Reflective analysis of After Twilight

Genre: Paranormal, Horror

Starring – Mathew Clarke & Kieran Coutinho
Written by – Kieran Coutinho
Directed by – William Taylor
Cinematographer – William Taylor
Edited by – William Taylor

Synopsis:

Matt and Kieran, two sixth form students studying A-Level Art, are kept behind by their teacher to catch up on their coursework. After recently hearing stories of an ex teacher who used to teach Art in their school, who killed a classroom of students and then him self after a mental breakdown, the students begin to wonder if the stories are even true. When the students try to leave to go home, they find that the exit won’t open and there are no other ways of escape and no mobile phone signal to call for help. The students split up in hope they’ll find an exit quicker that way, but to no avail. Matt cannot find Kieran after splitting up; he goes to the exit to wait for Kieran to come back, only to find that Kieran is lying out in the snow outside unconscious. The film ends with Matt rattling the door trying to aid Kieran, but a mysterious force smashes his head into the door.

One of our first problems in the production of our film is that we filmed the entire film in one day on one camera, when we came back the next lesson to get what we had filmed off of it, some of the shots had been deleted, this meant that we had to reshoot our entire film, although this set us back, I think it was a good thing because I think the second time round of shooting our film, we didn’t rush it as much, got better angles on the shots and clearer dialogue.

Although even though we did get better shots we had a few unwanted interruptions. One of the interruptions was that students from the school getting into the shot when they were walking through, so we ended up having to re-shoot the shot.

We also had a problem with some of the art teachers in the art block, they weren’t too keen on us being in the block with a camera, which was a major problem we had with the first time we shot the film. We had to get permission from the head of the are department before we could shoot the film, which set us behind by an hour, just trying to find the teacher.

For my part of creating the actual film, I wanted to get all the shots (angles, distances) just right, so that the audience would get more from the film with out the audience realising. Such as, when Matt and Kieran leave the class room, I used a low, canted angle, this is a strange angle which is supposed to signal to the audience that something isn’t right.

During part of the film Matt walks up and down a hall way, and I followed him with the camera. I would liked to have had some kind of track that the camera could use whilst following him so I could get a really steady shot, but unfortunately we didn’t have the budget or time to get one and set it up. Fortunately I think I got a steady shot even though I had to use it as a hand held camera.

When we were shooting the opening dialogue, Matt and Kieran mumbled a lot and it was hard to get them to speak clearly. Whilst I was in the editing process, even though I told them to speak clearly, it still didn’t come out as clear as I wanted to. Trying to fix this problem, I tried turning up the volume on the clip. Even though that should have worked, there was a high pitched humming noise in the clip as well, from one of the radiators in the art room. So the sound sounded quite dirty and unclear. I decided to leave the volume levels as they were and hoped that their dialogue would be understandable.

Another problem I had when editing was finding suitable, copyright free music to go with the sequence, the music I did find at first didn’t fit into the genre of our film. After searching around for a while I found a site with the sounds I needed.