From the beginning of this project, I had high expectations primarily with the special effects side of post-production, and after storyboarding each scene I went and gathered all necessary resources making for a prompt and well-organized time to plan schedules for planning, filming, any refilming, and editing.
For my film to work, I figured that I would need to use correct mise en scene, which would have to include the church as the location due to the style in which I filmed in. Also, the costume was rather important; I needed to use a clerical costume for the priest else it would of looked unbelievable. This was a problem at first because I didn't have the funds to purchase costume so using the resources that my acting staff had, we created a costume that looked belivable.
The establishing scene was planned to be prolonged, but due to weather conditions I had to keep this to a minimum so I wouldn't damage the recording equipment. I originally was going to film using my Logitech HD webcam, as I don't have a good camcorder and my webcam records in 1080p (High Definition) but on the day, I borrowed a friends camera in the hope that the quality would be better. Alas it was worse, and the zoom was terrible, this is why in my OTS the zooming is sharp and 'jumpy'.
In the second shot, I wanted to get a shot from the balcony of the church to show the priest entering his church. I had to make changes to the original storyboarding of this scene again due to limitations of the recording equipment.
Then, the third scene was of the priest walking towards the Altar with the camera panning left to right in order to make the audience aware that only one of the characters (Nick) was in a conscious state. This wasn't as obvious as I had hoped due to the poor quality of acting.
Following on from the third scene, the priest arrives at the altar, puts down his bible and takes a moment to read from the page, then picks it up again and walks towards to stairs to address the people in the church, but this was also to give the audience involvement and to make the audience feel like they are also being addressed. While the priest walks towards the steps, the camera blurs. This is intentional and is to show that he is 'morphing' and that he can barely be seen as human. This is accompanied by a POV (point of view) shot from the priest looking at the subjects of the church, and focusing his view when he gets to the boy (Nick). While editing, I applied colour correction to make this scene have a red tint. I did this to show that the priest was not human, and also because red is a semiotic for danger, so in essence this is dramatic irony and subconsciously notifies the audience that danger is approaching.
I did have a shot of the boy getting up from the pew and walking to the front, but I decided not to use it because I wanted to break the continuity and make the audience question how the boy got to the front so fast. This is to give a sense of the paranormal, and to show that the church is being controlled by the demonic priest, as he forced the boy to get up instantly.
Next, I wished to use a POV shot from the boy's point of view, looking at the priest (Ashley) and showing him turn into a demon, like I had demonstrated on a previous example posted on my blog. But due to camera quality, I was not able to apply this effect. The reason is as follows: For the effect to work, the footage needs to be tracked, which cannot be done with bad quality footage as it is hard for the editing facility to distinguish successful track points. So I had to decide that the priest was scary enough, and had more of an organic human 'demon' inside him.
Later in the OTS, there is a POV shot from the priest, with him extending his right arm and tensing his hand. The boy is then meant to looks worried and give a full body shaking motion. This wasn't accomplished again because of the poor acting on his behalf. I still used special effects on this scene while editing to show that his soul is being extracted. This was done using Adobe After Effects, and was fairly hard to do.
The next shot was meant to be the most emotional and I think it was rather successful, but of course could have been made better with sound effects and other such features. in this shot, the boy collapses, and essentially dies. I applied a fade to the end of this scene to show that the boy has collapsed and has been rendered unconscious. This follows with a fade in effect and the camera moving from the corpse of the boy's POV, moving up and focusing again on the priest, whom is looking down on the soulless body of the boy. I applied a blue tint to this shot while editing to show innocence, and peace. But also because blue is associated with the soul in conventional horror.
Finally, the title appears in the top left of the screen with a black outline, and sustains after the footage has faded along with the non-diegetic sound, and then the title cuts. The reason I kept the title on a couple of seconds prior to the faded footage/sound was to show demarkation of the OTS, and to signify to the audience that the main film was about to start and that the OTS has finished.
I had edited each scene in post-production with colour correction and colour curves to bring down the darkness, and to make the light brighter. This made it appear to be more horrific, and seemed to be a convention that I had noticed in many other horror films of this sub-genre, including Poltergeist, The Exorcism Of Emily Rose and other films alike.
For compositing the clips and applying special effects, I used Adobe After Effects. And for rendering the footage I used Sony Vegas Pro 11. I rendered at 8mbps to assure that there was no quality loss.
You will notice that most of the footage is shaky, and this is because I shot it hand held intentionally because I wanted it to symbolize confusion, and fear. However I did use a tripod on the majority of POV shots to give a smooth and natural flow to the movement.
If I could film this again, I would make many things different. I would first of all get a higher resolution camcorder so that I could apply the effects that I predominantly thought were essential for the OTS to be successful. Secondly, I would use a better actor for the boy, as he didn't manage to stay in character very well. Overall I would say that my OTS was successful, the theme was true throughout the scenes and for the most part, it was believable thanks to the acting of the priest (Ashley). The soundtrack also made it more believable and was used in place of the diegetic audio because of the microphone quality and the extensive echo that the church seemed to create. The soundtrack was royalty free. I wish that I could have found some royalty free sound effects also, or even if I could of created my own, but unfortunately I was unable to.
Another thing to mention would be two problems in continuity that were in fact unwanted: The first was the crucifix necklace worn by the priest hanging from his neck to the left in one scene, and then jumping to the right in the next scene. The second was that I noticed that my laptop was visible on one of the pews. Unfortunately by the time I had noticed these errors, I didn't have the time to go and refilm these parts.
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