Horror Film Opening Analysis

Dawn of the Dead - Horror film opening


 Shot 1 - This first shot shows the genre of the film immediately from the colour of the text and the sound that goes along with it. The colour red has connotations of danger and blood showing that this film is a horror and that it will contain violence. The sound effect of the title coming onto the screen is of something splattering across it and of someone screaming, these both bring tension to the film instantly.
 Shot 2 - This shot shows someone with blood all over his face while someone is trying to hold him back. This is a very quick shot with a loud scream at the same time, this is supposed to scare the audience and show them that the film has something to do with people going mad.
 Shot 3 - This intertitle keeps in with the theme of blood and horror because the words are in red and they then splatter across the screen like blood and the same sound effect as shot one is used. An intertitle is also a convention of a film opening.
 Shot 4 - This shot shows a spokesman talking to the press about what is happening in the film so far. In the background it say 'disease prevention', showing that the spokesman is for a company that looks for ways to prevent diseases from happening implying that it is a disease that is affecting the bloody people. This shot gives some insight to the audience as to what is going to happen in the film.
 Shot 5 - This shot is of a type of cell showing that there is going to be something that changes to humans during this film. This shot is shown in between shots of people screaming and bleeding showing that the change is not going to be good. 
 Shot 6 - This shot is of a broken window of a shop and the shop is on fire. This implies that there is going to be a lot of chaos in the streets and that people are in danger. It also implies that there is nowhere to hide from these zombies and this feeling of nowhere to hide is used to scare the audience into feeling vulnerable themselves.
 Shot 7 - This shot shows a crowd of half dead and bloody people screaming and looking at the camera. This is another very quick shot so the suddenness of the zombies looking straight at the audience would make them feel that the zombies are coming for them, reinforcing the horror genre.
 Shot 8 -  This shot is of a lot of police cars driving down a street, this shows that there must be something big happening that needs police attention. It is also at night which adds to the fact that it is something very bad and most horror films have a night scene in them so it is conventional.
 Shot 9 - This shot shows a location that is well known, Washington DC the white house. This shows the president of the United States being protected by marines which implies that there is something attacking them. This is just one of the locations showing that the attack is happening world wide and there is no stopping  it.
 Overall this film opening shows the genre of horror very effectively. 

Preliminary Task Evaluation

For our preliminary task my group and I had to film someone opening a door, walking into a room and exchange a couple of lines of dialogue with another person.
 As a group I feel that we worked well and all took part in making the film. We all thought of ideas and brought them together in a storyboard that we were happy with. On this particular task none of us had any conflict of ideas so the storyline came together quickly and we had enough time to prepare a mock up video of just still images and sound.
 In the filming process we came across some problems:

• We had to film all the footage in a random order because some areas of the school were busy when we wanted to film a certain part. We ended up filming each clip in any order we could over 2 days to avoid extra people in the shot.
• We couldn't film using tracking shots easily so we ended up with stationary shots throughout our film.
• Extreme high angle shots were difficult because the tripods weren't tall enough. To overcome this problem we had to make the high angle shots quick and just held the tripods with the camera on above us as steady as we could.
• Filming a dark scene was impossible because none of the rooms available were dark enough, and if we had filmed in the dark the film quality would have been low. We overcame this problem by using a blackout to show entering a dark room then switched the light on as part of the film.

After we sorted out those problems the rest of the filming went smoothly. When we had collected all the clips we swapped out the still images in the mock up for the film footage and moved around the sound effects to fit in with what was happening in the shot. Overall the filming task went well.

Preliminary Task Video