If your story involves people getting hurt, then you shouldn’t ignore the two essentials for this sort of scene: a killer getting its victim, and a way of letting us see what it’s like to kill. The point-of-view shot (POV) does this perfectly. It goes to the heart of right versus wrong, asking us to briefly empathize with the monster, hitching a ride with him as he does what we ourselves shouldn’t.
EDITING
In horror, suspending disbelief is everything. Remind us it’s just a movie and we come crashing down to earth with a bump. So use classic continuity editing. See Chapter 21, Editing Methods: Narrative Continuity for help.
CLOSE-UPS
When you edit, choose close-ups whenever possible, for their dramatic value and for the way they control what we see. You can disorientate the viewer quickly, keep danger hidden until the last moment, and create the right atmosphere of claustrophobia and clamor to build tension. And viewers always want to forensically inspect gory scenes.
FIGURE 34.1 Use close-ups to capture tension and claustrophobia. (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©clintspencer, Image# 6655407)
CUTTING FOR ACTION
Maintain the fluid transition of shot to shot, helping rhythm and pace by trimming the end of clips on the timeline to make sure every clip ends in mid-action. Don’t let a clip show a complete sequence of actions, instead rely on several which partly show it.
RHYTHM
For tension and suspense, treat the sequence just as if it were a piece of music, building tension through a series of quickening beats. Start a sequence with long (say, four second) shots, and steadily shorten the length as you build tension. Hold fire suddenly, lingering on one image for a while, before launching into an even quicker set of clips.
If you want to add special effects, apply subtle color casts for particular scenes where needed, in dream sequences or when you need to unsettle the viewer’s sense of time or space. For slasher moments, sound effects are a cheap and effective way of creating a gory finale, so opt for gooey sounds layered with animal noises. Mess up the whole thing further with three or four frames of blurred shots interspersed into the narrative.
Experts’ Tips
Dewi Griffiths, film director, UK
“Have a great story, and good actors – and build from there. try to make it as simple as you can so you spend your time working up what you have as opposed to moving from place to place or dealing with other logistical problems. make it an audience pleaser, and it should be successful – but know that audience, what they want, what they like: research. horror films follow rules – know which ones to break.”
Ray Gower, director, Dark Corners (2006), USA
“Never stop believing. find ways to shoot, whether it’s using a camcorder and a couple of friends, or selling your house and shooting with a fullblown crew (not recommended, but how i started out!) – gain as much experience as you can, watch movies (good and bad!) and never give up. and if you can’t shoot, then write. and write. and write. it is the most important aspect of filmmaking and the cheapest. Despite shooting hundreds of commercials, short films, corporates, you name it, it took me twelve years to get into movies – and my first real break came through my writing.
“[In Dark Corners] I tried to do something a little different. a kind of art-house, psychological horror. I like the look, the weird ambience, thora (Birch) and toby (stephens)’s performances – but would I change anything? the honest answer would be yes – but then no director is ever happy with their work. truth is we had a tiny budget, an extraordinarily tight shooting schedule plagued with problems and I had to lose and adjust scenes constantly. in an ideal world I would go back and create the perfect film I had originally pictured in my mind – but then filmmaking is all about managing compromise.”
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LEGALESE
STORY COPYRIGHT
For classic stories, copyright laws mean that most of the horror classics are free to use, such as most of Edgar Allen Poe, Dracula, and Jekyll and Hyde. If an author has died more than 70 years ago then in most cases copyright will have entered the public domain and you are free to use the work for your movie.
Make sure you have done the following:
Checked with the copyright owner if you use music tracks in your movie.
Before you shoot – get permissions from any location you want to shoot in. Some owners of locations are resistant to horror films, such as churches or schools.
Get release forms from every actor stating that they agree to your use of them in the movie.
Make sure you and your close collaborators all agree – in writing – where you want to show the film, so no one objects later.
Agree how everyone wants to be credited in the end titles.
Upload It
Best site to upload to:
Vimeo
Best communities to join:
Horror/Thriller Movies at Vimeo:
“A place for Vimeans to post horror or thriller movies they like or created! let’s use this as a forum for constructive criticism on our works, discussions of techniques to improve suspense or to just talk about movies you like!”
Scare Me at Vimeo:
“All things scary! muaaaahahahaha…”
Best channels to watch:
At Dark Junctions at Vimeo:
“A channel dedicated to the macabre, the phantasmal, and the unexplored.”
The Horror Channel at www.metacafe.com
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HORROR FILM SCHEDULE
This movie will fit any length of schedule, from 48 hours to 28 days. See Section 6 for a guide to schedules.
Chapter | Thirty - Five
Sci-fi
WHAT IS IT?
It’s like The Matrix: take the red pill. Sci-fi is the truth genre, letting you see the world as it really is. Sci-fi isn’t really about the future at all; instead it shows us the present, revealing the real world beneath all our own Truman Show-like lives. Sci-fi just can’t hold back from the truth.
Or you can take the blue pill and carry on watching rom-coms and stay smiling. Like Neo, the choice is yours.
Like Spielberg’s Department of Pre-crime in Minority Report, sci-fi alerts us to what might happen around the corner, just a few years down the line – and it’s done this since the 1950s. It’s like an x-ray of the zeitgeist, telling us what really freaks us out, whether that’s nukes, getting mutated by radiation, drowned out by climate change, or suppressed by corrupt governments.
But it’s more than that – the reason it has the top slots in biggest box-office of all time charts is that it does all this with thrills, a hint of philosophy, action, and plots you can stand behind and shout for. It’s the only genre where you are not restricted by any of the normal rules of life, or time, or space. Anything goes, anytime, anywhere. The only proviso is: it has to have its own logic, and make sense in its own way, so spend a while figuring out the back-story to your plot, so it has its own believable universe. If you get quizzed about your movie, you’ll know it inside out.
MY KIND OFMOVIE?
You have your finger on the pulse. You watch the news, hear what goes on and what can go wrong in the world. Just like Sarah Connor, this means you might not sleep too well, but when you find other people who share your ideas, it’s like a meeting of the faithful. To make a movie about your ideas seems just a small step: part therapy, part thrill-ride.
You have mapped out the prequel and sequel, and fleshed out the characters with real motivations. You’re going to find this movie easy to make – it’s already fully formed inside your head.
You like sci-fi but are very particular about your top 10 and you know enough about what you don’t like to make sure it doesn’t happen in your movie.
WHAT’S IT FOR?
Sci-fi has a big loyal fan-base, with a wider range of ages than horror, but like horror fans they are intelligently able to connect the dots in your movie and see the next plot turn coming. These people pay real attention to the film,
they don’t slouch in the quiet bits, instead seeing every section as potentially having the key to the movie. These people pay real attention.
Seven out of the top ten highest-grossing films of all time are sci-fi (the three others in the list are fantasy movies). Sci-fi has a lot of dedicated film festivals, comic conventions, and cable channels. Even decades-old TV shows get constant re-airing; at any time an episode of Star Trek is said to be showing somewhere in the world.
FIGURE 35.1 Use locations and props to create a futuristic feel for a scene, as in this image using an existing Geisha costume and a store room. (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©nuno, Image# 8322770)
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE ME?
Like other genre films, take your time in planning and reap rewards later. Sci-fi is a more thoughtful genre than most, requiring a strong idea followed through by detailed research. The only sure way to avoid a story that gets shot down by the fans is to expand your story and ideas into a much larger world, where you have thought about the background to the events in your movie, going back years, and the backstory of your characters. Use index cards to cross-reference events and people.
HOW HARD IS IT?
Difficulty level:
Sci-fi needs particular handling. You need two antennae fixed to your head – one to intercept and zap any extravagant or over-the-top plotlines or dialogue, the other to stop any possibility of patronizing the audience. The challenge with this genre is in making it believable and real (without spending big bucks), and coherent. It has to stand up to close scrutiny by fans and friends.
You need:
A complete vision of your imagined world
A complete back-story of your characters, and events previous to those in your movie
The ability to make sci-fi it look like it’s made now, not twenty years ago. It has to strongly relate to events in today’s world
Ideas that fit into today’s visions of the future
To be a good organizer and planner
To re-imagine our world as a world of the future; use everyday places and use your ingenuity to make them appear from the future
WHO ELSE WILL I NEED?
Producer
Sound recordist
Camera operator
Editor
Designer – or someone able to create your imagined world from few props
WHAT KIT DO I NEED?
Camera
Tripod
Boom mic
Set of lamps
Lavalier mic
IF YOU LIKE THAT WATCH THIS
For inspiration try low-budget sci-fi such as the angst-ridden Dark Star (1974) by John Carpenter, and fan movies such as Batman: Dead End, by LA’S Sandy Collora (www.collorastudios.com), made to fit into the franchise but on a fraction of the budget. George Lucas’ THX1138B (1971) shows you how to use just a bunch of students plus a metro train system to create a weird vision of the future. Alphaville (1965), meanwhile, also manages without lavish sets, creating a paranoid future in everyday Paris, and apparently the inspiration itself for the later classic Blade Runner (1982).
GET INSPIRED
IDEAS:
To create your own sci-fi movie, avoid space operas in favor of ideas based firmly in the believable near-future. This allows you maximum room to include whatever futuristic wildcards you want to insert, but within the context of a familiar environment. Avoid a reliance on effects, since a tiny budget can’t compete with the FX-laden blockbuster.
THEMES FOR LOW BUDGET SCI-FI
Stuck for ideas? Try these themes that have made classic sci-fi movies.
• Body shock
Crossing over into horror, this theme sees aliens, bugs, or disease take over or attack the human body. But it also takes a positive view of mutations, as in X-Men, using the theme to reflect racism and genocide.
Seek out: The Fly (1958 or remake 1986).
• Technology
This idea says that technology will get smarter than us and eventually turn on us, like Terminator, or The Matrix trilogy.
Seek out: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• Memory
This theme goes with the idea that in a technological world all that we have left that machines can’t do is our personal memories. Not for long, says the writer Philip K. Dick, who reckoned that our memories can be wiped or changed like any hard-drive disc. Dick singlehandedly created this theme in short stories and novels, leading to films like Blade Runner (implanted memories), Minority Report (foreseen events); and Total Recall (memories for sale).
Seek out: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
• Society
A lot of sci-fi themes since 2000 have been about future society becoming totalitarian, like the Nazis. A lot of ideas about prejudice, race, civil war and corruption have been played out in some great sci-fi moments. District 9 (2009) is a movie trying to figure out apartheid in racist South Africa, instead using a separate alien section of South Africa to create a gripping action movie.
Experts’ Tips
Kole Onile-ere, director, The Virus, UK
“[For my story] I very much remember when President bush said ‘if you aren’t with us you’re the enemy.’ There was no free speech – it was like there had to be one way or no way at all, there is no alternative. all of us in the west here, even if we wanted to disagree or even question anything, we were the enemy. So out of that I wrote this story.”
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PREPRODUCTION ESSENTIALS
Storyboards; script; location photos; release forms; style sheets/designs; costume designs; backstory; treatment; lighting designs; budget; permission forms for locations; health and safety sheets; contracts; copyright release for music; shot list; shooting schedule.
USING THE CAMERA
Sci-fi includes a wide range of ideas so no single method covers all. But if you are working on a zero-budget then you may need to use existing locations and make them look stranger or more futuristic. Use wide angle lenses and try to enhance the visual depth of the image – that means having stuff up close and other stuff far away at the back. It makes the picture look surreal and slightly disorientating. Check out surrealist painters like Salvador Dali or Giorgio de Chirico to get ideas. UK director Michael Winterbottom shot his movie Code 46 in present day Shanghai and Dubai, using the camera to create a futuristic look.
FIGURE 35.2 Modern buildings make ideal no-budget sci-fi locations, as in this city library, shot using a fish-eye lens. (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©Nikada, Image# 6291774)
EDITING
When you edit your sci-fi movie, spend time looking at the script again to remind yourself what you had intended. What was the overall atmosphere you wanted? Sci-fi shorts can get away with being a little more weird, so be bold, be adventurous and don’t fall into the trap of thinking the viewer needs fast action right from the first moment.
Good sound editing can make a low-budget movie seem like it cost much more to make. Create a big, wide sound environment, using several layers on the timeline. Add sounds of what we can’t see. You can conjure up a busy, dense city street with layers of traffic noise, audio advertising, and a range of machinelike sounds. This is the moment to think big and make us imagine a broader world – and pretty soon we’ll think we saw it too.
Experts’ Tips
Kole Onile-ere, director, The Virus
“Sci-fi is a very hard genre to get off the ground. Nowadays it has to be a hybrid, like a horror/sci-fi such as 28 days later which some might say is almost not sci-fi. what I like about the genre is it allows people to just be who they are – black, white, whatever – and also it is a smarter way to talk about things. You can do that in sci-fi, you can talk about issues in the wider world and you can do it more cleverly. If you think of 1984 or blade runner, even The matrix, they talk about things. It allows you that freedom to do that.”
“If you want to make a sci-fi film, the first thing is you have to have something to say. for me sci-fi films like Solari
s really talk about real issues so I would ask people to think about what they want to talk about and then to get together with a group of like-minded people. You don’t always need a load of money as long as the story is strong, and the structure is right.”
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LEGALESE
Fantasy movies like sci-fi will have less to worry you about offending people here in the present, but beware of how you use real names and especially corporations – if your story is a Matrix-style future where computers took over, don’t say it’s all Bill Gates’ fault.
You’ll need:
Release forms from all cast and crew
Permission from the owner of each location to agree filming, and remember to contact city authorities if shooting in a city center or on busy streets
Upload It
Best site to upload to:
Vimeo
Best communities to join:
Art, Music, Sci-fi and Comicbook Group at Vimeo
Stand-Out Shorts Page 19