Rebecca L.'s AICE MS blog

How did your production skills develop throughout this project? My partner and my production skills advanced throughout our project in multiple ways. When we first put our film together, we had trouble trimming down clips into the right size, and it took more time than it should have to get a cohesive and not overly long sequence of shots together. We also had difficulty with editing sound bytes to the appropriate volume and length. However, once we began our second cut of the film, we had improved our skills greatly in the trimming area. We were able to get more concise cuts of the film footage and our ability to put the clips together improved as well. Where we once had struggled with getting the clips tacked onto each other precisely we now handled efficiently. Once we began working on the third quarter draft of the film, we figured out how to easily increase the volume of sound bytes, which helped us with our small jump scare of the demon banging within the ice machine. As we co...

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text? Our product will engage with audiences by having its own social media pages, such as an official Twitter page that will have polls and trivia questions. This will give fans of the film more content and facts about it, along with sparking interest in people who may come across the account who have not seen the film yet. Along with our social media accounts, we will have our business partnership with Ice-O-Matic. We will collaborate with them to create a 30 second long TV commercial that will air a month before the film is released, and will continue airing until the film's limited release ends. The commercial will feature a middle aged couple who own a diner talking about how they are glad that they purchased an Ice-O-Matic ice machine. The husband rifles through the newspaper and points out that a generic ice machine competitor brand was the same type of ice machine that Sharon and...

How does your project use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? In our film, the main object of fear is an ice machine. Ice machines are not inherently scary, and most horror films use an object or concept that is frightening to the public. By using an object that many find harmless, we challenge normal horror film conventions. The 2014 film Annabelle  uses a doll as its main horror convention, as many people find dolls to be unnerving. Iceboxes are mostly ignored by normal people, so it is a good object to use as an unsuspecting object of terror. We also challenge conventions by using a location that is not very isolated. Most horror films use a setting that is hidden away from most of society, which adds to the tension and the character's feeling alone. With our film, the training room where the film is set is slightly isolated, but other students are seen in the background of the film. In A Quiet Place , the characters are set in a sligh...

Around the minute 1:39 in our film, my partner is getting ice from the not haunted ice machine when the demon from inside the haunted ice machine bangs against it's insides. In the first cut of the film, the bang is barely audible, so the look of confusion on my partner's face is unwarranted to an audience member who does not know what is going on. In the third quarter revision, the noise that comes from the ice machine is audible and loud. 

Our first revision of our film was to reshoot an angle where my partner walks to the training room door. In the original film, this scene was shot in portrait mode, as seen below. We wanted to re-do this shot for the third quarter submission, so we filmed the shot again, as seen below. Now the black bars on the screen have vanished, and the scene feels more organic.  

Our plan for distribution is to release our film in a limited release. This means it will only play in theaters in the town where the film takes place; Sarasota, Florida. This limited release will act as a limited event and will thus draw in more customers wanting to experience the film like this. After the two weeks of the film's theater release, we will pull the film from theaters and move it over to digital platforms. Our film will be released on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.