When it comes to producing a new product, television series or pretty much anything for that matter research is key!
The research I have conducted can be split into various different sub headings.
These can be seen in a table below:
When it comes to content you must first have an idea of what you are going to produce, from the start I knew I was going to be producing a horror themed ident so the majority of research that was done went into looking at this particular genre.
So how exactly does content fit in with research and what is content?
Well content is simply the presentation of information for a purpose to an audience through a channel in a form.
In terms of media and dealing with idents the content will be everything that the viewer sees onscreen, this ranges from the colours used in the ident, to the location the ident is set in and the font used in the horror channel logo.
In order to make it easier to layout I have split the content up into a few sub headings:
Font
Now you are probably thinking, 'font' is that really the most important aspect of your ident? In response to that I would state that everything that you include in your ident must be there for a reason, so why not make the best out of it. The wide variety of typefaces now a days gives you a vast option for which text to choose depending on what you are using it for!
For example the font used for my ident I found on Dafont.com.
Here is a link to the site: http://www.dafont.com/
Now from that you can immediately see that on the home page there are different categories of font styles, these include Fancy, Techno and Gothic. As you would expect for someone who is producing a horror ident, I delved right into to the horror section of the fonts. Yet from this I could not seem to find the perfect font that would be used for my ident so I decided to look elsewhere and opt for 'destroy'. From there after looking threw countless amounts of pages I found the perfect front to use.
The font I opted for is called 'Payday' and can be seen being used for the logo of my ident here:
After choosing my font I had another problem on my hands, what colours would be used in the logo, looking at previous research I had done (focus group and questionnaire/survey) I was able to recognise that the colours most associated with horror are both red and black. After also looking at some website's to do with horror including the one I have listed below the colours used in those websites would back the information I had collected in my research.
Here we can see the website for the horror channel: http://www.horrorchannel.co.uk/
You can see the main colours used in this website are black and red.
Location
When it came to location I had conducted a lot of research into this particular factor.
Due to my ident being horror themed I looked at many ghost and horror stories and where they were set.
I looked at certain stories such as 'Slenderman' and came to a realisation, that the majority of ghost stories at some point feature a wooded area, one much like I have at the bottom of my garden. This was only a thought on location but I felt I had to do more personal research before I could confirm that this is where the filming would take place.
More about the 'Slenderman' can be found here: http://theslenderman.wikia.com/wiki/Slender_Man
Therefore I looked back at a questionnaire/survey I had conducted earlier, I had found one of the questions that I asked was about location.
The question I asked was: What settings do you associated most with horror films?
Upon many answers in which I got one of them was a graveyard and a garden. When looking at location in which I would be filming I assessed wether my garden looked as if it could be a typical horror themed location. After deciding that my garden did look 'creepy' enough to film my ident in my next challenge would come in terms of editing and how I would have to alter the shots to add a darker atmosphere.
Here are some pictures of the garden:
Along with filming in the garden another location in which I used was a hallway in my house. Now I know this particular shot is original yet it had been pulled off well in many horror films so I thought to include it in my ident.
Successful use of the hallway shot can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbI7DmLCNI
Here is the hallway I used in the making of my ident:
The stop motion style used for my ident was Pixelation!
What is pixelation you ask?
Well pixelation is a style in which actors are used as a frame by frame subject on an animated film. This means to an extent that the actor becomes a living stop motion puppet. The way in which you create this involves taking a picture and then getting the actor to more a certain part of his body. This process then gets repeated and when all the frames are put together in sequence it will look like the actor is moving.
So why choose pixelation?
Well I chose pixelation because I have looked at other horror idents (some of which I will be posting below) and found that they all include real life people and situations as oppose to something such as claymation. In addition to this whilst conducting my survey at no point did people seem to remember any animated horror films, just one's involving live footage and actors!
From looking at Jan Svankmajer, I got a good example on how pixelation can turn an ordinary situation, crazy (yet still being able to involve live actors). To research how this could be done I looked at one of his stop motion's which was called 'Food', a link to the video can be found below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxpqUas_Vqc
When it comes to the actual visual style of the ident I would explain that as being modern horror incorporated with a bit of fantasy and slight surrealism.
The modern part being the way that the movie was shot as if it was part of the 'Footage Found' genre which is relatively new and can be seen in movies such as Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. This being a modern genre is due to the technology (cameras) progressing in terms of size, accessibility and how easy they are to operate.
The fantasy aspect of my ident can be seen when the figure or character can be seen, this is certainly not a normal everyday occurrence seeing a figure with long black hair jolt it's way down your front corridor. For this reason a sense of fantasy is added to the ident.
Surrealism is used in the storyline of my ident, in addition to this it is also used when the white constant flashes appear on screen and when the tally marks appear.
When it comes to audience for horror channels the age range for people watching is not that large, from reading certain online poles and collecting my own data about people of all different ages and what genre of TV and film they most regularly watch I can strongly confirm that when it comes to a horror audience that we are dealing with people who are ages 18 to 50 and mostly male.
That means the content I will be producing will be mainly watched by males, but never did I say that the audience was all male, in addition to the male audience I will also be expecting a handful of females to be watching. That means my ident will have to be targeted towards both genders, now the horror channel is not very gender specific and whoever tunes into to the channel just by name will know what content and genre the channel will be showing.
For the reason stated above I can assume any females watching my channel will be horror fans at heart and familiar to scenes that involve blood, gore and general creepiness. So because of this I will not limit certain content out of my ident.
Since I have decided that my horror ident will be dark and partly surreal, who better to have as my influence than Tim Burton.
I looked at some of the films he produced such as 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' to gain an idea of atmosphere and what aspects of surrealism I could include in my ident.
I also studied his website in order to find ideas: http://www.timburton.com/
In terms of stop motion my main influence was Jan Svankmajer and I looked at certain pixelation shorts he had done before to get a brief idea of how to produce them, along with Tim Burton, Svankmajer also does a lot of surrealism, and for that reason these two men where my main influences when it came to the surrealism aspect of my ident.
A big influence mainly for the visuals and how the ident would be shot was Paranormal Activity. Having watched it myself I know the kind of atmosphere it was able to build up and what tension it created, these two things are not only needed in a horror ident but are key, so for that reason I decided to use some of the techniques which I thought worked well in the filming of that movie series and implemented them into my ident. In addition to this much like myself Paranormal Activity I had to create something scary and horror themed on a low budget. Paranormal Activity managed to do this well (with the overall budget of the film being $15 000 and it making $193 335 800 in the box office) for this reason I would say that Paranormal Activity is the influence which I mostly followed when producing, filming and editing my ident.
As stated earlier I would explain my style for my ident as being modern horror incorporated with a bit of fantasy and slight surrealism. But how do I create this style?
Well to create this style I had to look at past movies which were related to the style I was hoping to convey, this involved looking at films such as Paranormal Activity, looking at the lighting of it and camera techniques used in the certain genre.
I noticed from researching some of these scenes that a technique that is commonly used is 'bad TV'. This is more commonly known as static or camera noise, this feature appeared many times in my ident.
Along with that I noticed the scenes in which horror or scares usually occur, the camera is usually tinted a certain colour slightly, in Paranormal Activity this is usually a dark green or blue-ish colour.
In order to create this a certain tint in my ident, yet adding a little twist I added a vignette to the footage, along with this I also de-saturised the pictures so that a certain amount of saturation could be seen, but the scene would not fully take place in colour!
To add a final touch to the ident and add the surrealist aspect talked about earlier, in random points throughout the ident white flashes would be seen (usually when the character is close) and along with this on 3 separate occasions tally marks appear on screen, if you look closely you can see the tally marks add up to 24, this is due to the name of the channel being 'Horror 24'
The white flashes were created on Final Cut Pro and the tally lines were created on Motion!
In terms of channel reasearch my main influence and focus was the horror channel, I have included a link to there website above. I looked mainly at the colours used, the intended audience, the footage that was posted on the channel and the idents that they used.
Some of the indents can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtPqm5eLcdQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gi9MYfeLeQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO9GJctyRN4
These idents were my biggest influences in terms of story lines and ideas, the ideas used in the videos would become a base for the storyline which was used in my actual ident.
Along with ideas used previously I had to create my own ideas when it came to producing my ident. Something that I thought I would do would be to combine past, well executed horror techniques, put a majority of them together and then add my own personal twist on them and that's exactly what I did.
I took Samara Morgan from the 2002 horror hit 'The Ring' and made a character based off her, yet with my own twist, a slight difference in terms of character and look, something that had not been seen before.
In addition to this I created my very own soundtrack for my ident by taking songs, mixing them and combining them with additional sound effects such as the slamming of a heavy door. To create an overall original soundtrack that will enhance the atmosphere of my ident.
Finally I have combined my footage with effects such as a vignette to give them more individuality and at certain points in the video I added camera noise and white flashes, yet again these changes were made in order to make the footage that I shot more individual and visually more pleasing.
