My groups initial idea of a setting was a forest located at one of my group members house. It is dismal and dreary and the trees are overpowering, however, our tutor advised us not to use a forest as it will be too difficult to film in the darkness. Here is a picture of the forest during the day. Even in the ambient lighting of daytime, it looks eerie and ominous.
Our orignal idea was that a group of friends were out walking the dog, but got out too late. They are walking around the forest when you see little bursts of light shining through the leaves and branches of the trees. The footage would be filmed handheld with elements of normal filming too. We thought that using handheld footage would be better because it makes the opening seem more realistic and believeable. Next, after the group of friends have recovered from the weird light display, they see one huge light shining onto the group with the person holding/shining the light unidentifyed to create suspense. The light would progressivly become closer and you just see the feet of the unknown person, a scream and a dog whine/howl, the camera is then dropped on the floor and you see someone being dragged away.
We origionally loved this idea, but we soon realised it was too much like a horror and we have now had to re-think. I had an idea that we could possibly set this is a different place, but still use the idea of being followed by someone you never ifnd out who it is, and the use of the non-ambient lighting really hides the identity and creates suspense doing this. So maybe one person is alone at night, walking to a friends home, and you see a light shining behind them, you don't see anyone there, just a shadow and the light shining. Have low angles of the feet running from both people and long shots to show the fear in the face and to create more suspense as you don't know what will happen to the victim. This is just a rough idea but I hope to develop round it and create something like this.
Unknown A man awakens from a coma, only to discover that someone has taken on his identity and that no one, (not even his wife), believes him. With the help of a young woman, he sets out to prove who he is. I really enjoyed this film as it really knew how to build suspense, in one scene the main character (Liam Neeson) is lying on a hospital bed, and a man who has been 'stalking' him has finally found him and has started injecting this poison I think it is into his blood. And you see the man (Liam) reaching for the scissors, but you only see the man's hand getting slowly closer to them to the the tube off of him. There is very daunting music playing at this point and the camera angles switch from the man's hand and the footsteps of the stalker who noticed what the man was trying to do. I found this technique very thrilling and it really built up suspense really well.
This film is also set in Germany where there is lots of snow and ice to the feeling of the film is quite dark and dreary and most scenes are shot at night. Trailer
The Butterfly effect
Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), who suffered severe traumas as a boy (Logan Lerman) and a teenager (John Patrick Amedori), blacks out frequently, often at moments of high stress. While searching for an answer to heal his emotional wounds, he finds that when he reads from his adolescent journals, he travels back in time, and is able to essentially "redo" parts of his past, and thereby causing the blackouts he experienced as a child. There are consequences of his choices, however, that he then propagates back to the present; his alternate futures vary from frat boy to prisoner to amputee. As he continues to do this, he realizes that even though his intentions are good, the actions he takes have unintended consequences.
I found parts if this film very distressing but in a way quite realistic, it brings out real crimes that people really take part in and shows you everything about them. For example in one scene, one of Evan's friends when he was younger, kidnapped his dog, but it in a potato sack, and left it to burn on a bonfire whilst you can here the sound of the dog whimpering whilst the camera is focused on the boys arguing and Evan crying. I remember this so vividly because this scene made me really distressed. Another scene is where his lovers dad made them participate in pornographic sex scenes when they were only seven years old. I thought that this was disgusting, however, they did this scene well and made me feel this disgust by just showing the man and his expressions whilst he is holding the camera, that shot is what made that scene shocking and realistic.
· Empire posted videos of interviews with Gary Oldman because specific audiences watch from empire. Empire targets audiences that know about film and are interested in them.
· Interviewed Gary Oldman on football focus 10th September. This would attract a male audience as the film has mainly a male cast.
· Set up Facebook pages where pictures, trailers, competitions were posted. The posters were posted on Facebook where you had to identify codes that were purposely created with in the posters to win a free poster. This would target a younger audience as most teenagers have Facebook nowadays.
· Apple sent pod casts of interviews with the actors. This would have a wide range of audiences and people who normally download podcasts would then download this.
· Created a website where they made you involve yourself with the film, where you had to input a code. This again would target a younger audience as it makes more interesting for them to involve themselves in guessing the codes etc.
· Vue held an interaction based interview on Twitter with Gary Oldman where people could post questions and he would answer. Twitter also allowed people to re-post many things so it was widely spread. Vue is a mainstream cinema and so even though this film is mort of an art-house film this would attract all different audiences that wouldn’t necessarily watch this without it being advertised through Vue.
· Tinker Tailor made several different trailers which were focused on the actors and the number coding more than the action within. This was used within YouTube and anyone watching clips on that (more younger audience) would see the trailer and therefore maybe become interested in seeing the movie in the cinema.
This shows that the target audiences were mainly male, who were interested in thriller films, who had seen some films by the director before which would create an expectation.
An unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact.
This film tells the sad story of inbred, poverty-stricken, Missouri Ozark hillbillies trying to scratch out a living on poor soil and even worse personal resources, so it was no wonder meth production was embraced as a life-changing profit center that had the illegal potential to change their lives for the better. Their poor lives before meth had a certain dignity in the hard struggle for survival in an uncaring world that had passed them by or never allowed them to catch up, either or both, but cheap and dangerous drug production leading to fast but risky money took these unfortunates down a road that surely few would have chosen if they had a chance beforehand to see any of the personal and social harm it created in a society already at great risk of decent survival. What great harm it did was shown and acted brilliantly, as it pushed these already at-risk people lower down the chain of life than before and surely even lower than the wild animals they had to kill for food.
A young girl of 17, seeming older than her years, beaten up and beaten down, wary of those around her but needing their help, and with 2 young siblings and a helpless mother to care for, she learned that her drug-making, drugged-out father disappeared and missed a court date for a drug arrest, and the most important task of her life then became finding her father before they lost their meager home to bondsmen, as that sorry home place was all they had in the world but it was home and she intended with all her heart and soul to do whatever it took to keep it and her family together. The acting throughout was appropriately serious to deadly, with hardly even a smile to be seen, and left us thankful as seldom before for whatever our own lives give us compared to those in the story.
Such a grim and foreboding task the daughter had, with imminent harm threatening around every corner she turned and behind every door on which she knocked, even those of relatives. Determination can get you far, but only so far unless you get a few breaks, and that long quest for a decent break was what kept viewer's eyes glued to the screen until it all played out in the end as could be expected in that dire situation.
Bleak, stark, harsh, mean, cruel...all those tough adjectives were present in full force throughout her search, but present also was her eternal fire of human spirit and family duty that would never quit. When actual survival is at stake, this story showed well that some of us truly can find the right stuff to survive when no better choices are possible.
Negative Review.
A plodding bore, 10 February 2011
A girl is searching for her presumably dead father in order to prevent her house from being seized by a bondsman. The father turned out to be murdered in a community effort to prevent him from talking to the police about the neighborhood's little drug operation. The claustrophobic atmosphere in the film is accompanied by dry local dialog which won't exactly make you spin in your seat. By the time the film is over, you have gained nothing in terms of entertainment or a better understanding of what the hell it is that makes these people tick. The film just kind of drags on for 100 minutes and then ends. It's not a poorly made film by any means, it just begs the question why anyone would bother to create it in the first place.
100 min -