For my project, I decided to create a film strongly influenced by horror in both cinema and videogames, with emphasis on lighting and sound to create atmosphere. To achieve this, I experimented with different colours and levels of lighting in my production exercise, and during this, I found that the professional lights were good for controlling the general direction and level of the light, and the torch was good for creating isolated areas of light. I decided that I was going to try to stay away from the cliché of obvious red tints in horror, and opted instead for green and blue tints, as it gave a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere which I felt went with the theme of nightmares in my film.
When I wrote the script, I was still unsure as to who would be available for shooting, so I deliberately left the characters as ambiguously as possible. At first, I was going to modify the script when I had confirmed actors, but I decided to leave it ambiguous, as I felt that it didn't affect the overall flow of the story and, if anything, it made the audience feel slightly alienated - much like the main character, who is going through something they don't fully understand.
The shooting of the film went quite smoothly. Over three consecutive weekends, my friends and I met up and shot as much as we could over Saturday night and Sunday morning. The majority of indoor scenes (with the exception of two scenes) were shot at night due to the actors being occupied during the daytime, which meant that the lighting came primarily from the lights I set up, which means that a lot of these scenes are quite shadowy. This, I feel, creates tension and an unsettling atmosphere in these scenes. The other scenes were shot early in the morning or late in the afternoon depending on when the actors involved were available.
One shot in particular that turned out to be very effective was the shot of the 'ghost' in the mirror. Originally it was going to be a long shot of her standing in the doorway, but then someone suggested using the mirror instead. I agreed as it would give a bit of variation to the shots. I set up the camera and then noticed that the way the light was angled gave an odd reflection. I adjusted it and eventually achieved an effect where the reflection in the mirror was lit brightly whilst the surrounding area remained dim. This drew attention to the mirror as opposed to what was around it, and made the shot seem like a still image from a nightmare.
One problem that proved to be difficult to solve was the issue with the 'spotlight', which was the torch used in the production exercise. During the exercise, I had someone to help me with the lights, but during shooting, I had to operate both camera and lighting. At first I was unsure of how to move the camera and hold the torch at the same time, but eventually I used the camera strap to fasten the torch to the camera. Although this was not ideal and would occasionally come undone, it meant that the light was pointing in the same direction as the camera at all times, and that it moved at the same pace.
The sounds were recorded after shooting. They were made out of a few recordings: one of a conversation in the classroom played in reverse with echoes and distortion; one of me playing my violin behind the bridge; one of me scraping my nails along a radiator and one of me speaking which was heavily edited with echoes, delayed loops and pitch modulation.
The main problem encountered in editing was that some of the footage had a lag between audio and visual. At first I thought I would have to reshoot it, but then I found out how to isolate the audio tracks and move them until the audio and visual tracks were in sync with each other.
During editing, I remembered that in some outdoor scenes there was supposed to be tints to the lighting. Although this was impossible during shooting, I was able to add this in by using a 3-way colour corrector on Final Cut Pro. Whilst doing this, I also experimented with using this on other scenes, and created a set look for the scenes involving the 'ghost'. The mid colours would be tinted blue-green, and the dark colours would be tinted red. The blue-green tints were in accordance to the original idea, and the red was added because it was subtle yet added a dark, nightmarish look similar to the one found in the 'Silent Hill' games - which were one of my primary inspirations - as the dark red gave the impression of blood. It also made the shadows more noticeable, and gave a strong contrast between the tinted mid and dark colours and the lighter ones, which were left white. This was especially effective in one of the ending scenes, where the main character opens a door, and the light coming from within is bright white in contrast to the unnaturally tinted colours of the surroundings.
I re-shot the conversation scene at the beginning because originally it was one continuous two-shot, which became a bit monotonous. I re-shot the scene to include point-of-view shots from the characters so that the one speaking would be facing the camera. This also made some facial expressions clearer to the audience.
The final editing process presented one last problem. The voiceover at the start was longer than the montage that accompanied it. At first, I spread out the events in the montage with blank slugs, but this made the sequence a little dull as there would be gaps of fifteen seconds with nothing happening visually. I solved this during the final editing session by layering scenes from later on (mostly involving the 'ghost') over the slugs, some with increased transparency, and others in very blurred, high-contrast black-and-white. Another was made by layering a monochrome version of a scene on top of itself, then over the following slug, creating a 'ghost' of the scene itself that was only completely evident once it was layered over the slug. This new sequence gave the overall effect of seeing the main character's nightmare due to the inclusion of surreal, out of context shots that were only explained later on, but had a lot to do with the main character's mindset and feelings of guilt which might have caused him to go mad and imagine the haunting.
I feel that overall my film was a success as it achieved the surreal, nightmarish atmosphere I had been aiming for since the beginning of the project. The lighting and colour tints were not entirely as I had envisaged due to the inclusion of red tints in the final edit, but it did create the mood and look I was originally intending to achieve. The sound effects were almost exactly as I had intended them to be - sounds that instantly created unease made primarily of whispering and speaking, with some other sounds such as rattling and screeching that gave the impression of something being there but too far away to be understood. One in particular was the delay-looped speech. This was originaly a recording of me speaking, and to an extent this is still just about audible, but quickly becomes an indecipherable noise due to the loop.
When the final edit was shown to the class, the horror aspect was immediately evident, and a lot of them commented on it, saying it made them feel scared, anxious and tense. They also kept trying to guess what would happen next.
Overall, they said that they understood the basic idea behind the film: that someone was being haunted. However, they said that at times it was a little confusing and it seemed that certain lines and scenes had aspects that were not entirely clear, such as the fact that the main character already had a slightly unstable mental state and suffered from chronic nightmares before the events leading up to what happened in the film.
When it came to the characters, there were two distinct groups amongst the viewers. One group sympathised with the main character, saying that they felt sorry for him due to the suicide of someone close to him and the apparent coldness of his friend. The other audience group sympathised with the friend, saying that she wasn't being cold, but instead was justifiably angry because she was close to the dead person too, and the main character saying he was being haunted by her was obviously upsetting to her.
This shows that I managed to successfully create a spooky, gloomy atmosphere, which was my original intention, but in places my script was a bit confusing. The divided sympathies was not something I had intended to create, but it proves that I was able to create a script with characters that were complex and believable enough to make the audience sympathise strongly with either one or the other and give justification as to why they sympathised with their chosen character.
The shot of the main character knocking on the door became a static shot with no zoom, as I felt it added to the tension if it seemed that the audience was watching the scene through the eyes of someone watching from afar as if too afraid to approach. The shot with the dead person showed her face in the final edit as it made it a much more striking image.
The indoor scene became the scene where the main character comes into the house because I felt that it was more dramatic is events seemed to suddenly escalate.
The high angle shot proved impossible to film and was instead a straight angle.
The close ups here were instead medium long shots as they were easier to film and helped show that the characters were not in the same place.
The shot without the ghost was scrapped and replaced with the close up of bloody wrists.
The long shot of the ghost was replaced by the mirror shot.
Additional angles were added in the conversation scene.
Once again, the montage was changed in the final edit.
Here, the montage was changed and extra parts were added, as detailed in the evaluation.
