Paul Road Evaluation

Paul Road Evaluation

Our film Paul Road is a Hybrid Horror focusing upon the climatic sequence, targeted at 18-30 year old males who have vast film knowledge and are genuine horror fans. I wanted to create a Horror film because my previous work during AS Film Studies was based around gothic horror. I felt this would be an advantage in creating this genre as I am confident with the codes and conventions needed to make a realistic horror film.
At the beginning we were unsure of what we wanted to achieve and went from challenging the codes and conventions to sticking with them to challenging them again. In the end we decided to follow the codes and conventions, however we played around with smaller aspects such as gender issues, using an all male cast, and the technical features, such as using steady camera work unlike the typical hand held camera seen in most horror films.
To produce the highest quality product I thought it would be ideal to work as a group and focus on certain aspects of film making and roles within production such as director, cinematographer, Editor, Sound. My role was the Editor because I have experience using Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 and feel that is my area of expertise. I was in charge of all the decisions made for the music, shot transitions and effects to create a dark atmosphere, tension and suspense towards the audience.
The way in which I edited the sound on the film was to create continuous tension throughout using diegetic and non diegetic in the appropriate timing, the music was taken from parts of Halloween and Psycho to emphasize the intertextuality between our film idea and the influences, which helps the audience relate to what they are seeing or hearing on screen. I wanted it to flow at a quick pace whilst remaining steady, to create tension and a flawless atmosphere to keep the audience active and aware, much like Halloween due to the fact it’s an older film, which uses longer scenes to create more tension and suspense while keeping up with the cut transitions.
Our film was highly influenced by Hitchcock through the bathroom scene that consisted of one of the main characters Tom, being stabbed to death in a bathtub, the blood running down the drain much like Psycho. We wanted to make the blood authentic to create more impact on the scene as a whole, not many students focus on aesthetics which is something we wanted to make realistic. It took a lot of time making the blood, as we had to mix different ingredients together such as honey and milk to create the correct texture. This was an important factor to the film because the gore is one of the elements of the film which makes it a horror film and in order to create a reaction from the audience it has to look authentic. I feel that we achieved this as the contrast of the red blood trickling down the white bath creates a very vivid and memorable image that is shocking and intense.
I believe that my understanding of our film improved drastically after we started filming because our initial ideas stared to expand as during each scene we filmed we gained more ideas on how to make it look authentic. Before we started writing the script of how we wanted to film everything, the ending was something we couldn’t decide upon because nothing seemed to fit. During the filming of the dragging/fighting scene we were inspired by the fact that in most horror films the villain always gets away or ends up getting killed. We decided to go for both to drag out the tension and created more impact, and for that reason we left it as a cliff hanger, showing the villain getting away but injured at the same time thus making the audience think what’s going to happen next. The use of an all male cast was relevant because we thought that usually horror films have a lead female character that is often sexualized to attract a male audience. Our aim was to target the same audience, however we felt that using two male characters as the victims would challenge the codes and conventions while still following the rules of a horror film. I think this worked well because it makes our film more unique and individual compared to most contemporary horror films.I believe that our main weakness in creating this film would be the amount of time we had to film and getting people to commit to filming. Due to the time shortage some of the scenes we filmed were very hard to edit because sometimes they were too short and the actor was doing a different action. Also the shots towards the ending of the sequence where the main character Harry is running around the living room after the friend has been killed, it drags on for too long and could have been slightly cropped. Some other comments recieved from feeback on facebook and youtube was that maybe the continutiy of some parts is not fluent such as when Harry is being dragged across the floor, before he falls down there is carpet on the floor and then as hes dragged the carpet has gone. This is something we need to look out for in the future and prevent from happing to keep the continutiy.

Paul Road Offical Video