The beginning of our pitch started out to more or less set the mood for our film and introducing it. We did this by creating a CU shot of a woman crying blood against a black background done in photoshop, giving many horror connotations to our viewers. At the top was the chosen title of the film, and at the bottom, the chosen one-liner. The title and one-liner received a lot of positive reactions from the group, as did our background.
Next we talked about what genre and sub-genres our film were going to be. We explained that we are going to be filming a horror film in a mainly supernatural sub-genre. We then explained that we were going to be filming with the teen and psychological sub-genres due to the protagonists being teenagers and so much of the dialogue would conform to the teen sub-genre. Also that the supernatural sub-genre wouldn’t be extremely evident for a lot of the film, and the antagonist will seem to have more of a psychological menace to her than a supernatural motivation.
After this we spoke about our target market. We said that our target audience would be mainly young adult males ranging in age from 16 to 30 as from research we found that this was the demographic most likely to go to the cinema to watch a horror film. We also said that our target audience would mostly be for middle-classed British and Western cultures. This is because this is also the demographic that purchases the majority of cinema tickets and merchandise for a horror film.
We next spoke about the people directing, producing, editing and acting. We said that both George and I would be doing the directing, editing and producing, while George would be doing the majority of the editing, and I the majority of the producing jobs, with both of us sharing equal directing responsibilities. We also gave a confirmed list of actors and extras, explaining that the extras would be playing the parts of dead bodies, not requiring any acting skill. The confirmed actors would be required to do some actual acting, though not much as there is no dialogue in our opening sequence.
We then presented our rough budget to be about £10.00 and explained why we were planning to use this as a budget. We said that we would need to spend some money on effects for the extras playing corpses and gave blood capsules as an example. We also said we may need to purchase some sound effects and may need to purchase some inexpensive props like for example, drinks cans or a painted sign to illustrate the name of the location. We also said we may need to purchase some lighting equipment, but have now found someone who is letting us borrow some equipment and so has reduced our potential budget.
After that we spoke about the synopsis of the film. Here we outlined what was going to happen in the film, introducing where the majority of the filming is going to be done being the woods, and who the protagonists are going to be. We also spoke of the dilemma the protagonists faced in the film, then ended with an open ended question leaving an enigma for the viewers which had some positive responses.
It is then that we read the film treatment. We outlined the motivation behind the antagonist and went into further detail about the ‘mysterious town’ in the woods that was mentioned in the synopsis. It also went into more detail about the ending of the film, also explaining more about the problems the protagonists have to face. Our feedback from this was that the treatment may be too detailed, and could have been shorter to not give away so many details.
Lastly we discussed our opening sequence idea. We explained we would be having one character exploring a wood, with parts of a graveyard and a barn at the end, while exploring there are corpses littered around the location. We then stressed that the character does not seem to be concerned about this and is strangely calm about this. We also said that when a corpse is brought into shot, it would cut to a montage of what is to be presumed life before this situation occurred. At the end we then said the character would walk to a barn seeing a shadow of a small girl on the side. Light is shining out of the barn. We then hear dying sounds and creepy laughter from the girl’s shadow. It then cuts to black and the title ‘Scapegoat’ fades in.
However we still need to work out exactly which person is playing which character and exactly where each corpse is going to be. We also have to work out how we are going to be doing the lighting and will have to experiment to get the barn shot the way we want it. We also need to figure out whether we are going to include diegetic sound, and if so, what volume to put it up to, which is same as the music we are going to use. Lastly we need to figure out what time of day we should be filming. We need to have a relatively dark scene, but it will be hard to film at night, so we may be able to fix this in the editing and film on an overcast day, or at dusk.
The feedback we received was that the treatment should be less detailed, and that our one-liner and title were enjoyed by the group. It was also said that they enjoyed we included modern day problems the protagonists face in the outline of our story and so was relevant to present day which lets the audience relate to the protagonists. Lastly we found the viewers liked that we chose to use so many horror conventional props, locations, stock characters and that the eerie approach to the opening ‘walking around slowly and calmly’ was disturbing. Which is what we were trying to do, so we were very happy with how our pitch went.
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