BLK Film Making Conventions and Cultural Codes HW

The scene I chose to analyse is from a horror movie called 'Insidious'.

Film Making Conventions:

- In this film clip, the camera uses low key lighting in order to draw the audience's attention to one thing. The way this is done is by focusing the lantern on one element of the scene at a time, for example just one face as shown at 0:43.
- Lighting is also used to show the entire room in a dim light to add mystery and evoke a fear of the unknown from the audience. Candles are used for this purpose, and it also shows the scary family in relation to each other in the way they are positioned around the room.
- The scene opens with a cheerful yet slightly unnerving whistling sound that disturbs the viewer. This is because there is something menacing about the location and that sound merged together - something doesn't seem quite right. In this way, the audience feels like they expect something to happen and anticipate it. This whistling carries on right up until the shooting which gradually builds suspense.
- Two different time periods are incorporated as one which disorientates the audience. It seems like the man from our time is intruding on a normal family from the 1930s, watching TV, ironing and reading the newspaper. What makes this even more unnerving is the fact that a sense of normality surrounds the family, yet the overly cheerful sound effects over absolute silence tend to connotate danger. This sense of normality is disrupted when the gun shots are fired and the gruesome smiles displayed on the faces of these people establish are freaky and agitating.

Cultural Codes:

- The man is alone and isolation is a typical feature of a victim in horror films.
- The action seems to take place in a dark room/cellar, typically related to horror films. We are unsure of the dimensions of this room as we only have the dim light of the few candles and the lantern to go by.
- Long shots are used to convey that we don't know how big the room is or what could be lurking in the shadows.
- The family start off as unresponsive but are established as threatening when they show signs of life, for example the woman blinking at 0:46. To accompany and emphasize this even further, scary and unorganized music sounds at this point.
- At 1:41, the camera does a close up on the shooters face. It is a young innocent girl with a psycho smile on her face which flips the identity of what is conventionally the victim, to be in this case the villain.

Film Still Homework

We decided to depict a horror movie in our shots and used the school cellar as our setting. We chose to take the pictures here because it was eerie and mysterious - very fitting to a typical horror film. The girl in this medium shot is the conventional victim, a young woman desperately trying to escape from a dark room through an old and run-down looking door. From what you can see of her expression, their is a sense of panic and urgency to get out of the door, increasing the audiences fear of the unknown and what could be lurking in the shadows. As the girl is a teenager, the film would most likely be aimed at teenagers or young adults.

We deliberately succumbed the inside of the cellar into darkness by turning off all the lights. This meant we could keep the location under wraps and draw the focus more onto the girl, who is looking down and fumbling with the door handle in a hurried attempt to get out. The shot was taken from a slight high angle, to give the impression that the girl is smaller than she actually is and therefore in a state of vulnerability. The light generally points towards the girl who is in the centre of the shot and thus the object of attention. We also included a frame inside a frame to emphasise her entrapment and to express this more vividly to the viewer.

If I were to reshoot, I would suggest even darker lighting, as although this is quite low-key, it isn't dark enough to instantly convey the horror genre. We could've also done the shot from further away and at a higher angle, to make her look even more innocent and in danger.

Film Still Analysis

This shot shows an older girl, dressed in an old fashioned nightgown standing over a little girl. This little girl seems to resemble a classic horror film victim - young pretty and blonde. She is lying in a pink bed, suggesting innocence. She is in the foreground whereas the menacing looking girl is in the background, giving the audience the full picture on whats going on. This creates dramatic irony, as the audience can sense that something bad is about to happen whereas the little girl lies there obliviously and peacefully, engulfed in her sleep. It evokes a desire to protect her from the bad thing that's inevitably about to happen. Despite the older girl being slightly out of the center of the frame, the light has been focused on her and the white nightgown emphasizes the light even further. This suggests she is very significant to what is about to happen and gives a sense of danger and suspense. This is a low angle shot, taken from the level of the little girl sleeping, making the older girl look bigger than she actually is. We also relate to the victim in this way, as we are looking up at the older girl while she looks down on the girl sleeping.