The Awakening: Final Cut

The Awakening Shooting Record

Here is a record of all of the shooting of 666 and The Awakening.

We had lots of problems filming beacause my other two group members were absent a lot before they left college. Luckily I still managed to create a horror trailer that I am reasonably happy with, even though there were a few shots I wished I could add or film again if the characters/actresses were still available.

Prop List

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

In the focus group screening, the most common praise highlighted were that people liked how the music fitted and felt that the trailer was well edited. A positive point which I agreed with was that my trailer had good "Camera angles, editing and sound effects". I had focused specifically on using uncomfortable, canted angles during the filming process and wanted to emphasise this through the use of fast editing and uneasy sounds.

The main criticisms highlighted were that the trailer didn't leave people guessing who the evil one was. Negative comments also mentioned there were a few things in the side of shots, such as feet and people laughing, which ruined them. This could especially be seen when Bex's was dribbling blood from her mouth.

I also agreed with the criticism that the "editing needed tightening in places". To aid this I cut down the length of a number of shots and put in the dissolve effect between shots. Another criticism was that the trailer was "More like one long scene than a trailer", however I chose not to do too much about this because I had purposefully made my trailer a "scene trailer" similar to The Brave trailer. Scene trailers are becoming increasingly popular and my trailer reflects that. By also including only one main scene, there is also a lot more unseen footage from The Awakening that my target audience could expect in the full film.

To overcome these problems, I cropped a lot of the shots and filled in the gaps with a couple of extreme close-ups of mine and Em's mouths at the end. The end result in the final cut of The Awakening had a lot less errors due to responding to the focus group feedback. By just deleting or adding a few extra shots here and there really made The Awakening flow more smoothly and I liked it much better after this, so was grateful for that comment.

During the final screening, the comments received improved greatly due to the changes I had made to deal with what people had criticised earlier. Some of the positives were "clever effect of chalk drawing on the floor", which I was pleased with because it had taken a very long time to film in stop-motion animation and even longer to edit each shot down to exactly the same size. There were still negative comments, such as "blonde girl's bad acting". However, considering one person in my group had left before the filming finished meaning we had to start filming all over again, and then the other group member left before editing was finished, my friend's acting skills were not my main concern.

I think of the main things I have learnt from looking at my audience feedback - especially the mixed scores in the evaluation screening - is that it is impossible to please everybody. While taking some comments on board can be an effective way of noticing things that I may not have noticed before myself, different people had different opinions on the same things. The music in my trailer is a good example of this. Some people loved it while some disliked it a lot. I think that this is representative of the horror genre and why it is aimed at a niche market. Horror isn't something neat and tidy and which appeals to everybody. It often creates a great deal of controversy, which is why I think that having mixed feedback is a positive thing.

Evaluation Screening and Feedback : The Awakening

"Well edited, good music, good effects. But a bit too bassy at the start" 7.5/10

"Music is very good, edited together well, good gore and start drawn on floor. Tidy up the music at the very end" 8/10

"The effect of the star being drawn really worked. The montage of shots works well. You cant really hear what is being said" 6.5/10

"The use of gore was good. The choice of music made it a lot more scary. Use of close-ups when holding hands and speaking. Although Camera could be stiller" 9/10

"Close-ups of face and hands and the bloody smile at the end, circle being drawn. Can see Bex smiling though" 6/10

"The tension throughout wit hthe camera shots and close-ups was good. The music was spooky which created suspense. But gives away most of the narrative in a 2 minute trailer" 7/10

"Good soundtrack, clever effect of chalk drawing on the floor, good shots - cinematography, bass. But blonde girl is bad at acting." 7.5/10

"Good location, creepy music, good pentagram effect, good body horror. But a bit slow paced in parts." 7.5/10

"Good killing scene with pole, the animation of star, good location and camera angles. But the background music was annoying." 5/10

"Editing was good especially the drawing on the floor. Good use of close-ups. Sounds throughout were good and created suspense. The shots of the the pole going in to the mouth were a bit slow" 6/10

"Good location, effect on the pentagram is good, good camera angles. Still hard to know what is going on." 6.5/10

Average score: 7.5/10

The Awakening Poster

http://www.flickr.com/photos/poppydavey/6902278804/

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Although a conventional image on most mainstream magazine covers would have its featured person making eye contact with the camera, I noticed that this was not always true for Sight and Sound Magazine. I had wanted to use a picture of myself looking down in order to suggest that I may have something to hide and to create a sense of mystery, as I feel I did in my trailer. I chose not to use an action shot from my trailer, because I did not feel that one shot could reflect my trailer properly, and because I wanted something slightly more classy to appeal to the readers of such a niche magazine. My cover shows I am the auteur of the film, and therefore makes my film seem more worthy of being watched by my target audiences of individuals and reformers.

I chose to keep the text simple and minimal because this almost always seemed to be the case with Sight and Sound. They only ever seem to explain what they really need to and the simplistic approach seems to be what makes their cover so classy in comparison to other more mainstream film magazines like Empire and Total Film. I did a similar thing with my trailer, only explaining what I really needed to, in order not to give too much away too soon. For my magazine cover I wanted the main focus to be on the image, and for the trailer I wanted the main focus to be on the footage. I chose to have myself looking down on the cover. Although I know this is not a conventional feature of most magazines, who usually choose to have the model making eye contact with the camera and addressing the audience, my online research showed that Sight and Sound only did this around 60% of the time and I decided to take advantage of this to make my cover a better suit to the enigmatic narrative of my trailer. It also makes my film seem more artistic and suit the usual Sight and Sound audience.

Both the cover image and the trailer create a sense of mystery and gore, and enforce the concepts I wanted to evoke about The Awakening. The gore is created on the magazine cover by the connotations of the red text and is enforced throughout my trailer with the use of fake blood. The mystery is created in the image on the cover by having me looking down like I have something to hide, and is created in the trailer by the close up shots of all of us grinning in a sinister way, making it difficult to determine the evil one. I was inspired by the mysterious look of the Total Film cover that featured Shutter Island. Like the makers of Shutter Island, I knew I couldn't exactly advertise my film on a cover, but I could send pictures out that would portray the artistic style of my film.

I wanted to keep the themes of mystery and body horror prominent in my poster too. I feel that managed to achieve both through my use of the torn image. By covering half of Em's face in blood I am showing an effective use of gore and connoting danger and death, and by showing the other half normal. This is taken from the film noir/low key lighting technique of half-light/half-dark which connotes that a character is a mix of good and evil. My poster intentionally creates confusion over which half of her personality is genuine. Again I went with red text to enforce the idea of danger and blood. The tagline 'WHO CAN YOU TRUST?' is the same one used at one of the final, and most effective, points in the trailer. Taglines are very important in drawing in an audience and something short like "THIS TIME IT'S WAR" for Aliens really help grab the attention of a wide audience and encourage good word of mouth. By using the text on both products, I was thinking that if somebody has just come out of the cinema and saw the trailer a couple of hours ago before the film, coming across the tagline again in poster-form will take them back to that key moment in the trailer and encourage them to watch it.