New Narrative

Our new narrative is about the young girl that is walking her dog, her dog then goes missing (near the forest) this then gives a reason for the girl to look for her dog in the forest. This is where the horror starts. 

Having more of a simple narrative opens up ideas for shots and scenes, many shots such as over the shoulder, birds eye views and long shots could be created.

We had trouble with actors the first few weeks due to work and days they cancelled, because of this, our new narrative means only one actor is officially needed, along with a dog and the killer that will just be a dark shadow. 

Narrative Change

We have decided to change the narrative for a number of reasons. Firstly, the amount of actors we would have needed if we decided to use dolls would have been unreasonable, and very difficult to arrange timings, because we attempted to but costs to all get to one place when we all lived in different places and the practicality of all being free at the same time all played a part in it. Also, it would be very difficult as first time media students to create very realistic looking dolls and manage to make a very good narrative that a wide audience could understand. All of these reasons are why we decided to simplify the plot and just use two actors, a male ans a female. We kept the idea of the main character being killed so we have the same genre as before (psychological thriller), but the narrative has changed slightly but it hasn't changed the target audience or the audience pleasures or anything like that. This will hopefully help us to get a slightly higher grade, because we can spend more time with less actors helping them to create a very realistic opening, and it will be easier to edit and sort out when there is less people acting, and also it means whilst filming we are less likely to get distracted.

Updated Call Sheet

Ellie and Alex are our actors for our film opening. They are both free on wednesdays from one thirty onwards, and the same on thursdays. They are both free on mostly saturdays, so we are going to use this as a basis for when we will film. following is the call sheet in a table, to make things more simplified.

free times to film:
ellie: saturday all day
friday 1:30pm onwards
monday 1:30pm onwards
wednesday 1:30pm onwards
thursday 1:30pm onwards

alex: saturday 12pm-6pm
friday 1:30pm onwards
monday 2pm onwards
wednesday 1:30pm onwards
thursday 2pm onwards

Me and hannah are also free in these times.

Group Meeting and Filming

Yesterday we shot all of the indoor scenes, and we feel that they fit the narrative well enough and represent the genre very well. We have shot the scenes of our actress inside the bedroom, reading out the note on the doll, and then it cuts to a scream and an image of our actor's silhouette against the yellowy curtains. This was all shot two or three times, so we can review back over all of the footage so far and choose what we think works best. We also yesterday shot the scene of the dog running off into the woods, the shot of the swings swinging on their own, and the shot of the actress on the swing, cuddling her dog then the killer walking behind her. We believe this reenforced the narrative, and should creep out the audience because the actor comes across as quite intimidating in these shots. We also shot some silent shots of the graveyard, and it makes the narrative quite scary. Next wednesday we plan to film all of the shots of the woman running in the woods, and we plan to do many angles, such as worms eye views and long shots and medium shots. When we edit some of these, we plan to do some special effects, such as fading to black and things like that, to reenforce the genre and the expectations of that. This will also help to fulfil the audience pleasures- they get what they have set out to look for- a scary film opening.

Next week- on friday and saturday, we want to finish all of the filming, and this will help us to meet all of the deadlines. On friday, we will finish all the shots then look over them all, then saturday will be the final date to reshoot anything we don't feel satisfied with at all. We have asked our actress to wear the same outfit every time we film, and this will help when we reshoot because it will keep the consistency with the story line. we shot everything on a tripod and this will help stop any potential camera shake. 

Title Ideas

Following are some of the ideas of the titles we are going to use for our film opening. I have done some research on the types of fonts that should be used on our genre- psychological horror. We could use typical fonts with blood dripping, but this fits with gory horror and that is not the kind of idea we want to send across. We want quite a simple font, so it won't take away the attention from the video itself. The photos i have embedded are all ideas of the types of fonts we will use for the titles and credits and everything that needs to be typed. these will be displayed with a black background most of the time, with the odd exception at the end with the credits, when it will fade into white and say 'the end', and this is when it will fade into black and the credits will be shown with white writing on a black background. These two title fonts, although different from each other in writing style share the feature of  having used different colours. The colours help to give a different meaning to the whole text and the image that can be associated with it by anyone viewing it.
i spoke to some people in my media group about which they felt fit the narrative better, and they felt that the first two ones with the white background fit the narrative the best. they believed the coloured ones took away attention from the narrative and the images, because they are quite prominent and it causes a lack of attention from one thing. Other people also agreed, saying that a simple idea was probably better because it portrays the image of being well thought-out, but still simplistic.

Casting Actors

We have Ellie Freshwater as our new reliable protagonist. We had a group discussion and made a time table of the days we will definitely be able to film with her. Ellie is in 3 of my lessons which means we have the same frees as her. Ellie is 17 and goes to Chenderit school, along with me and my other group member Hannah. This helps us as we are all together and can make plans easily, as sometimes social media can be difficult due to phones dying and not seeing messages, logging out of sites and other reasons that could course can issue with plan making. 

We are using Alex Cudden as our Antagonist. Alex is a tiny bit more broader than Ellie and because of this, it will be much creepier. Showing the different builds will help create an image of Ellie being timid and fragile, while Alex will look much more dominating.


Trixie is the dog we're using. She is a west highland terrier, this is a common kind of breed for a family pet, we are using Trixie to show that our protagonist is a normal girl from a normal family, living a normal life. Trixie is well trained and it will not hold back any time with using her in our filming. 

Filming Rescheduling

We planned to do most of our filming outside over the course of this week, but as it has snowed we have had to delay the outdoor filming until the snow subsides. This means we may have to film over the february half term. We would need to film all the inside shots this week, and then hopefully when the snow goes we would be able to do all of the outdoor filming over the next couple of weeks.

Filming Timetable

This is the timetable we have created for filming. We will stick to this and hopefully it means we will have filming over and done with as soon as possible, and it means we do not need to travel more than we have to in order to film.