Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Creative Tuesday.
Last night was Halloween, so most of us where out for some trick or treat.
We, on the other hand, were spending our evening making a short horror scene.
Everything was written, prepared and shot yesterday.
We had to be very quick with everything, but that was our intention.
We were send a very interesting light from Spiffygear.
This right here is the Spekular.
An amazing versatile light, that can take any shape,
is setup in minutes and can be run from a battery.
So we took it to the test and shot everything only with the Spekular in one evening.
Like always, you can visit the first link in the description below
to find out more about this light.
Now the Spektrum helped us with many applications.
At the television scene we would use one bar
and twist the brightness dial to fake the lighting from the television.
The artificial shapes could just be created
by attaching the different LED panels together with some brackets,
which gave some very interesting results.
They also send us a star-shaped bracket,
which is pretty cool to reflect this in your talent's eyes.
We used this on our last scene.
So that, a little about these lights.
Let’s have a look at some tips and tricks that we have for you.
And the first tip for shooting a horror film
is that you need to create a bond between your audience and the talent.
In the beginning of our scene, we saw Kim making some tea.
She was on the phone with her mother
talking about something that they will do together tomorrow.
This long intro is a very conscious choice.
We're creating a persona around Kim.
We wanna show the audience who Kim is and try to make a connection between the audience.
Kim is a regular girl, with a loving family.
She cares about her pet,
likes to enjoy a good movie and is happy in life.
This is a cliche image, that is more likely to connect with the audience.
If she would have been a drug addict in an abandoned crack house,
you wouldn't get that same empathy.
Now bonding your character with the audience is important for
when you let something scary happen.
When someone intrudes the house or an alien ship arrives on earth,
then you don't want anything to happen to the character that you've bonded with.
And since the audience doesn't want that, it's easier for us now to create tension.
And that brings us to the second tip: build up your tension.
When something intrudes the house, don't let that person or alien attack right away.
But instead, build up your scene slowly towards the final attack.
And there're various ways to do that.
You could let your talent search for something, like we did.
Or you could also let your talent unknowing
and only show the audience that something unpleasant is close by.
Play with your character,
usually the longer, the bigger that tension becomes.
We also have one tip about lighting.
When making a horror film, you can sometimes do things that you normally shouldn't.
Like having a single light come from the front.
This is considered flat lighting. You always wanna create back lighting
or let it come from the side.
For horror films, bad lighting helps with disturbance.
Like, putting a light underneath someone's face.
Usually hard, spot lightings work great.
Now if you would like to get five more lighting tips for horror films,
you can click in the cards up there or locate a link in the description below.
Continuing with tip number 4,
music and sound effects.
And I have a big tip for you guys here.
Usually we wanna add in a lot of sound effects and music.
But often the silence is scarier than your horror music.
Not to say that you shouldn't use music, but use it at the right timing.
Going back to the example,
we first had a normal sound scape.
We've included different sounds where Kim was making her tea,
you would hear a television in the background, etc.
But there is no music. Because, why should we add music?
If there's no reason, don't add music.
Just as Kim notices something suspicious for the first time,
we lower the volume and reduce most of the normal sound scape.
We're playing with the silence.
And this silence helps again to build up that tension.
It's only in the very last moment we've introduced music.
And this is to create some contrast between the scenes that where not dangerous
and the one that were by the end.
This bring us to the final tip for when you wanna create a horror film
and that is to avoid clichés.
And to name a few, the first one is definitely the scare jump.
We've talked about building tension before,
and that's what you wanna do to scare your audience.
And maybe after you've build up that tension, you could do a scare jump.
Where you suddenly let a monster appear, or someone jumps literally into the scene to scare.
But you don't even have to do that,
keep in mind that the scary part sits within the tension.
Other clichés are adding inappropriate jokes.
You don't need humor to make your scares more frightening.
When used wrong, it could even break your entire film.
And maybe a last cliché:
scary things are not always about blood or demons.
It's what you build up to.
You could have a single gun shot as your climax.
It doesn't have to be a chopped up body.
Bad props will more likely break your film.
And that’s it for today’s video, I wanna thank Spiffygear for sending us the...
spectacular Spekular.
To find out more, you can visit the first link in the description below.
And of course thank you guys for watching again.
But most importantly,
stay creative!