Research: Seven intro sequence

Seven has an incredible introduction, in the short space of two minutes, eight seconds, we see many, many images related to forensic science and detective work, giving an early insight to the film's atmosphere; a gritty murder mystery story.

Below is my timeline:
0:01, we see a book in a dark atmosphere, "New line cinema presents" dashing across a small space in the scene, a page is turned.
0:06, director's name "An Arnold Kopelson production", no background emphasises his importance in this film.
0:08, a diagram of two hands are shown on screen, at 0:11, "a film by David Fincher" appears on top of the image.
0:12, a metal device is turned, we then cut to a razor, slicing some paper.
0:13 "Brad Pitt", written in a blackboard style font to emphasize the autopsy atmosphere.
0:15 the razor slices some skin off from a finger
0:17 "Morgan Freeman"
0:20, a teabag is dipped into a mug
0:21, autopsy photograph of a murder victim
0:22, teabag is shown mixing in with the water
0:23, "Se7en" dashes across the screen, at 0:26 a stack of books appear.
0:28, a photo album is opened
0:29, the pages in the book shown at 0:01 are being turned again
0:30, many cast names are shown against a black backdrop
0:32, a document is being written out
0:33, "Richard Roundtree"
0:36, a photograph is shown developing in a darkroom
0:38, "R. Lee Ermy"
0:39, a film strip of photographs being cut by a pair of scissors
0:40, scissors cut another photo by a book
0:41, John C McGinley
0:43, sellotape being sliced by a metal blade and a photo over a document
0:45, extreme close up of a dollar bill, "In God we trust"
0:46, more staff names appear
0:48, another autopsy photograph is shown
0:50, a document with lots of writing on it is turned over
0:53, staff member names
1:00, a small amount of writing is smudged by a finger
1:02, a document is censored by a black marker
1:03, another document is turned over
1:04, staff names
1:07, more censoring on a document
1:10, a photograph is censored by a marker and crew names are shown
1:16, a document is written up by a darkroom pool
1:19, a strip of photographs is held over a document.
1:24, Staff names
1:26, a document is stuck together with more staff names appearing at the bottom.
1:29, a page is turned revealing another document
1:31, an autopsy photo is shown
1:35, a page is turned and more names are shown
1:37, a needle is being pulled out from in between a finger and a thumb
1:39, producer and co producer names
1:42, string is threaded through the eye of a needle
1:43, another autopsy photo is shown with producer names shown
1:47, needle is threaded through two pages of documents
1:51, cast names
1:54, book shelf with cast names
1:58, producer names shown against a dark background
2:01, the word "God" being removed from the bill from 45 seconds in, implying the atmosphere of the film
2:05, "Directed by David Fincher"

From the sheer length of this timeline, you can see without reading that this sequence is packed with information.

Planning: Storyboards

In our class we've been working on our storyboards, these will act as our guide to the filming as it shows the script we will follow, timing and the settings. It can also help to keep our place in the filming to keep things linear.

The filming shall take place in the church walk and proceed with Craig departing from his friend (still needing to be identified) and walk through the woods:

 The first frame shows our title scene, or rather the original concept of it's appearence. I do not know if we will use it yet or not, but at the planning session, it did not seem correct.



 The first frame shows where Craig starts running from the villain, and then he trips. We did not know if this would be a good idea because it is so horribly stereotypical, but in the end we decided to use it regardless.

Finally in these frames, Craig is crawling away after being wounded in the leg, but he is picked up by the villain and stabbed.

The villain takes his mask off and we zoom into Craigs face and then out of the mask, this is where the second proposition for the title to appear takes place.

Research: Psycho shower analysis

In our classes we have been studying the psycho shower scene in which the Hotel owned, dressed as his mother, attacks and kills the victim as shown below:


This is to show us how to film a scene with multiple angles, and also use props cleverly, as in this scene, they used chocolate sauce in place of blood, and the stabbing sound effects were made by stabbing a melon.
Psycho is widely considered a classic, and while I doubt our movie will be considered a classic, we hope to do well nonetheless.

Research and planning: Sound and music.

Sounds and music are crucial in atmospheric movies such as the horror genre, as they add an atmosphere and can foreshadow events adding to the suspense in horror.

As of such, planning the sounds and music was quite difficult, as we needed to get everything right in order to make this film seem like a horror.

The first thing I needed was a main theme, I was quite reluctant to use some of the internet's royalty free music as most of it was either terrible or not fitting to the theme of the film. Luckily however, I listen to Orchestrations from ZREO music, which takes soundtracks from Zelda games and orchestrates them into different music altogether.
Although this sounds like an odd source of music, ZREO Music was happy to provide music to people who puts special thanks in where due and also informing the staff, which I did both of.

Below is the email I sent

Sensitive information such as names and emails have been blacked out.

Unfortunately I did not get a reply but luckily I did not require one to use the theme, all I needed was to let them know of the project and with that completed I was able to use the theme I was looking at.

The sounds however, were luckily already installed to the system. At first I was reluctant to use predefined sounds but there was a lot of good sounds there, including the winds sound at the title and my first appearance, and also the stabbing sounds at the end.

Research and planning: Fonts.

Deciding what fonts we were going to use was a lengthy and arduous process; especially with the large variety of fonts at our disposal, and then even more so with the layer blending properties afterwards. It was not an easy task, but given the settings, forests and desolate areas, we figured we would need something narrow and threatening, and so I watched various films set in similar areas and took note of those fonts.
The first film I watched, was Blair Witch Project; infamously set in the forest where we as an audience felt completely lost alongside the students in the film, the theme suited ours perfectly, so naturally I figured that the font would also fit our purpose.

However, the context of the film in itself was the wrong genre, and even though the title suited the theme of the Blair Witch Project, it ultimately would be underwhelming in our film.

The second film I looked at was Scream. Although not set in a forest, the genre of the film was the same; slasher, so I decided that would be my next film to watch.

The title is distorted and so I decided that our title should ultimately be distorted also, but I thought that it wasn't enough, so I took this type of font and narrowed it down into the title font we have now.

It took a little while for the font to look just right, and I decided to use the shadow under the font from scream to make the film work.

I believe that despite all of the work put into finding this font, I find that it suits the film well and I am rather proud of it. I believe that it would be difficult to improve it much more.

Horror movie preperation: Settings and locations.

Ever since my initial idea way back in October, we have always had our settings cast on the woods in town by the cemetary.
Below are some photos of our location.

This first shot will be where Craig and his friend are walking from town to the church yard, this is where Craig bids fairwell to his friend and walks away.

This second shot is where Craig will walk past, this is going to be in the opening title sequence.

This is the shot we will see Craig entering the woods, this will also be in a lower lighting as this shot seems too inviting.

 The next few shots are of the pathway Craig will take in the rest of the film.

Horror movie preperation: Film title.

The film title was always a discussion in our group for the horror movie, however we had to split the group in half when we learned it was too large. In the new group (Craig and myself) we decided upon a title, "The dead woods" as it was foreboding and the setting for the intro was the woods. This title may not be permanant, however, as we are still considering other options.

Research: Dracula intros

In our media class, our next task is to plan and prepare for the intro scene to a horror movie. After watching 3 movie intros of our own during the autumn holiday, we watched 3 dracula intros:

The first film we watched was the intro to the 1922 horror film Nosferatu, by F. W. Murnau, this film was bright and cheerful in the intro, but the opening credits were dark and had a loud low key tune playing.

The second film we watched was the 1958 Dracula, starring Christopher Lee, by Terence Fisher, this film like Nosferatu was bright in the intro but the shot zoomed into a coffin which then had blood thrown on it to show a foreboding tone.

The third and final film we used to research was the 1992 Dracula, by Francis Ford Coppola, Starring Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, this film opened on a narrative providing the audience with Dracula's story on how he became a vampire. The film intro used low key lighting and used plenty of iconography such as maps with the muslim religion symbol dominating it to connote an invasion.

The conventions we picked up on in these activities provided us with invaluable conventions to use in our coursework once filming begins.