Our narrative - based on a true life event

Part of our narrative is based on a true life story that is shown below. Combing my audience research with other members within our group, we found that people are most provoked when watching a horror film that’s based on a true life event or inspired by one.



Case study

The character named Annabelle in our narrative plays the role of the young suicide victim. We adapted this case study to fit into our narrative, which explains why Annabelle committed suicide (“...Annabelle commit suicide; from a drug overdose, due to the constant hassle of people calling her ‘crazy’ and the continuous terrorizing from Guinevere”).

Our narrative

This week we were put into our groups to start working towards our 3 production tasks consisting of the horror film poster, front magazine cover and trailer. As a group we decided on different themes that we would like to include in our trailer to begin with, and chose to base it on a real life event of that we carried out research into and found a case study of an 11 year old girl that committed suicide. From this and relating to the paranormal, we came up with our narrative:


The narrative of our film features a young girl named Annabelle, aged 15, who lived with her mother, father and younger brother. She loved to write, especially poems. Every day she would write in her diary; a new poem and a chapter about her day concerning her emotions and feelings especially about how she was tormented and labelled about having mental health issues as she would hear voices and see ghosts. She believed that she haunted by a ghost who she named ‘Guinevere’ (around the age of 5, but no one knows) or otherwise known as ‘The ghost that lives at 134 Queens Road’, who manipulated and antagonized her constantly because all she wanted was someone to play with her and love her, like her mother never did. This eventually made Annabelle commit suicide; from a drug overdose, due to the constant hassle of people calling her ‘crazy’ and the continuous terrorizing from Guinevere. All she wanted was to be left alone. Guinevere was finally at peace when Annabelle died, as she finally got the friend she always wanted, now that Annabelle is in a spirit form. Leaving her at 134 Queens Road. When Annabelle died, all she left was her diary, and the mystery of her death unsolved. Until now. 17 years later, a family of four moves into the house that Annabelle committed suicide in. The family consists of single mother thirty six year old ‘Sandra’, her two brothers ‘Anthony’ (11 years old) and ‘Matthew’ (5 years old) and finally are main character ‘Tara’ who is 17 years of age. Tara finds a diary in her room and it happens to be the diary of Annabelle. She tells her mother about the diary and its contents and Sandra insists that she stops reading it and throws it out. Tara disregards what her mother says and still continues to read it and gradually creepy and abnormal things start to happen for example the noise of a young teenage girl crying. Sandra asks around the neighbourhood if anybody has ever heard of anything on the history of the house, one neighbour expresses that they heard of a teenage girl committing suicide, with this information Sandra goes on to the internet to research the house and finds an article on a blog website form ex neighbours about the ghost of Annabelle that they believe exists in 134 Queens Road. Sandra goes through Tara’s room and tries to throw away the diary believing that this would put a stop to all the unusual activity, but it does not. Tara believes that something is watching and haunting her and a series of events occur that makes it apparent that the ghost of Annabelle does actually exist. This results in Tara becoming mad and she leaves her house. To this day she has been missing. Without a signal warning or sign to know where she has gone. Leaving her family to believe that she may be missing forever, and even the possibility of her being dead. Now all they can do is wait for a knock on the door, a phone call, or a spiritual sign, just something that would tell them that she is still with us.

General update

We have been looking at how to write narratives during lesson, and as a class came up with a list of fears in contemporary society which will help us as a starting point in creating and developing our narratives.

Fears in contemporary society

As a group we then decided to brainstorm ideas that we found most interesting and which we wanted to explore within our narrative. Below is the brainstorm I wrote with the different ideas we came up with as a group.

Brainstorming ideas

After carrying our the brainstorm we all liked the idea of our horror movie being based off of a true story and having elements of the supernatural in it. We chose to look for a real life suicidal victim who had died from an overdose of pills and from depression. The bases of our narrative would go along the lines of a new family moving into the house where a girl committed suicide. Another member of the family would find a diary in the house and as she reads it, paranormal things start to happen, leading to the death of some family members.

In the next few days we will be writing the full narrative up and I will be looking for a case study of a suicidal victim.

The Blair Witch Project Parody

As part of our first group task, our challenge was to create a scene inspired by a horror movie that we had all seen. We were only given a short space of time of two days to get this production done, which included filming, editing, and finding a suitable location. We created a parody of The Blair Witch Project by emphasis on the appearance of the actual Blair Witch at the end. The reason why we chose the Blair Witch was simply because we wanted to give a good production with the limited resources and time we had. By the scenes consisting of only handheld shots, we were able to blend different re-enacted scenes together and create a mini extract similar to what you'd find in the Blair Witch Project movie, except with the appearance of the witch at the end.

                      

My group!

Earlier this week were given the groups that we are going to be in for the production of our new horror film promotional package. I will be in a group with 3 other people who are, Beth, Asha and Ellesha. Things to remember through the production will be teamwork and our communication skills, so that we are completing tasks that are set on time, and work efficiently towards the deadlines for each of the different products we will be creating.

 Asking around the group I found out that Beth's strength was using Premiere Pro and that Ellesha know's how to create music through different programs on the Apple mac computers. When it comes to the production of our trailer, this will work towards our advantage as we have two group members that are familiar with different things. As for myself and Asha, we will probably be taking charge of the poster and magazine, although these things may change towards the start of production. 

Audience Reseach - experimentation booth

The soundtrack we used is here below to listen to:

Audience Research - focus group results

Results that we got back from our focus group were:

-When there’s soft talking, barely any background music, and suddenly a loud outbreak of suspense type music is played it jumps the audience - "...Big loud noise and you didn't expect it!"

-When things are thrown at the screen, such as in paranormal activity when man comes flying towards the camera, it makes the audience jump – this may be because they fear the fact that the person/object is up so close, almost as if they're trying to get out of the screen and come into contract with the audience

- A comment made that I found significant was "I think filming it documentary style makes it more real". We came to a concluded that this would be effective because when the characters are talking to the camera, like a documentary presenter, it engages with the audience directly, and they feel as if they are a part of whats taking place on screen.