Initial ideas for Settings and Locations

Throughout the blogging process our film idea has been constantly changing, causing the setting and location to change. An idea I myself find very interesting would be that of a film surrounding the theme of ghosts, and in order to make this a success the surrounding location has to be somewhat scary and haunting. One thing we most definitely are looking to achieve is that even in everyday life scary occurences can happen, we feel this will result in a much better reaction and hopefully make it stay on the audiences mind even after the film.

Considering we draw such inspiration from films that include the theme of ghosts, its clear to see that most films surrounding this theme are set in a house for example, The Amityville Horror and The Haunting. I myself feel that using a setting that everyone can relate to in turn makes the film that little bit more unsettling. By using a house, a place that is often seen as a place of security and safety we feel we will be breaking the stereotype of this, giving the audience the impression that they aren't even safe in their own home.

As a group a huge decision we have to come up with is whether we are going to use more than one location in our film. Something we are not looking to do is over complicate our short film mainly due to the fact that we do not have as much time to make everything clear, so by using just one location, i.e the house, we can insure that the audience is enticed into this one evil place, so the horror doesn't stop throughout, Paranormal Activity was able to put this across extremely well, keeping the audience on edge with fear. If we do in fact decide to use multiple locations and settings we will have to make the extremely relevant and in a way must link to the house, for example, the houses garden which could be extremely scary with the use of a flash light, only lighting up a small part of the screen, however, even with the flash light the lighting could be rather hard in a garden, especially as the film would take place at night time. If we do finally decide to go with the location of a house, we need to ensure that the film doesn't at all look amateur, and not like a low budget student film that isn't even remotely scary. We will need to use the lighting of the house to our advantage to ensure that the film is extremely creepy by the use of dim lit rooms, with the occasional scare which will be rather subtle, e.g the occasional bang or sighting of a ghost, supported by that slow and somewhat eerie music playing throughout until the films finale which will be both memorable and scary.

By Anthony Wilson