Final Major Project - STALKED (A Short Horror Film)

My final major project is a short film called Stalked. Stalked is about a girl who is home alone when a series of mysterious things happen to her. I decided on doing a horror film because I wanted to do something a little different to anything I had ever done before, I think I was successful in this because I had never thought of doing a horror film. A thing I didn't realise was how much goes into a horror film. A big aspect of my film was the music, I think music is always important because it is essentially the difference between a horror and a thriller; this is because I believe the music can give it a 'scarier' atmosphere and almost makes the audience feel for the characters. To me the music was important because I didn't use any spoken dialogue therefore the sound within the house was very important.

Filming 

I filmed my FMP on the 27th & 28th of April. I filmed it at Yelverton Cottage which is my friends house. The reason why I used his house is because we knew that it would be empty therefore we wouldn't be disturbing anyone. The other reason for filming in his house is that it is pretty big therefore it gives the atmosphere of a 'haunted house' this was incredibly important to me because the setting of the house would help in order make it 'scarier'. I decided I wanted to use three parts of the house, the living room, hallway and upstairs. The majority of the shots were in the living room this is because all of the major events happen in that room. 

I started by filming all of the shots that were in the living room. I decided to film in the order on my shot list, I found having a shot list so helpful because it meant that I was able to keep on track of everything that I was supposed to be doing. I also found that by having a shot list I had planned it thoroughly therefore I couldn't miss out any of the important shots, although this still gave me the leeway to add any extra shots if I needed to. 

The actors in my film were Olivia Searle who played Megan, the girl who was being stalked and Matthew Jury who played the stalker whose shadow appears. I filmed everything during the day, the reason why I filmed during the day was because everything was shot inside the house therefore with the correct lighting I could make it look like it had been filmed at night. I used the Dedo kit in order to make it look like the evening; which is better for a horror film. I did a lot of my shots using a tracker, I think the shots with the tracker went really well because they were very smooth this is due to the room being pretty big and the fact that I had to keep going from one side of the room to the other. I think the hardest shots to do in the living room were the shots of the email, this is because they were over the shoulder shots which meant that I had to hold the camera incredibly steady in order to get the best shots. 

I shot a lot of very similar footage coming from different perspectives because this way it doesn't get boring with just having one shot. I think my favourite shot from the living rooms scenes, is the scene where the door slams for the second time and Olivia drops the phone and turns around in surprise because the door slams at the same time. This shot works so well because she didn't actually know the door was going to slam therefore it was a genieue reaction. 

The lighting in the hallway was a lot more difficult to get correctly because it was a lot brighter therefore the reflection wasn't quite as good although I still think that it looked good. I changed a bit of this shot because Matt had a glass door that he could pull open which would look better than him just standing still because the shadow would then be moving. For the shots of running up the stairs I decided to take it from two different angles. The reason for this is because I wanted one from the bottom where she is running away from the stalker but alongside this I also wanted a low one from the top of the stairs where the shadows hand is still behind her as she is running up the stairs. The only problem with the low one was that there wasn't a lot of room therefore making sure that Olivia didn't stand on the lights and camera was pretty hard. 

Finally the last two shots were done upstairs, the slamming off two different doors. The last shot is important because it gives the audience the choice to decide what happens as the stalker is getting into the room, they can decide whether he gets in the room or not.

BTS shots from filming.

Sounds 

I used multiple sound effects, I did the sound effects after I had all of the filming done. The most important sound effects was the door slamming's, this is because there was mutliple doors being slammed therefore I recorded a lot of different door slams. I decided in doing different door slams because after my test shoots I learnt that all the different door needed to make different noises because these can get incredibly boring and repetitive another factor is that the door were all made from different material therefore all the door slams aren't going to sound the same. 

The only pieces of dialogue I used was the voice of the phone where Charlie Theron says 'The Truth Will Come Out' & 'You Can No Longer Hide.' This is the voice of the stalker talking to Megan because he wants her to feel afraid. This dialogue although it isn't much is very important because it tells the audience that he is serious and that she is in danger. The sound that took the longest to record was probably the hardest because it took a few times to record in order to get the sounds in line with the film. 

The other sounds that I used was email alerts and rings tones, I also recorded all of these although I could have gotten them from the internet I wanted to have them instead.

Sounds being edited. 

Editing 

I decided to edit it over the course of a few days, this is because I had over 100 clips to edit and go through. I think the editing of this was probably my favourite thing to do. Once I had all of the clips the editing was relatively easy. The hardest part of the edit was matching the door slamming to the video clips because I needed to make sure that they were in time. I didn't have an ambience sound therefore I found one online called 'Haunted House' this sound was perfect for my video because it had exactly the sounds I was looking for. I edited the ambience sound quite a bit though because it had a lot of unnessariy children screaming which didn't happen in my film. 

With the dialogue of Charlie's voice I edited it quite considerably and adding some echo's to it because he didn't sound quite as scarier as I wanted it to. I edited his voice on Adobe Audition, this was my first time using Audition and it was quite hard to use to start with but I think I managed to get the hand of it in the end. 

I colour corrected the entire film because I wanted it to look darker than it actually was therefore I turned up the brightness and turned down the contrast in order to give it the look I was after.

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I'm really happy with the way my Final Major Project came out, I think the clips and audio had come out the way I was hoping it to. I think if there was anything that I would change with it, it would probably have more clips so that I could make it longer as it is just under 3 minutes although I don't think that this is something essential. 

Overall I had a lot of fun filming and editing Stalked and I thoroughly enjoyed making it. 

Here is STALKED - enjoy. 

               Final Major Project - Stalked (A Short Horror Film) from Naomi Doddridge on Vimeo.