Evaluation of my 2 minute film opening

I believe that my 2 minute opening uses a variety of different horror conventions effectively throughout the entire production. It uses the dark eerie lighting throughout the entire production, the overgrown alleyway really helped to capture this darkness in the chase scene as you can tell from the difference in lighting in the opening 2 shots, this was a slight downfall at times however as the digital camera I was using was very light sensitive, if there was too much light then getting a normal looking scene was quite difficult to achieve. If there was not enough lighting then the scene looks too dark, making the transitions between shots not flow as smoothly as i had first intended, here are some examples to show you the difference in lighting I had due to this problem of sensitivity with my camera.

In some scenes this problem made it very difficult too see what exactly was going on, one of my scenes was meant to be a POV of one of the infected chasing the main character, however due to the problem with lighting you could barely see the small scene. My target audience did not seem to notice however so maybe I am just being too harsh on myself. I believe that this problem made parts of my introduction lose continuity, however my target audience seemed to rate it highly and nothing was mentioned on lighting in my comments. Here are some examples of what I mean:

I think that my film opening effectively uses sound throughout the entire duration, I worked particularly hard on this part of editing to ensure that my product made the most of the soundtrack and that the pace of editing matched and reflected the pace of the music. Here is my film opening again to show you what I mean:



My film opening uses a wide variety of short and long shots to ensure that my end product was as smooth as possible, this was another point that was mentioned by a peer media student in my consumer feedback which supports my point. I tried to use a variety of more imaginative shots such as the infected running into then back out of the camera to reinforce to the audience that there is no camera there making the scene look more lifelike as well as the close up birds eye view and the stationary on the floor shot I used aimed at monster fodder, both of these quick shots were used to speed up the chase scene and were used in conjunction with editing to make my opening as effective as possible. In my POV shot of the infected I used quick cuts to speed up the chase scene and masked them as the infected blinking, I believe this was an effective method of speeding up time as the origional chase scene was far longer than what is in my opening, I wanted to make sure that I did not drag the scene on for to long and more my target audience.

My film opening was obviously shot in an isolated location of an alleyway and a close which is a typical horror convention, isolated locations are used primarily to reinforce the point that there is no help coming for our protagonist which makes the audience worry more for them when something dangerous comes along. Again as I said before during the chase scene I used monster fodder to show the audience what happens when the infected catch who they are chasing, the mysterious man appears to be dead, but later on in the opening it shows that actually he has just become one of them. I brought him back into the opening by using him in a jumpy scene which are typical of horror scenes to give the audience a quick thrill of excitement.

Usually there is a disruption of normallity in horror films, however an infected chase and murder scene does not happen in real life so my target audience get their normality from real life. My opening also starts off backwards if that makes sence in the fact that it starts off with a chase scene then introduces the story, just to give the audience a taste of what's to come in the rest of the film. Horror films typically use this to introduce their main threat through the use of monster fodder, I have used the same technique but without it actually happening in the film due to the use of the dream sequence.