Target Audience

Films these days are mainly targeted at men aged between 16-25. I think our film would be aimed at men and woman, aged between 16-25 and/or higher. Also I think it would be aimed at a higher social class because our film is not the typical gory, slasher film but it’s about a woman journalist looking into a psychological investigation of a murder. This means it would also be targeted at woman, because the main character is a woman. Strong Female protagonists are familiar archetypes in both Horror and Thriller films. This makes them popular with women because of the positive image they can project. Men would also feel obliged to bring their wives and girlfriends to the cinema with them.
Teenagers might not enjoy this film as much as older people. You would have to have knowledge of the mind, and the clever ways in which it can work, in order to understand the killer in this film. No doubt younger people would enjoy this film, but stereotypically teenagers enjoy slasher films, with teenagers in high school.

Research Sources

We wanted the opening sequence to not reveal much about the film. We wanted it to grab the audience and make them interested to watch more. So we decided that we would begin with the main character, researching about the killings, and the titles would be incorporated into the props, i.e. an ID card. The film that inspired us the most was the opening sequence to ‘Seven’ because of the fast, nitty gritty, research that is going on.

Another film that we used for inspiration was 'Napoleon Dynamite’, Even though this film is not a horror or a thriller, we wanted to use the way the titles are incorporated.

The Ring, also gave a lot of the inspiration for our research scene. We use a lot of the ideas from here, like typing in Google, and looking through books. Starting from, 4.20 through to 6.50.

Idea Developments

We came together as a group, and looked through all our ideas for a film. We talked, and decided that Leaya's film was the best idea and would have a good opening sequence. Her film was named, 'Class of '73', and the story was about a girl being given an assignment to research about her ancestors. So she decided to look into the death of her great aunt. She found out that her aunt was murdered by her football team boyfriend. She also discovered the year book of the class of 73 and found his photo, she realises that he looks a lot like the school janitor at the school now.

We talked over this idea and decided that it was a bit too typical American high school horror, which is not what we wanted. So we thought it would be a good idea to change the girl into a young woman, who is trying to make it as a journalist and this is her first real job. She is asked to research into a really interesting big story and comes across an old newspaper article about some murders in a school, and the killer was never found.

This suited what we wanted better because, we wanted more of a psychological thriller than a high school flick. We talked and explored ideas on how to get a more tense, interesting opening sequence. We decided that we also wanted to incorporate the titles as much as possible.

Account of Shooting Day

While we were shooting, we made a shot list. Accounting every shot we made, what was happening in the shot, and how many times we took it. We did this because this would help us afterwards when it comes to editing, and sorting it out. This is our shot list, that we made on the day.
All these shots were taken in the studio
1- Trina (our actress) walks into the set and slams her books into the table. This was a close up shot, of where her books were slammed onto the table. Our first title would be placed in this shot.

2-Trina then moves the books to the side, and opens the bottom book and takes some paper and a pen. This is a mid shot, and we took this shot 3 times.

3- A close up of Trina's eyes reading, and we took this shot 2 times.

4- An over the shoulder shot of Trina writting her name on the top of a piece of paper.

5- Extreme close-up of Trina writting her name (this is our actress title) We took 2 takes of this shot, but at different zooms.

6- Tracking shot, using the spider dolly (breaking the 180 degree rule) of Trina opening a book, then holding an iPod, then typing on Google. This shot contains 3 titles, on the library card when she opens the book, (Director of Photography), On the iPod screen, (Original Score By..), and Typed on Google, (Written By..) We took this shot 5 times, as it was a hard shot to get perfect, but by the 5th shot we got it right.

7- Extreme close-up of Google screen, With Leaya Hatzakis being written.

8- Over the shoulder shot, Highlighting Edited By Elly Sams.

9- A Tracking shot around her face, close-up.

The next shots were taken in the library
10- A shot behind a book shelf, of Trina taking out books, and revealing her when the books are taken out.

11- A very low, tracking close-up of her feet walking.

12 - A close-up of a book on the photo copier, being used.