Evaluation Question 1 by Rachel Nolan.

1. Introduction: what did you make, who did you work with and where did the original idea come from?
The brief we were set was to create the first two minutes of a horror film. It could be any type of horror film, from psychological to zombie, but we chose to do psychological. The reason we chose to do the psychological genre is because we found these the most realistic type of horror films, but also some of the scariest - as they play with the audiences minds and draw them into the film.We watched a lot of psychological horrors before coming to the decision to definitely follow the genre and we found that they were all very successful in achieving a scary film with a tense feel,  which is what we wanted to achieve for our own film. 
Before beginning to plan or create our horror film we did a lot of research into what a psychological horror consists of and we did this by watching psychological horrors. 
The film Paranormal Activity inspired our original idea, as we liked that there was a very scary threat, yet never physically seen by the audience. We used this concept for our film, with throughout the whole film there was a threat present, yet never visible. This is typical for horror films of the psychological genre and we intended to mainly follow the conventions.
I worked with two other people, Conor and Niall -  we had done other practice exercises previously and we found that we worked really well as a group and decided to do our final project together. As our group get along really well it definitely has helped in us creating a successful piece of work, that we are all proud of, as we all bring something different to the group which I think is very useful. We have not had any problems in our group and I think that this is because we all listen to one another's ideas and nobody took control and tried to manage the group, however we all had the ability to take control when necessary and to tell one another what to do when we felt it was needed. 
Here is a picture from the film Paranormal Activity:

Here is the trailer for the psychological horror film 1408, we watched the beginning of this film and drew inspiration from the build up of suspense, with the use of music, mise en scene and camera angles/shots, for our own film:

This is a shot seen in the trailer for 1408. We like this shot because of the use of lighting and mise en scene to create a scary, foreboding feeling for the audience. The dim lighting creates effect, but the lightening which is illuminating the main characters face allows him to be the thing to which the audiences eye is drawn to in the shot and the sense that something bad may be about to occur...

This is another shot from the trailer of 1408 that stood out to us. We wanted to include a lot of close ups in our film as they show exactly how the character is feeling, allowing the audience to understand and feel how they are feeling. Also close ups are one of the main conventions of psychological horrors.