http://www.slideshare.net/MGRG099/evluation-question-1
We decided to name our movie ‘The Nightmare’ because it sums
up what the actual movie is about. We included ‘The’ in the title because by
using ‘The’ the title sounds more dramatic such as ‘The Prestige’. This makes
the title stand out more because when saying the title it sounds ghoulish, this
means people who read the title are more likely to remember the name as it
gives off a frightening atmosphere of the movie. Which means my target audience
will be attracted to watch the movie as we are targeting teenagers, who will
definitely want to watch movies that give those petrifying and excited feelings.
For productions, we are using our own which is called ‘Big Dreams’, we decided
to use our own production as we weren’t able find a suitable production which
would match with our movie’s genre and story. As you can see we didn’t name our
production something dark or spooky as we felt that having a dark name for our
production would be too much as if wouldn’t be realistic if our movie and the
production both had names with similar feelings to it. However, for our main
stream we will be using ‘Universal’ because we feel that making our own main
stream company would be time consuming, which we could be using it on editing
the movie more professionally.
Our first scene shows how the protagonist is very
distressing as he is having a nightmare; this is shown to foreshow how his
situation will be worst as his problems are going to get even worst. By
starting with ‘Disruption of the Equilibrium’, we have challenged the
‘Todorov’s Narrative Theory’ when we didn’t follow the typical movie structure
as we didn’t start with a happy scene like most of the movies do like Black
Swan and Memento. The opening gave away quite a lot of ideas on what the movie
is based on and what genres it contains. This is because our first scene was
quite serious and when the protagonist walked upstairs in slow motion, it builds
up suspense as the audience would be questioning where the character is going
and what would happen next. The main reason for this is as the previous scene
contained strong emotions, so the audience would expect the emotions to build
up as it goes on. In the first scene, we introduced the protagonist, whose
ethnicity is Asian. Hence, I can confidently say that we broke the
stereotypical idea of having a white protagonist in movies as most movies
contain a white protagonist. Not only that, as ‘Propps character Theory’
suggests how the Hero has to be strong as it has to over comes the process
‘Disruption of Equilibrium’ however, we made the protagonist weak as you can
see from the first scene, when he is seen distressed because he is unable to
overcome his fear in this case his past. Secondly, we are introduced by another
character who is a psychiatrist, he plays the role of a helper/mentor as he is
the one who guides the protagonist overcome his fear. During this process of
helping the protagonist, you could see how the psychiatrist is much stronger
and holds more power than the protagonist himself because the protagonist needs
someone who contains more power than himself as he is powerless and needs a
mentor to guide him into success. Another character is the step-mother of the
protagonist, who was actually first introduced in the nightmare however as the
step-mother has an illness of ‘multiple-personality disorder’ which suggests us
how the person who was present in the nightmare was actually her other
personality, Evie. Further into the story, the actual step-mother with her real
personality was shown quite later in the opening, when the protagonist starts
tell the story of his past. In the protagonist’s past his step-mother, Eva was
shown as someone who is caring and loving towards the protagonist. In terms of
props and costumes, we just had all the character wear their normal clothes
expect of Evie. One of the conventions we used to show the genre of thriller
was through Evie’s costume in the nightmare. She wore a red mask and had blood
on her face; this portrayed the thriller genre as most thriller movies contain
these kinds of conventions for example in Shutter Island, Saw, Spectre etc…
Also, near the end of the opening there is a scene of Evie beating the
protagonist (in the past), where she uses a weapon. This convention is used to
show how serious her illness was as she was harming Ethan (protagonist)
unintentionally.
Having the right locations determines how professional your
movie looks as it naturally gives off a certain atmosphere which adds onto the
scene. We used the location of ‘Heath’ as a forest in the nightmare and we shot
this scene in afternoon because it starts getting dark around that time but not
too dark. This was the perfect time for us to shoot since shots won’t be too
dark. Also, since nobody was in the forest, it looked isolated, which suggested
how the protagonist was lonely and had nobody. Another location was in an
apartment, where we change the setting a bit to make it look like an office for
the psychiatrist. To do this we made sure to shoot only in certain area so we
don’t give in too much detail about the location and make the setting look
fake. The shots are either located in the forest, which gave off an eerie
atmosphere or inside a room to emphasise his emptiness and how he is still
trapped in his past. In the nightmare, the protagonist runs away for someone
who isn’t physically there, it’s only his imaginations this suggests how
defenceless he is even in his dreams to Evie.
Finally, I have used variety of shots such as LS, Medium
shots, CU, over the shoulder shot and many more to focus on certain elements in
the scene. In addition, I have also used a range different editing such as
adding transitions such as ‘cross dissolve’, zooming in and many more. For
special effect we used slow motion, adding Texts to provide audience with some
information e.g. people starring, changing the colour to make two different
shots looks alike.
