Horror Shot Evaluation

1. Describe your shot and identify in what way it could be seen as representing 'horror'
We took an extreme close up focusing mainly on the characters eyes and the angle is tilted and unbalanced. The shot is framed by a gate. This gives a trapped, uneasy feeling representing horror. The whole shot is very dark with light only on the right hand side on half of the characters face. This makes the character mysterious and adds to the horror genre. The character is looking away from the camera at something which makes the audience want to know what he is looking at which adds to the mystery and horror.

2. What did you actually do to achieve the effect?
To achieve this effect, we found a dark area with limited light. We placed the actor behind a gate so that the gate framed the shot. We used a light source with the barn doors almost shut to create only a small shaft of light and held this upwards on the right hand side of the actor so that only one side of him would be lit and the other in darkness. This way only half of his features would be illuminated. We held the camera about a metre away and used the zoom to get in close. We tilted the aslightly to get the unbalanced effect.

3. What is successful about your shot?
I think the whole overall shot does look like a horror still mainly due to the lighting. The lighting worked well due the the half darkness/half light and i think this makes the shot have the horror characteristics.

4. What would you do differently in hindsight?

In hindsight, i would make the gate in the shot more apparent as in the shot at the moment, you can't really see the gate very much. This way, it would look like the actor was more trapped. I think we also could have over exaggerated the tilted angle more to get a more unbalanced effect.