Short Film Assignment - Evaluation Essay

The short film project was recently completed, with the short film ha verve ving been released and myself as well as my peers are left to reflect and evaluate our film and ideas.

Original Ideas

The idea that we spawned as a group was to create a found-footage "analogue horror" short film, which took inspiration (in my eyes) from 'The Blair Witch Project' and 'No Through Road'. Myself as well as my group, were keen to create a short film which would test boundaries and conventional styles of cinematography and horror films as a whole. We attempted unorthodox techniques, filmed in unusual ways and even attempted to convey that our film was set in the 1990's, specifically the year 1997. Hence the name, 'HOMEVIDEO97'.

Analogue-horror is a style of film and media which is on the rise, due to the digital age and the heavy involvement of people of my generation on the internet, with the internet having cultural significance among "Generation Z." Analogue-horror, uses equipment, filming styles and effects, that are reminiscent of the analogue-age of home entertainment. Analogue television was permanently discontinued in 2009 and this is where the cultural significance to people of our generation comes in.

Many people born around the time that myself and my partners on the project were, (with all of the team including myself having been born in 2004), would have a nostalgic connection to analogue television, with it being a brief period in the early and delicate years of their childhood. However, with this emotional attachment, comes the opportunity for meddling with such a sensitive shared memory, which the entire target audience can relate to. Analogue horror, takes these old, slowly fading memories of our youth and analogue home entertainment and twists them, creating the stuff of nightmares from our own memories that become ever more vague as we grow up. Thus, analogue horror fascinates many people and is a rising star in the modern world of entertainment, particularly on the internet which as mentioned before, has cultural significance to people of my generation.

Research and Development

During the early stages of pre-production, myself as well as my two teammates conjured up ideas for the short film, taking inspiration from a variety of productions. The ones that I proposed to my peers, were 'No Through Road', 'Kairo' and 'The War of the Worlds'. No Through Road had the shaky camerawork and VHS effect that we were after and was initially believed to be a real piece of found footage due to the perceived authenticity of the video, especially considering it was released in the late 2000's, well before analogue-horror took off as a genre. Kairo, featured an unorthodox method of 'jumpscaring', in which the ghost in the film, rather than pop out in front of the audience, instead slowly and unsteadily walked towards the camera, whilst being over to the left hand side of the screen. It was the ghost from this film, that gave me the idea for the antagonist for our own short film, known as 'B.O.B', who I have already made a blog post about. Then, there was The War of the Worlds, which featured groundbreaking special effects for the 1950's and so inspired me to use red lights against dark backgrounds (inspired by the stroboscopic lights of the martians) to make the character B.O.B stand out, as well as give the character some scene presence.

I also looked into methods of contrasting lighting, most notably Chiaroscuro, which was the art technique/style of interspersing extreme light and dark in the same image, which also helped to create atmosphere within our short film with scenes like the glowing television in the dimly-lit room and the scenes where the audience could see B,O.B's glowing red eyes. Something else I researched, was the film 'Baby Driver', which among the critical acclaim, has also gained attention for its unique use of diegetic music. The music that Baby, the main protagonist of the film listens to, is only heard by himself within the reality of the film and the audience behind the fourth wall.

Target Audience

The target audience for this short film was, as mentioned before, those who have also had the recently blossoming genre of analogue-horror hit their radar. This would encompass people born between 2002 and 2005 (however this is not a completely inch-perfect claim). Among them would be media students, art students and music students because to me, these, as the most creative courses that one can study at college, would require a creative mind, one that strays from academics and would rather fixate on the multi-faceted, dimensionless realms of unconventional creative content which rejects any sort of conformist values. Music, art and media can all demand and release unconventional products that can appeal to the fringe audiences of all genres.

Inspirations

A popular analogue-horror staple of the internet would be 'The Backrooms', which is related to the loose concept of "liminal spaces" (known as spaces in which a lack of people would create a feeling of unsettlement and revulsion from the viewer, who would feel disturbed by the lack of entities within such an environment. A shopping centre would be a good example, with such places normally being bustling with activity, they would look ghostly if there was an absence of life.

Much inspiration was taken from the backrooms for our short film, with many nods being given to 'Kane Pixels', an internet video creator who has specialised his expertise in the concept of the backrooms, creating an entire analogue-horror web series surrounding the universe of such a liminal space, using VHS effects like ours. Our prop for the short film, known as B.O.B, was inspired by the entities that some believe to lurk in such a space, filling the gap that the absence of human beings leaves behind in such spaces. Some see the concept of entities lurking in the backrooms as a "corrupted memory" in which ghosts and apparitions have taken refuge.

On the topic of liminal spaces and more specifically, the backrooms, corridors are commonplace in such imagery, often providing a sense of mystery to the image, with the viewer most likely wondering what could be lurking in the empty space between the foreground and the background of the image, with dim lighting in the background and intense lighting in the foreground helping to add to this sense of mystery. We did end up using a corridor shot in the final production, in which our entity, B.O.B, peeks out from behind a door, which the viewer has to actively look for to spot, as well as outside a window earlier on in the short film. Unfocused scares are considered by me, to far scarier than more conventional, direct scares, because they are less obvious and are to be discovered which gives a far creepier edge in my opinion.

Practical Skills

In terms of the practical skills I developed, this project gave me an opportunity to develop many and try my hand at others. I had never once been involved in prop design prior to the creation of this short film, but once the idea for an antagonist had been spawned by myself and my group, I headed over to the art room in college and used some black card cut into the shape of a torso, as well as thin red paper for the phone torch lights to illuminate to create the design for B.O.B.

I also managed to create two sound effects which can be heard in the short-film when the warning message displays on the television and when B.O.B is seen stalking our protagonists. They serve as diegetic sounds, but also help to create a mood in the short-film, to unsettle the audience and give the implications that our protagonists are in a bad situation.

I also tried my hand at camerawork, being the camera-operator for the opening scene in the film. I used a tripod which I carried from the edge of the living room until it was adjacent to the television in the same room, at the start of the film. When the "explosion" hits, I had to jump across the room, taking the camera and tripod with me whilst making sure not to break anything. It was easily the least safe thing I have done in the entirety of the course, however in practice, the stunt was not too difficult to perform and we were left with a satisfactory shot which captured the chaos that we wanted to out across in the scene.

Short Film Screening

There were multiple factors to the short films that we viewed as a class today. We looked at a multitude of decisive conventions, techniques and attitudes which had a say in the quality and style of the finished products. The majority of the short films were of the horror genre, which meant that the art of tension was used in bulk by many of the students. Shrill sound effects, long and silent pauses as well as dim and dark lighting were all featured in the films of such a genre that we viewed as a class. Our short film used elements of tension, but they were not in any way dramatic or cinematic, rather coming from the silence which was present in areas of our short film.

Sound was used to fill the gap in audio left by the absence of dialogue in the silent films. Higher volume levels for sound effects assisted in creating the desired atmosphere of the films,

Effectiveness of my Outcomes

I believe that my short film as a media product was a success. I think that we dared to be different, straying from conventional paths of production, trying out unique techniques which would set us apart from our peers within the class. We merged analogue-horror with found-footage style horror films, creating a unique, claustrophobic and dark atmosphere which I believe that most viewers would find gripping and refreshing, with our genre-merging serving as an outlet for the unconventional horror-media most commonly consumed by our generation. As mentioned before, our short-film takes nostalgic collective memories of a generation and binds them with psychological horror which gives the viewer a feeling of uneasiness.