Post-Production: Achieving horror/thriller

If you have read my previous blog "attempting to achieve horror/thriller", you would know that my crew and I struggle to get the idea of horror/thriller in our film because certain important shots were on the brink of getting cut out. Fortunately, today my editor and I had the time to re-access this issue. In order to have enough time for both shots (the villainess staring into the camera & the villainess walking towards the camera) we had to remove another shot that was deemed less valuable. Luckily for us, we only had to remove one shot that we were able to replace without effecting our time.

                        The shot we removed, also discussed in the "redundant shots" blog 

More about this shot and why we removed it is discussed in my previous blog, "redundant shots"

Now that the two shots can exist in our film, we were able to reorganize the shots following after, reordering the "winning" scene from the end of the "playing chess" scene to the end of our whole film. By doing this we were able to allow the viewer to understand how the Queen strategically moves both in the fantasy world, Chesstopia, and the real world as a chess piece. My editor was able to do a smooth transition between both scenes, making it seem like the Queen or villainess moving towards the camera was the same thing as player 1 moving her queen, capturing the opponents queen, and winning the game. This provides a jump from fantasy to reality. 

                             The "winning" scene

Additionally, by using lighting altering filters, we made the environment of the fantasy world, Chesstopia, seem gloomy, dark and rigid, almost like the air quality was stifle and poor. I desired for this look because it strongly reminds me of a dystopian world and that's exactly what I wanted for our film. We also made the look stand out by making the real world with the two players, have normal and bright lighting. This shows a jump from reality and dystopian, and makes it more obvious that we switched worlds without looking at the establishing shot.

                         A screenshot of the filter we used to add gloom to the environment

Finally, we depend on the sound designer to add sounds that pull the horror/thriller genre together, like a bow on a wrapped present. We will continue to be in touch and refer to the script and figure out what shot should have what audio. 

                                                            a screenshot of our script