Here’s my recommended song for this post.
Well another unit in PLP has come to a close. We have officially moved into another unit and “completed” our Horror project.
Last blog post was back in November and a fair bit has happened since then. Ultimately leading to this.
I’ll explain why it’s a trailer later on but let’s begin with a small recap.
So way back in October our class journeyed down to Seattle where we began to explore horror a little more in-depth. We also began looking at our final product. The Horror Film. We began with deciding roles within the class, crafting a rough idea for our story, just generally begin to think about it more seriously. I ended up with the role of co-producer with Sam.
We were pretty much the people who were responsible for the film finishing on time and meeting the deliverables required.
By the time we had left Seattle, we had gotten a rough idea of what our story was going to shape up to be. There would be two groups of kids, who were at the school pulling grad pranks, the janitor is there as well, sees the pranks and begins a killing spree. The first few kills force the group together and ultimately try to escape. Only two make it out, the two most innocent/pure. We wanted to play with some of the tropes of horror and use those stereotypes to comment on the way people perceive teenagers and the stereotypes they “follow”.
The week after Seattle, both Willemse and Hughes were away, so we began work on creating the story. The one problem with starting it all off is that we have 4 script writers an a ton of people who are there for future phases of the project. So, the real challenge was finding things for others to be doing while the story was under development. By the end of the week the script was well on its way and we had a basis to move forward.
Instead we watched some movies. Which, don’t get me wrong was useful, it was just very time consuming. I found the first two extremely helpful for me personally to visualize what horror movies are all about (before I had not been one for horror). After those two (Halloween and Get Out) I had a solid understanding of the different aspects of film and how things were kind of going to shape up. The class had a general consensus on what the film was going to shape to be and the films helped to scope that.
So after the films we got back to work. (At this point we are within the last weeks of November which is end of term and everything is going crazy in all classes) We started off with a lot of script crafting. The first week or so was spent on making sure everyone understood the story and a lot of changes were made to try to ensure that the audience would have clarity on what was actually going on. Ultimately we were making this so a random person could watch this and understand it all. This was the beginning of where things began to fall apart a little. The story was changed quite heavily, or at least it seemed that way to most of us, than what we started out with. We had the two groups of kids getting caught and having to return after school for detention, forced to clean up their mess the janitor gets fed up with the kids and starts killing them off. Both groups believe it’s the other group doing the killing and it all leads to a confrontation. The groups discover that it’s someone else doing the killing not them, so they try to find a way out of the school, a couple more kids die and then it all culminates at the final fight scene between the select few remaining and the killer (the janitor). Two finally escape and drive off, believing the janitor is dead. During that time they all undergo massive breaking down of the stereotypes they originally had and what’s left is their true personality.
With the story and script under our belts, then began the next step in production. We had to get everything ready to go for filming. This is where things began to fall apart. We had to assign acting roles, do call sheets, scheduling, set design, art design, table reads, story boarding and equipment checks before we began filming. What the problems came down to was a couple of things; organization of people and their jobs, organization for things going on on set, knowledge of roles and knowledge of the actual story. Now as one of the producers it was my responsibility to try to right the course of all this, I didn’t really acknowledge that fact which contributed to the downward spiral things kinda took. We moved into filming anyway because we had a dealing to meet and needed time for post-production. Some of the filming was ok but the storyboard was largely a skeleton of what we kinda needed, so a lot of the shots were being thought of while we were setting up the scene and even during shooting.
After our first proper night of filming we had a class sit down where we had to write a reflection of the project so far and our current stance on if we should continue with it or not. The majority of the class wanted to continue with it but we needed to change one things up in order to be as successful as we could at that point. So Sam and I stepped down from the producer roles and he became the cinematographer and I became the 2nd assistant director, boom operator and post-production supervisor. Adam (our first director) also stepped down and was put into an acting role and one of the post production team members. Spencer then moved into the producer role and Willa moved into the director role.
After that change things started to move a little better, I think having that first kind of run through was helpful for us to understand how things were going and what we can do to correct those mistakes. My main task from that point forward was the call sheets and scheduling. It was my job to figure out when we could film, who could be there and what we would film. Our deadline was pushed back once again to the end of December (at this point in time we had 2 weeks left). So we spent the first week gathering scheduling and fixing all of the pre-filming tasks. The call sheets were quite tedious and took a lot of changes and tweaks to make it close to working out. Ultimately we would be a few hours over on the allocated times regardless of how fast we were.
We began liking on the Saturday before our last week of school and ended on the Wednesday of that week. We missed three of our planned shots and had to cut some parts and scenes out of the script to even try to make it work. In the end we didn’t have enough footage and were missing the entire climax so we turned it into a trailer, using most of the footage we had.
The main focus of the project was on three general competencies; Teamwork, Language communication and Continuity & Change. The original purpose of the film and the general plot description looks at continuity and change in the characters stereotypes. Some change and some don’t and those who do change survive. The meaning behind that I feel is that when you change/adapt to what’s going on you will be more successful, you learn quickly and can work effectively. Now with the language communication, there is not much shown within the trailer for it and despite the countless revisions to the script, I would say it’s not the strongest. It is a High School film so it wouldn’t have been any Hollywood level project but I think our idea comes across and it really would have been up to the audience to decipher it the way we intend. I felt that the changes were evident within the script and correctly portray those ideas of continuity & change. When it comes to teamwork that can sway both ways. I feel this time round working with the whole class proved a little problematic at the best of times. In the end we came together and tried our best in the last week to get as much done as we could. Some things fell apart in some communication aspects and understanding everyone’s roles within the production, which did affect the outcome.
Some of the big things I learned from the unit is how horror plays such a huge role within society. We use it as a guilty pleasure and enjoy scaring ourselves. It seems a little odd but makes sense the more you think about it. When you look at horror in a different lens, other than it scaring your friends which can be funny, it can be seen as a comment on society. If you take Get Out for example it was riddled with American culture and addressed the modern racism people are seeing in today’s world. I found t really interesting to learn to see horror in that sense and it’s actually really effective for that.
I also learned a lot about my leadership style. I have always been a quieter person when it came to being in charge. I don’t like the whole yelling and screaming thing, that’s not how I operate. With this project I validated my thoughts on how I lead. I work on being a guiding presence with my team members and take a chill stance on things. That was not what was needed for this specific project which is one of the reasons the role changes occurred. I think moving forward I hope to work on ensuring when I am put in a leadership role that I have full knowledge of my deliverables and ensure that those are what are focused on with myself and my teams efforts. In the past my “chill” leadership has worked quite well an that is who I am as a person so I don’t intend to overly change that but work to improve the overall outcome of the projects I am involved in.
This was a really long Unit/project and despite all the twists and turns it was quite interesting at times and I’m able to look at film in a very different scope than before. I’m really looking forward to the next units though as they are a little more up my alley. Vietnam here we come.