shot on the victim where you can hear her breathing heavily which also exaggerates the victims fear towards the antagonist. I worked with my

group to ensure the horror genre came across to the audience in order to create fright. Furthermore our sequence created a visible divide between the characters into the victim and antagonist; this also helps develop the narrative so that the audience can understand the events of the sequence, we also tried to make the narrative clear. I planned diegetic sound including speech from the characters to succeed in creating the horror sequence

our group wanted.

Halfway through the sequence another character was used who was simply walking past the victim whilst the victim was begging for help; this is quite conventional of a horror because the character passing by

doesn’t help which makes the audience empathizes with the victim. However our group changed our plans for the film sequence as some of the ideas were too complicated, we adapted our film by cutting out some sound and shots to make it simpler, and then we could add more effects and sound when editing the sequence after filming. In addition to this we altered the costume slightly but kept the colours the same as the victim was wearing white and the killer was in black, this was to outline that the characters were good and evil to keep to the conventions of horror genre. We stuck to the props we had planned by using a knife and fake blood to amplify the mood of horror and kept to using natural light to make the sequence feel more realistic then used editing to make it brighter. Furthermore the acting was successful as the victim showed she feared the antagonist, where as the antagonist was quite slow moving but showed anger towards the victim, leading to the audience knowing something awful will happen to the victim, this is important as the film ends with the killer

holding the knife against the victim which leaves the audience to predict the ending. Though we changed the camera shots we stuck to mainly using handheld and point of view shots to give the audience an idea of what the victim is going through however we used the tripod to film the first parts of the sequence to keep the filming still so that we could allow the panic to build up through

the sequence. The technical skills I developed helped me with the element of sound I used so that I could make creative choices independently and help the group as a whole.

The audience provided positive feedback on the sound and explained how the music created suspense well because the distorted sound matched what was happening on screen and worked well with the quick cuts. However they stated that the music needed to be faster to create further panic. Moreover I believe that this could have been more effective to the audience as fear being created could have helped make this a conventional horror sequence and that the lighting could have been improved because some of the footage was too dark. Some of the decisions I made could have been improved as the sound could have been more influential towards the final outcome, I should have added more Foley sound to exaggerate what was filmed and more speech to develop the narrative. However I believe tension was created well as the mood music that was added in was timed well with the camera work.

Nicole Diaper