Film Opening 

After so much stress and nights without sleep, it's finally out, hope you enjoy!

Here it is.

Whoop whoop

CCR 

    Oh my goddd, the end is near

CCR #1

Genuinely don't know how I finished this in time. Here it is.

CCR #2

Here it is. Podcast!!!!

 Reflection

    And so here we finally are, April 2nd. It feels so surreal to finally say "I'm done" after spending the last two months of my life stressing over this but as Greg Hirsch would say: "if it is to be said, so it be...so it is" I'M DONE. This entire experience has be so...crazy??? After so much (fake) blood, sweat, and some tears, I uploaded by final project on YouTube. The little pessimistic, perfectionist voice in my head is telling me that it's horrible and reminding me of all the little editing mishaps, but most of all I'm trying to be as proud and happy with my final result as my mind will let me. Seeing this idea form before my very eyes, starting off as a half-baked idea that had so much trouble developing to a pretty decent opening has been quite interesting to witness. I'm so excited to take A level next year and already starting to think a little about what I'm gonna do. This is my last blog post before I post my final project ad CCRs, and well, this is it I guess? To anyone who happens to be reading this, thank you for putting up with my absolute delusional midnight ideas and breakdowns. Hasta la vista, blog.

 CCR Script #2

    

(1)How does your product use or challenge conventions and (2)how does it represent social groups or issues?

    1. When I was starting to develop the idea for this production, I fell into this I guess rabbit hole of horror films. I watched so many horror openings and read so many opinions on what make a "good" horror film opening. I quickly realized that, with horror, audiences want to be immediately entrapped by the opening. For many great horror films, the first few minutes begin with a terrifying scene, often used to give context to the rest of the story, but not completely related to the actual plot of the rest of the film. My production mimics an opening like this to try to engage audiences by using conventions of the horror genre. Aside from the slightly obvious stereotypical production choices, the dark room and creepy statuette, the actual plot takes many traditional horror aspects and adapts them into this new idea. As part of the paranormal horror sub-genre, this production fits into the "possession" trope. TV Tropes calls this specific body snatchers trope a demonic possession and defines it as "A spirit or energy being who puts the host's mind in a straitjacket.". It's not much of a subverstion of this trope, but rather an adaptation for a new story. 

   2. While writing my script, especially working in the horror genre, I knew that I wanted to represent teenagers in my production. The most obvious reason being that it's what I know best. But also, teenagers make up a large majority of the audience for horror. It's the third most popular genre amongst Generation Z (9 years old to 27 years old), and specifically for paranormal horror, the average age of the audience is 27% younger than the general moviegoing crowd. From the first minute of my production, I wanted to show how social pressure and general teen stupidity can lead to something like this, obviously not literally, since getting possessed by a spirit is quite unlikely, but in figurative horrific manner. Within the opening sequence, I wanted to represent this theme through the limited dialogue that I incorporated throughout the opening. Phrases like "it'll be fun" give the impression that these kids do not have consequences in mind before doing something of this magnitude. Although the characters introduced in the opening scene don't make an appearance later on in the film, their scene serves a purpose to introduce the issues, groups, and tone that the rest of the film will be exploring.

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

(3) I set out to first and foremost, to make the most engaging, atmospheric, and scary product that I could with the resources I had. I was heavily inspired by the genuinely terrifying and abrupt openings from horror films like It Follows and Talk to Me. Again, since I chose the horror genre, I tried to make a production that could be relatable and scary for the target younger audience by incorporating not only classic genre conventions from horror films like possessions and rituals, but also by incorporating certain genre conventions from teen movies, such as parties (although albeit mine was a small get together since I couldn't get a big enough cast) and through mise-en-scene elements like clothing. Mostly though, I used production techniques to engage with my audience. The atmospheric music was chosen not to scare the audience, but rather to give an impression of eeriness to the entire scenario. The dark setting only being lighted by candles again is used for the purpose to build this atmosphere. Of course, the "scarier" elements are introduced once the opening goes on the situation escalates. The purpose of the opening is to introduce the audience to these characters, make them slightly attached to them, and then completly flip the script, this way the audience is already gripped onto the plot from the beginning.

(4)     Since this a smaller production, it unfortunately won't have a theater release. However, to gain audiences, Malignance will premiere in various film festivals, specifically horror or genre based ones such as the Fantastic Fest in which The Last Night in Soho and Titane premiered. Additionally, Malignance would be released on the streaming service shudder, which is self-described as a the  premium streaming service with the best selection of horror, thriller and supernatural movies and series uncut and commercial free, from Hollywood favorites and cult classics to original series and critically-acclaimed new films you won’t find anywhere else.

 CCR Research and Script #1

Podcast 

(Script:)

-Hi everyone, welcome back to In Between the Scenes. Today we're here with Daniela Saffon, writer and director of the upcoming film Malignance. How are you doing today? 

-I'm good thank you

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

(Script: So, this being your debut film, how did your production skills develop throughout the project?)

Answer: I learned so much working on this project. I started this off with not much experience in production, and this was a perfect chance to bring together everything I learned and worked on this year. Even though I have some sort of experience with video production, this being my first time directing something was particularly difficult for me. Having full control (and responsibility) of this project felt like a huge weight on my shoulders. I made a big mistake early in the project by taking a risk and using equipment that I had never used before and it didn't pay off, causing me to have to reshoot the entire project. But again, that was a huge learning experience for me, and I realized first that there are times to experiment and times that doing what you know is best, and second, I learned that in a process like this there will be so many challenges and disappointments and you just have to be constantly adapting and improvising.

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

(Script: And I was wondering, in terms of software, hardware and online, how did you integrate technology into this production.)

Answer: Like I was talking about before I did make the poor risk of using "professional" equipment in my first shoot, it was my first time using a boom mic, camera tripod, and that specific camera. My inexperienced showed, so I ended up refilming my final shoot with my iPhone. I basically relied entirely on that technology in terms of shooting. I had a lighting set (which was basically two rgb lights and another standard light), a tripod, and my phone. I used Premiere Pro to edit the footage on my laptop, it's pretty comprehensive and great for editing not just footage but also audio. In terms of making the title card and credits, I used the graphic design application, Canva. And for any audio and sound, I used YouTube and copyright free sfx websites like Pixabay. 

(Script: "Wow ok. Thank you Daniela for joining us today, it was an insightful conversation."

Do Not Shoot Your Footage in HDR!! 

    So, after many, many hours on Premiere Pro (I'm so surprised my computer didn't end up crashing) I finally finalized my last draft of my project yayyyy. I split up the process depending on the day and importance of what I was working on, it went like this:

- Monday: editing the clips together to create the general structure (at this point, the video was over 3 minutes long).

- Tuesday: sound, editing dialogue, adding in sound effects, and music, as well as editing sound levels.

- Wednesday: color grading and shortening length

- Thursday: final edits

- Friday: exporting

    As someone who does NOT enjoy editing, this was one of the most tedious parts of the project. There are so many different aspects to editing that make it so difficult to make everything as close to your original vision.

    

Color Grading

    I have very little experience color grading (I usually prefer to do it on Lightroom too, but I chose just to color grade on premiere pro for now), so I'm not really sure how I feel about my final result.

Original footage

After color grading

Original footage

After color grading

     I don't know why, but it just looks really red to me??? I'll keep editing to see if I can make it look better, but I think this may be the final result.

Audio

    This may have been the process that took longest for me just out of the sheer amount of time it takes to find the exact copyright free music that matches what you're imagining. I ended finding this website called 99Sounds for copyright free sounds that was WONDERFUL. I downloaded their Halloween Sound Effects file, which came with 60 different horror sound effects. I used Atmosphere 2, Jumpscare!, Impact 2, 3, and 4, and Tension 1.

SS from the website

    I also downloaded their free jumpscare sound effect. Additionally, I used the ambient hum pitched from the YouTube Audio Library (part of YouTube Studio). From Pixabay I also used: Stinger 001, Demonic Whisper, Four_Voices_Whispering, HeavyBreathing, and Scared Breathing 2.

    To make the production logo intro, I used a xylophone eye blink sound from Pixabay and the horror intro sound effect and guitar sound effect from the 99Sounds Halloween Sound Effects packet.

Exporting

    Finally, Friday at 1 AM, I had finished editing, so I go to export it. Since it's a pretty small file, it only took about 4 minutes to export. I go to check out the whole exported video and it is SOOO overexposed and oversaturated, nothing how it looked while I was editing the sequence. Naturally, I started panicking and searching all over the internet to why the exported video looks like that. Apparently, Premiere Pro is in a different color setting (??) than how I filmed my footage (iPhone HDR setting). So, the first thing I tried doing was exporting in the QuickTime format rather that the standard H.24. The only problem I had with that was that when I went to export as H.24 in the QuickTime player, it wouldn't let me since I work on a Windows laptop rather than a Mac (really unfortunate since the QuickTime format captured the color perfectly). Next thing I tried doing was changing the color grading yet again to somehow make it less overexposed but that didn't work. After a little bit more of scourging on the Internet, I finally found someone who had the same problem. What they ended up doing was modifying the color settings in Premiere Pro. I tried doing the same thing (my original setting was in Rec 2020) until I reached the correct setting (Rec 709). I ended up sleeping at like 4 AM trying to figure this all out, but luckily I was able to fix everything.

Fonts...

    Fonts are oh so important to developing the tone of a movie, especially in its opening. Imagine if the title drop in Jaws was in comic sans...

A Little Bit of Research

    Did a some research on horror movie fonts before choosing my own. I chose to look at the credits and title drops of movies that I specifically know have a somewhat similar opening to my own (all horror too).

Raw title screen

    First one I chose to watch was from Raw. This title drop occurs right after a mysterious car accident. I love how the bold font chosen, matched with the opening scene, really leaves an impression for audiences, and expectation for what the rest of the movie will be.

Credits from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

      

Title from The Conjuring

    Second ones I went with was this credits scene from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Conjuring. Like the one for Raw these are bold fonts. Both are put on black and white backgrounds, with the fonts being white. Since my own title drop would be behind a red and black background, I think the best would be to have it in a red font. The credits would be in a white font to contrast against the black. 

    

    Last credit scene I looked through was Climax. I chose this one because there's like three different title drops throughout the movie and also a couple of credits scenes, as shown by the screenshots above. I was hoping that since so many different fonts and colors are used, I would get some ideas from from it. Unfortunately, the style of Climax is much more neon and "fun" than what I was envisioning. 

My Own Final Result

    I created the title and credits on Canva. While I know how to use Photoshop, I just prefer Canva, it's easier to use for me. The final fonts I chose were Inria Serif and Paalalabas Wide. Here is the final result:

TITLE REVEAL!!!