Initial Ideas and Inspiration

Rachel and I took much time over the discussion of our short film, deciding the genre should be a horror film. Do explore this idea we created a mood board to display our thoughts and feelings about the genre and how each theory could be applied to our film. We decided that narrative makes a short film, and if the story line is effective then the over piece will be considerably iconic and memorable. We decided to use as least dialogue as possible in order to create the desired effect of silence which we felt would give the feeling of our protagonist feeling alone and as though there is nobody for her to talk to. A great use of the concept of limited dialogue would be Strangers. Although it is not the genre we wish to explore it inspired us to have a stronger narrative with less dialogue. After researching our genre I came across a short film called Love Field by Mathieu Ratthe It explored media language and genre theory very exceptionally. The audience are instantly captivated by the film and come to their own conclusions as to the genre due to the lighting, music and representations used. They are then shocked by the ending as it turns the genre upside down and with a a few changes in lighting and soundtrack the entire genre is changed. This had me and Rachel hooked on the genre of horror and researched further into it. We explored the narratives of other successful horror films such as the classic "The Shining" and what made it so effective. We decided that the use of media language was very effective with the denotations giving incredibly successful and memorable connotations such as the blood coming out of the elevator and the twins in the hallway with the creepy look on their faces sending shivers up the audiences spines. This is obviously the desired effect we decided our film needed. We looked at another very successful horror film "The Ring". We decided that what made it quite so brilliant and really effective to the audience was the unstoppable force of the little girl from the well. She could not be stopped as the was already dead and could attack as any time, and anywhere. This gave us the idea that shaped our narrative of our horror film. We looked at all aspects of horror films and their effectiveness in our mood board.