hello everyone it's Robert Macfarlane here and today we're going to be
going through how to scare your audience without special effects
so if you've been following my previous episodes i've been trying to come up with a short film and
i came up with a pretty cool concept and when it came up to Halloween this year i realized hang on
i could make my film a horror film but what are the things i'm gonna have to think of
to make my film really successful so you've got your horror script you've got your monster your
ghost your werewolf your vampire your murderer whatever you might have as your personification
of evil however how many times have you watched a horror film where you end up not really being
that scared by the main villain or monster quite often we put that down to just seeing the monster
too early in the film but what is it really that we can do as filmmakers and directors to actually
enhance our films to make the jump scares the frightening moments really frightening so most
of us when we're about to do a horror film or even just a film with a jump scare in it
we're so consumed by the actual moment of the scare that we actually forget that the build-up
is probably more important than the payoff when it comes to frightening your audience
take for instance Aliens the first three minutes of that film have no characters in it no speech
no movement all it is is showing the Nostromo the spaceship that you're on before any story
actually happens this obviously shows us the geography of the ship so we get an
understanding of how labyrinthine this space is as well as just how dark and how difficult
it's going to be to get away from anything if there's anything on this spaceship with them
it's the build up it's the consistent getting closer and closer and closer that frightens us
more than anything else and so what i'm going to put to you is that there are techniques and things
that you can do that don't require special effects they don't require gore and explosions and frights
to actually get your audience biting their nails all the way to the quick so we're going to jump
into some tricks that i'm going to use on my next film and we're going to discuss exactly how you
can get some really good scares tension suspense in your films without having to use one special
effect so we want to guide the audience's eye your music your tone your your lighting your set design
has them in a place where they're already looking for elements of danger this is perfect because
now you can guide their eye now you can do this by understanding exactly where to draw the eye
to outside of sound peripheral vision is one of the strongest ways to add elements of fear
and frights into your film so if you know that you can control where the audience are looking
at any given time and don't forget your audience are going to be searching your screen they're
going to be searching frame edges they're going to be searching in the dark corners the light areas
so if you ensure that you get them to look at a particular spot at one particular moment
then you can use their peripheral vision on purpose to really ramp up the tension
this could be just a subtle shift in a shadow or it could be a book falling or it could be various
elements that fit with your story but don't forget use the peripheral vision it is so effective
of course most of us really really enjoy using the dark now this is obviously where we can get
or get around a multitude of sins when it comes to storytelling because in the darkness anything can
happen the darkness also has a secondary use the audience they want to know what's there they want
to see everything they could possibly see because that will make them feel safe so don't just use
darkness when you're dealing with your horror films instead think about using different lenses
if you've got a longer lens you're getting rid of more of the background from your subject you're
making it harder for the audience to understand exactly what's going on around them especially
if the character is in a dark situation and they can only see a small section of the environment
around them with their torch then you use a longer lens just like a torch beam would be used to see
around the area in front of the character use that longer lens to do the same thing
next we've got the perspective of your victim this could be someone that at the beginning who gets
murdered horrendously in the most cliched way or maybe your protagonist is the one who starts
running away from said monster earlier on the film so there are a few different ways we can use
perspective one in a similar way to the previous concept where we use lenses to try and restrict
the perspective of the audience but you can also think about what is my character seeing and don't
just don't just show what the character is seeing imply what the characters see this is something
that Steven Spielberg did quite often in his films if a character is chasing after someone and then
they lose sight of them instead of showing a whole area where they can't really see anything
they show the character and not what they're seeing but they show the confusion on their face
this can imply so much more information and how the character is feeling about
having lost whatever they're going after and can be really really effective in horror films
think of Blair Witch Project where we are so close to the character's face
that we're seeing the night vision footage as they cry and they blub into the camera as they document
what's happening to them that's a perfect way of ensuring that we're not only getting inside the
mindscape of our protagonist but we're also restricting the information at that moment
another fantastic way of scaring the pants off your audience mess with the geography
how many times have you seen monsters come at your protagonist from the one direction
they didn't think they could come from this is why Ridley Scott in Aliens had air vents
dotted all over the ship it enabled the aliens to come at our characters at any given time from
any different direction and you had no way of knowing where they were until it was too late
this is a fantastic way if even if you only ever used the air vents once or twice during the story
it was enough to make us always be afraid of that little grill on the wall or the ceiling or the
floor because you never knew what was on the other side of it
thank you so much for joining me in today's episode on how to scare your audience without
special effects use the perspective of the victim this is a great way of ensuring that you control
the amount of information that your audience has and this stops the audience from knowing
more than your characters and thus making the audience feel separate to your film make sure
you're guiding the audience's eyes if you can do this then you can scare the audience whenever you
want you can leave them on the edge of their seat for an hour and then you can scare them