Year 9 60 second films assessments

Our project for this term is to film a 60 second horror movie on our phones. At first we shot it in frames and then went on to film it. It was different to acting out a scene because we had to think about camera angles. It took a while to plan the angles, because we had to see what worked best.
The first stage of making a short horror movie was planning the first four stages of the film. As the film would be 60 seconds, we estimated there should be 30 stages, each being 2 seconds. This was hard to do, because the timing was so precise.
We then drew every stage of the movie, so when we came to film it, we would know what we were doing. Drawing every stage took a long time- but in the end it helped us a lot in the filming process because it was a guideline.
Following the drawings from our storyboards, we took the pictures of them. This was relatively easy because the 30 pictures were exactly the same as the drawings. From there, we knew the camera angles we wanted to use and the timing of our movie.
Then we went on to filming our horror movie. We discovered that filming, while keeping in time, was really difficult. We decided to shoot in 5 or 10 second groups and then put them all together. This was easier because we would only be doing 3-5 stages at a time.
The camera angles we used differed from long shots to close ups. We shot the movie in black and white, to give the movie a spooky, mysterious element.
It was hard to film the movie on our phones, because the screen was so small- so fitting a lot into one stage was difficult. However, it was interesting to see how it worked on a phone and also how filming a 60 second short film is difficult, although fun and interesting at the same time.

Rosie Green

This term we have been working on creating 60 second movies using our mobile phones. Our storyline was a kidnapping of a little girl whilst on the swings with her friend. It was quite a long process. First we created our idea, then we made the first four frames which led onto drawing out our storyboards which brought us to our next step, taking photos of our short film. This step led us to the step that we have just finished, actually filming the clips.

We chose to make our film in black and white. We felt that this gave our film an old fashioned and slightly spookier twist. We didn't use quite as many close -ups as we perhaps could have as we felt that it would be scarier using more imagery rather than concentrating on facial expressions and emotions.

For our set we used the swing in the school by the gates. This was initially not our first choice as originally we had wanted the double set of swings but as we thought about it we realised that the single swing would work better as it would be easier and more realistic for the girl to disappear behind the swing.

I think we could have improved it by concentrating on our characters. Although I thought it was quite successful as it was clear as to what was going on. All in all I found this project very fun and educational.

Kate Eringer