Research: Writing an opening

 For the project, I was assigned as the writer and screenwriter and I wanted to learn about how movies, especially those of the horror genre write their scripts. A lot of things needed to be in it while not overloading the audience with information. Scripts for opening scenes, especially horror movies aren't exactly heavy in dialogue.  

The opening sets up one or more of, the characters, settings, and themes, horror movies in particular usually set up the villains in the opening like in Friday the 13th and Halloween where the characters present are meant to be killed and establish the killer or in A nightmare on elm street where it establishes Freddy's personality. In this, I had to establish how the monster works as a duplicate which was a bit of a challenge. I also had to write stage directions for the actors/actresses which had to be rather specific. 

Research: Creature sound design

For the project, I decided to look into creature sound design to create a growl of our creature. At first, I expected sounds we associated with scary animals would work but after some testing, I realized that the sounds came out as more random, this is because we already associate them with particular animals. For example, if I used lion sounds for a zombie it would take the viewer out of the scene because something human shouldn't be making generic lion roars, it would have more unique sounds. 

With this in mind, I ended up testing other animals instead, specifically whales and birds, animals already associated with having weirder, more complex sounds. After testing out a couple of them I found birds to be very effective in terms of animals as they have the most diverse range of calls as well as many of them sounding unsettling on their own. This resulted in the prototype call.

That one used sounds from Kookaburras and Sperm Whales, it was rather effective but the sound of water in the Sperm Whale sound files was problematic. In the future, I'd probably try to make artificial clicking or find a replication of their sound to use instead, as well as using more sound clips from non-living things.