Killer? I Hardly Know Her!
Concept
Our main antagonist (Sof) is a serial killer who has been killing students of the university our protagonist attends. Our film opens with a shot of an abandoned school newspaper lying on the ground that shows a picture of this serial killer along with a vague description of her appearance. Sof’s face is unknown, she is only described as a young woman who wears all black and a hoodie when she makes her kills. Our protagonist (Julia) is walking home through the Grunnel (Norman area) listening to music through her headphones when she gets an eerie feeling that she’s being watched. She looks around to find nobody there and continues on her walk home. Suddenly Sof walks out from the shadows and as Julia recognizes the figure from the local newspaper, she begins to walk faster. This escalates into a chase as the killer relentlessly continues to follow, speeding up and closing the distance between them. We see Julia run through the campus in an attempt to escape when she trips and falls, fumbling to try and get back up and run away. But it’s too late, the killer has caught up and is poised for the kill. We see the shadow outlines of the killer dealing the final blow and killing Julia. A close-up shot shows Julia’s limp hand as blood pools on the floor.
The scene changes and we’re inside the Norman building, the camera is focused on the announcement cork board that displays a flyer/newspaper about the most recent death (Julia’s) urging students not to walk home alone at night as an unsuspecting student walks past, walking out the Opus front doors unaware of the danger nearby. There’s a slow pan to the window in the back and a zoom to where the killer stands watching the student through the window before taking off after the unsuspecting student.
Our goal for this project is to recreate cheesy classic horror. Our team members are huge horror fans and wanted to try to create a film that would evoke feelings of suspense and fear while also poking fun at the horror genre a bit. We want to make audience members nostalgic for the first horror films they watched.
Pre-Production
Storyboard 1.0
For our first version of the storyboard, we split the work based on the number of shots we had planned and tried to use a consistent color palette. We planned on shooting in the Norman area at night due to how well lit it is. This environment is reflected in a few of the more detailed frames. For the "kill" scene, aka our most complicated scene, we planned to do a silhouette shot to prevent us from having to make a very detailed kill scene. The viewer doesn't actually see the death in a fully lit scene.
Storyboard 2.0
For our second version of the storyboard we didn't make many major changes as we hadn't recieved feedback yet, however we did include some additional frames to aid with the storytelling. We exaggerated the expressions of the main character/victim and added context to the ending of our story. It was a bit unclear in the first version of the storyboard that the killer chose a new victim to follow offscreen.
Animatic
Some notable criticisms we recieved after showing the class our animatic was that our film came across as classic horror rather than cheesy horror. It's difficult to achieve comedic timing in a horror animatic, so we noted that we would have to decide which direction to go in before filming. Ultimately, we began leaning towards cheesier horror in our production process, while also evoking feelings of suspense. Our viewers liked the lack of dialogue but looked forward to hearing sound and music in the film. We decided to change our story a bit due to the critique that the girl walking in front of the window scene would be even more impactful if it took place at the beginning also with our main character, to show that the cycle would repeat with a new victim.
Production
During our production process, we chose two nights to film the scenes for our project. On the first night, we filmed the first half of our film up to the final chase scene. Some problems we faced in our production process include large groups of people at our location and the realization that we could only film inside Norman during the day. So, the scenes where Julia (the protagonist) and June (the next victim shown at the end of the film) walk by the corkboard in Norman were actually filmed during the day. We had to get rid of the window scenes for this reason, so Sof would watch Julia and June from behind a corner instead. A change that we implemented was making Sof (the antagonist) trip on sticks to catch Julia's attention. We wanted to increase the suspense with this change and allow for a comical shot of Julia ignoring the very obvious noise.
The video above is our compiled final draft before we added foley, music, and a blooper reel.
The video above is our blooper reel that we made on mobile with the intent of adding to the end of our film. Just in case, we made sure our film alone made the 2 minute minimum mark before adding this segment in.
Post-Production
This is our final submission in its completed state. Since the rough draft, we slightly decreased the exposure of the film with an adjustment layer and added a black and white filter over one scene. We also adjusted the speed of certain scenes for dramatic effect, added necessary text, transitions, and finally audio.
