Hello world, for the past five months I have felt like Ross in “Friends” when he was trying to move a couch up a set of stairs while yelling “PIVOT” over and over again. The phrase my teachers always say was running through my mind too: “Flexibility is a tortoise🐢 trait” though most of the time flexibility and pivoting in this project felt like how Sisyphus must feel pushing that rock🪨 up a hill: hard, never ending, and the feeling that it might all come crashing down and be for nothing at any second. 

Welcome to my 👻 HORROR 😱project blog post filled terrifying events like when your group members decide to change the storyline after you had already spent two days making one, or when your people don’t know who the main character is TWO MONTHS into the film production, or when people decide that they can learn their lines five minutes before we need them on camera, or when your director leaves for a month and literally has no internet to do her job……fun times 💀. Anyway I guess it is time to give you context and show you what this project really was about, but before I do that I just want to warn you that this blog post is longer then normal because this project was 4 months long. 

(PLP 12 casually taking four months on a project be like ⬆️)

Now you might be wondering “hey, isn’t this a humanities class? Why are they learning about horror? ” well, that is what I used to think too (not that I wanted to say it out loud in case they changed their minds…..). The reason we were studying horror is perfectly outlined in the driving question: “Why is horror such an effective way to reflect and comment on our society?” The horror genre gives people the ability to see and process our biggest fears in a controlled setting. It also enables us to see how fears have evolved over the decades.  For example, during the height of the Cold War, lots of horror movies showed an evil imposter hiding among people as the villain. Today, we have lots of zombie 🧟‍♂️ plague movies, as well of lots of movies about being in total isolation which we can connect directly to COVID-19.

This brings us to investigation one which was all about Frankenstein!!!! The first fact you need to know is that Frankenstein is the name of the scientist not the “monster” and the second fact is that Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein is nothing like the movies. Another interesting thing to note is that when Mary Shelley’s first edition of her book came out, (when she was only 20) it did not have her name on it. It wasn’t until the second edition of her book three years later that she was identified as the author. This is because it was the early 1800s and she couldn’t put her name on it the first time because she was a women. This book actually became a cornerstone of the gothic genre that people still read centuries later.  It’s the  themes of isolation, guilt, grief, fear and her manipulation of nature that come together to create this awesome novel Frankenstein that follows the life of Victor Frankenstein and how he comes to create his “monster”. 

Throughout reading this novel, I was surprised how different it was from today’s horror and gothic genres, because it wasn’t gory, fast paced or about a man in a mask with a knife. That’s because the ideas and themes I said above were scary in their own way especially for the time period it was created in. After a number of chapters we would take our notes, themes, and connections and discuss them in small groups. I found that I was much more comfortable and confident in these smaller group discussions and that I was able to effectively communicate my understanding. My notes themselves showed a deep and meaningful understanding of the novel and of the role fear played in the storytelling aspects. You can find my notes here if you want to learn more about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 

The next investigation was quite different from our normal investigations in humanities as it included us watching horror movies. We did this to better understand how fear can be used in different situations and they gave us ideas for how we can create our final product.

The first movie we watched was the original John carpenter Halloween movie made in 1978. This movie demonstrated how long pauses cause a mix of fear and suspense and how we don’t need blood or a large budget to make a good movie. 

Next was 28 Days Later, which is a well known zombie movie released in 2003. This movie I enjoyed a lot more because it used more action and jump scares to incite fear while still having long suspenseful pauses. I also really liked how the director incorporated a feeling of isolation through amazing shots and views of empty streets which would cause anyone to feel uneasy. Once you add in the fact its a zombie movie… it definitely induced fear in the audience. 

Lastly we watched Get Out, which was released in 2017 and unlike the others used more psychological horror to create fear. This one was very well made and the twist at the end was crazy. My favourite part was how much foreshadowing and symbolism there was down to the cereal and milk being separated in one scene. 

All of these movies showed different fears in very different ways. After watching all of these films, we thought about the specific techniques used and make connections to other projects. I think my notes showed very insightful thoughts and connections which you can find here: (Halloween, 28 Days Later, Get out). 

These steps led to the last investigation/ the final product/ the reason for a lot of stress, work, problem solving and pride!!!  Our assignment was to create a 15-25 minute horror movie. This was by far the longest PLP project we have done (on and off September → January) with a lot of hard work, responsibility and pivoting. BUT it is  — by far — my favourite (kinda, this does not include any field school projects because those automatically are just too good to count).

First we needed to be put in two groups and to do that we needed to hand in a pitch form saying what role we wanted in the creation of the movie. When I first looked at the choices for film jobs I had no idea what to pick as I don’t like writing enough to want to write the script (thanks dyslexia), I have no idea how to use editing software and my acting could use…work. That’s until I told someone (my classmate Sabrina or Ava I believe) that I am better at organizing people, and I prefer to do more than one thing and they suggested I pitch for producer (if only I knew what I was getting into).

After being put into our groups we needed to decide on what type of horror we were going to to do and what our rough story outline was. This took many days with lots of debate and new ideas, and at many times it seemed like we restarted the discussion daily. One day I was trying to think of ways to get people to collaborate more so I brought Tim bits which oddly enough was the day we decided on psychological/killer and we came up with our rough story (whether it worked or it was a coincidence I don’t know).  From there we started the script where our Max R , our scriptwriter, worked with Ava, our director, and Sabrina, our production designer to create many drafts of our movie SHATTERED. This is one part of the project where I was able to help a lot as a producer. I worked deadlines around different people’s schedules and I made sure everyone read the script and gave feedback. Along with making sure others gave feedback, I gave lots of feedback on every draft and put the drafts in our groups craft link to keep everything organised. Unfortunately, even after many drafts of the script we realised that our ending did not make sense and against many people’s protests I decided we needed to change it. I got the director,  the scriptwriters, and one of our editors together (to get different perspectives) and we discussed how to fix our problem. After several rounds of discussion we had a plan and we changed the storyline. Here is our final story idea: “Months after the events of a grad camping trip gone horribly wrong, the surviving girl is deeply affected by the trauma of this event and is trying to move on, but her nightmare is far from over when she starts seeing the killer everywhere she goes.” 

The main real world connection that we were trying to show through our film was that trauma is long lasting and greatly impacts the lives of those who have experienced it. We should all make an effort to have more compassion and patience, and to not dismiss the struggles of those suffering from trauma. 

Our next big struggle was the filming. If I am being honest, just thinking about it gives me a headache because we had a lot of problems we had to pivot around. (See couch photo). The first hard part is that we took a break and started a whole other project in this class because we couldn’t go to Loon Lake (the retreat where we were going as a class to film) until end of November. This was hard because while we were “taking a break” we still had lots of work to do so it left like doing two projects at once. The props, lines, equipment, people all had to be organized before we went. I remember carefully making my schedule and planning who would bring what so it was there on time and two days before we left it seemed like it would all be fine. Then it wasn’t. Our first problem is that we changed our camera we were using one day, at the last minute but I forgot to make sure the person bringing it would be there on time. Unfortunately by the time I realised my error, we didn’t have what we needed and we had already lost filming time, so I quickly decided to go back to our original plan so we didn’t lose more time even though it would decrease the quality of those scenes. The next problem involved teammates not showing up when they said they would which made keeping to a schedule very challenging. We also found that it took a lot longer to film than we originally thought, so I moved some things around. Before we left for Loon Lake, we also discovered that our group member’s drone wouldn’t work for what we wanted it too so we had to pivot and use the other group’s drone. Unfortunately, that one ended up breaking (I think it ran into a tree….) and so I had to work with the cinematographers to find a new plan. These situations really tested my leadership and organization skills. Our main problems were around group members not being prepared, which in Grade 12 is quite frustrating, and also because of Ava and I underestimating how long it would take to film a scene. So after the first day I read through our schedule and reorganized it to put everything we absolutely needed filmed at Loon Lake on the day two and pushed everything else to if we had time on day three. This worked pretty well and even with the changes in plans and problems with filming we got everything we needed and most of what we wanted. 

My favourite part of filming at Loon Lake was our “school sanctioned rager” that we created for one of our scenes. This involved speakers, lights, and a red plastic cup, all to create the illusion of a party where our main character spots the killer. While the filming for this went well it was also honestly just really fun and definitely a highlight. 

While Loon Lake was very productive, we still had almost a full act to film (of our three) and that required a lot of organization. About a week and a half in advance I informed my group that we would be filming on the Tuesday we had off from school. I then created a schedule, trying to give most people as much time to sleep in as possible without harming the movie. This meant that we filmed our scenes with less people first then didn’t film much until that evening. Our first problem was that we needed a set of parents for our final act and we had forgot until a few days before that we hadn’t found any yet. This meant I had to desperately ask everyone in my group if their parents were available. Unfortunately in the end we only had my Dad and then we dressed Sabrina up to look old. This filming went really well too (shout out to Ava and Sylas for the awesome mirror scenes) and we ended up getting all the shots we needed. 

This brings us to the editing. Our first draft of our movie was hard to watch and made me worried, especially since my director was about to leave for a month long trip. But this fear didn’t last long because once we were back at school the editors were able to fully commit  to making the film amazing. While the deadline was tough to meet, I was proud of how (once I learned about the due date) I changed people’s roles around making us have three -ish editors and I checked in with each of them daily, giving feedback and trying to help out where I could. I found the editing portion of this film making quite tough  because I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO EDIT WELL. I instead found myself only able to help, give advice and just trust that the editors would be able to complete the movie well and on time. After seeing many, many, MANY drafts of each act we got Declan started on the music which made a huge difference to the overall feel of the film. 

While there is a lot more I can say about this project, I feel like this is already the longest blog I’ve written in years (if not ever). So I just wanted to wrap it up and say that this project was hard and that it pushed me outside of my comfort zone, made me have to learn how to deal with different people and added a lot of stress, but it also was so cool to work on this film every step of the way and it feels amazing to have a completed film that I’m actually proud I have created. Please make sure you watch the film below because —while there are things that could still be improved—it still shows how much hard work and effort was put into it.