Paul Road Evaluation

The main aim of our film ‘Paul Road’ was to create a climatic ending which conveyed tension and suspense. Horror movies deliberately explore the themes that make us, the audience feel uncomfortable and they emphasize breaking the rules, i.e. violence and the rejection of society.
The making of ‘Paul Road’ was a group project and consisted of three members with my main role being the director; so my job was to keep everything in order, although we did put an equal amount of effort in to the construction of the film by inputting different ideas and outputting an even better idea.
Our film was targeted at males 18-30 who were fans of horror and have a good knowledge of the genre. I feel that we were successful in conveying this in the extract via the all male cast. Horror films are essentially usually cast with a woman protagonist as the victim tying in with the final girl theory however due to complications with our chosen actress, it caused problems and so we decided to challenge the typical convention and make it more male orientated yet still following the ‘normal’ rules for a horror movie. We also wanted to engage the audience actively.
The genre of our film was a hybrid teen horror with some elements of a slasher movie; hence the brutal killing and I feel that we fulfilled this by using the diegetic sound to add suspense.
The strengths out our project were the diegetic sound and the use of special effects. The music played a big part in adding to the tension because without it, we wouldn’t have fulfilled our main objective. We especially wanted to make the blood look effective and we put a lot of time and effort into the making of it as we wanted to highlight the ‘gore’ aspects of Horror. We originally wanted to splatter the blood across the white bathroom wall however when it came down to it, we found it quite difficult to make it look effective so we started off by using a shot to pan away from the violence to show the shadow of the knife. This was influenced by Tarantino’s film ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and we wanted to not only show the shock visually but make it seem more realistic because we wouldn’t have been able to achieve the shock due to limited equipment, costuming etc.
Then we had the next frame as blood trickling down the plug hole. This was highly influenced by the shower scene in Hitchcock’s 1961 film ‘Psycho’. The editor then faded the clip out and faded in to a similar shot to show the dead body with endless amount of blood coming from it.
The cinematographer Ellen Smithson was highly influenced by Tarantino and so we wanted to portray this in the scene. We achieved this by using long, steady shots instead of the typical fast cut shots that we see in Horror movies today just to add more tension.
We created the film to have a straightforward linear narrative however with an enigma at the end. This was decided near the end of our project by highlighting a few films that we could relate to and in the end came up with a similar storyline to ‘Halloween’ where the dead killer disappears, leaving it open with a cliffhanger and possibly a sequel.
I felt that the main weakness of our project was organization and it came across in our extract. By this, I mean the quality of the shots and the lighting as some shots were darker than others due to the different times of the day that they were filmed at. Personally, I feel that I should have paid more attention to the mise-en-scene in the bathroom scenes. This came across because from the feedback that I got from my fellow peers after they watched our extract, I found out that they were more inclined to look at the ‘clutter’ than the action going on.
By being a film student for nearly two years, creating a Horror movie was at an advantage to us all as we had the knowledge of what needed to be fulfilled especially because we studied horror as a topic in our AS year and the codes and conventions needed to make the film successful. There were a couple of theories to do with Horror but in my opinion, I feel that the ‘play theory’ is mainly associated with our film. We wanted the audience to enjoy the adrenalin rush and the anticipation of what to expect.
My understanding of film knowledge has increased since making a film because of the ideas that we have gained, both as a group and individually. Not studying film would have been a disadvantage to us all because we wouldn’t know the specific shots and codes needed to make a Horror film successful.
In conclusion, I feel that this project has been a great success due to the hard work and the dedication that my group and I have put in. We have all improved our filming skills and learnt a lot about the industry of filming, all within a short amount of time. We also learnt to deal with challenges that we faced along the way, i.e. time scale, location available etc. If I decide to produce another film, I will take the negatives from this project and hopefully make them positive in the next.

Paul Road