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!
