Reflective analysis by Abdul Khan

Title: The Survivors

Gere: Horror

Synopsis: Zombie apocalypse survivor is chased by a zombie in the woods. After shooting the zombie once the survivor walks near to the corpse to reload his gun when the zombie wakes up and bites his leg. He instantly shoots the zombie in the head and begins to stagger to a tree. The survivor sits down, places the pistol in his mouth and kills himself. Before we went out to shoot our film we had aims for our film mainly to make the theme of horror greater by deciding what styles of cinematography could create a tense and vulnerable atmosphere for our survivors. We also wanted our film to be realistic so we decided on accurate props to fit the zombie apocalypse theme.

My roles: Story board artist, cinematographer and prop designer/costumes. 

Story Board

As a story board artist I had to draw out the different scenes of the film, however I drew them in the style of the shots that were going to be used when filming the scene. I tried to make sure that the story board was clear enough so I didn’t draw stick figures but instead made it look good by making small drawings of the soldier and the infected as well as filling in the back ground too. This was very important because I needed to paint a clear picture for my team to understand what was happening and I think I nailed it well.

By doing all of this it made it easier for filming our film as we had a clear understanding of how, what and where to use each camera shot. As well as this the story board was structured so that Michael (our editor) could easily edit it as it the story board was done in order of the how our films plot was going to play out.

Costume/Prop design

I was also a prop designer for our film, I didn’t design anything but I had a few items to be used for props and costumes. As stated in our pitch, I was meant to be playing a survivor with a military background so I wore a combat boots an olive green beanie, a CS95 smock, trousers and webbing as well as carrying a blue airsoft pistol to represent a gun. This made it clear to anyone viewing our film that this character was ex-military. As well as this the infected person in our film wore more casual civilian clothing such as a white t shirt , jeans and a hoodie which again was very helpful in our film because it helps to make it clearer on who the characters are in our film. The use of authentic looking props really helps with our short horror film because things that seem more realistic and believable is more scarier than something you know isn’t real and definitely having accurate props makes the film look like we took our time in making it something good to watch. Sadly the gun I used was slightly broken to which if I filled the magazine with gas , we could have had the gas blow back motion each time you pull the trigger but either way we managed to do it manually.

Cinematography

My final role was as a cinematographer for a few clips with the help of my friend who did most of the camera work. We used a small camera without a tripod which meant that a lot of the clips would be shaky, normally this would have been a bad thing but because our genre is horror the shakiness fits in as it sets a sense of vulnerability at all times. My story board helped with filming shots as it was essentially a plan of what shots we were going to use in each part of our film. As there were only two of us filming whilst acting at the same time, it meant that we had to use the environment to hold the camera for us while it was recording. For a few shots I was meant to be using a helmet camera, I did and would have had some really good clips of point of view shots with the gun in action but sadly every time I was pressing record I was pressing pause, and when I thought I was pressing pause it was recording so it kind of left us with slightly less clips.

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