Props, Locations, Makeup and Costume

Location 1: A Forest

- We decided that this would be a good location for our film opening as we decided to set it in a small country side village, and we feel that this is a typical styled forest that you would find in a village in England. Another perk of using a public forest is that there were no rights against us filming there as it is a free public place. Luckily on the days we were filming there were no people in the forest, as obviously it is a public place one of the difficulties we may have faced when filming would be passers by. We also had no problem with the sounds of birds or rustling of trees as we had already decided that we were to place narration over our production, but this too could have been a struggle we could of faced. We got the inspiration for this location from other horrors of the same supernatural genre such as The Woman in Black, the locations for The Woman in Black are highly 'natural' and often set amongst forests, woodland grave yards etc. We though the aspect of setting some of our opening in a forest would make our production feel like a realistic horror of the super natural genre.

Prop: Plastic Tea Set

- We purchased a plastic tea set for 1 pound which was convenient for our budget as it was extremely inexpensive. The fact that the set was plastic too meant that it looked 'childlike' as stereotypically children wouldn't be aloud to play with real china as it is too expensive, the fact that it was plastic also helped us make them look 'destroyed', we did this by placing them in mud and covering them in leaves to give them a more 'used' look, helping them look aged. The use of tea cups links to the supernatural horror genre, as often in supernatural horrors children are heavily featured for example in films such as Dead Silence, Annabelle, The Woman in Black etc - we gathered our inspiration from films such as these and decided the childlike aspect would add a vulnerability to our production as often the lives of children being at risk within horrors evokes fear and tension for the audience.

Prop: Chalkboard & Chalk

- Kaya already owned a chalkboard and chalk so this part of our props was not an expense issue. We thought that the use of a chalkboard would help add an eery effect to our titles, and make them seem more ghostly than just adding them in with a normal text over the production. It ties in perfectly with our 'dolls' theme by adding a stereotypical childlike aspect of the chalk and board, whilst also tying in with the victorian aspect as in victorian times, chalkboards were classically used amongst schools. A difficulty we could have faced with using this to display our titles could have been that perhaps the text wasn't clearly visible, or if the camera shots were shaken it would be hard for the audience to read the titles. In order to avoid this we shot each title a couple of times, just to make sure that we perfected each shot. This idea linked in to our supernatural theme perfectly by making the text seem slightly opaque and ghostly.

Location: My Bedroom

- We decided to use my bedroom as the setting for the doll scenes. My bedroom was a good setting as we wanted a room that would almost portray a room within a dolls house. My room is stereotypically 'girly', and as we wanted to portray the image of the dolls sitting in their doll house we thought it would be a good idea to place the doll sat on the bed, this way the audience are able to see straight away that this is a bedroom and one of the rooms within the house. Using this location wasn't an expense for any of us as it was in my house. The realism of a suburban house juxtaposed with the natural forrest location helped the audience to identify the panic and horror amongst the villagers i.e with the use of the images of the victims hung about the village and the terror the dolls are to plan, with the slow clockwork movements of them.

                                                           Prop: Images of Victims       

- We decided to take photographs of 'victims' of the dolls and place them in various places of the forest. We decided to make the images look old and battered so we ripped, scratched, tea stained and rubbed them in dirt. This whole process was inexpensive to us as we were able to take the photographs at college, using the college's equipment, and destroying them and placing them in the forest cost us no money at all either. We found that this was a really good way of getting the idea of what the dolls had been doing to their victims across, by destroying the pictures it helped to show how the victims of the dolls were being destroyed too - also, this helped them to look aged helping to show the long period of time the murders in the village had be going on.

                                                                Prop: Wish Dolls

- We used the wish dolls for the scene when someone is playing with the dolls house, the idea of using wish dolls helps to add an eery effect as usually wish dolls are used to take nightmares away from children at night, the fact that these dolls are being played with and pushed down the stairs and almost tormented furthers the evilness of the dolls and adds a creepy feel to our production. The wish dolls were Kaya's and as she had them in her house it cost us no expense to use them. Whilst 'dolls'  are commonly used within supernatural horrors, when researching we didn't find any supernatural horrors that used 'wish dolls' - as aren't commonly used in supernatural horrors this aspect of our production challenges the conventions of supernatural horrors.

Prop: Dolls House

- Arguably one of the most important props within our whole production was the dolls house, it fits in perfectly with our dolls theme. As Kaya already owned a dolls house this was a massive benefit for our production, it really helped to tie the whole theme together - this was also not cost affective to our production. The dolls house was empty, it wasn't furnished and didn't have any colour to it apart from the wooden background. This helped to give our final production a really eery feel to it, unlike a usual happy dolls house that is used and played with - this one is completely empty, giving it an a 'abandoned' feel to it. 

 Dolls Costume:

- We wanted our costumes to clearly represent the doll theme, however with a twist - the use of the black, dark colour of the costume is not stereotypical to a 'cheery' doll, this furthered our horror theme and made it clear to the audience that the dolls were evil. We wanted to get a classic doll styled corset, luckily the one we used for our production was exactly what we had in mind, the dark black contrasting with the white polka dots are almost clown like, perhaps reminding viewers of films like Stephen King's IT. The tutu we used wasn't a classic styled tutu - it was slightly distorted and the ruffles weren't well coordinated, this furthered our horror theme, pushing the idea that the dolls weren't regular dolls forward.

Makeup:

- We wanted to make the contrast between the two dolls obvious, we decided that makeup was the best way to show the difference in the pair. For one doll, we decided to use brightly coloured makeup, as a more 'classic' doll look, we used bright red lipstick, neon pink eyeshadow and large fake eyelashes - however this was juxtaposed with an extremely pale 'ghostly' looking skin colour, we decided to use a very pale foundation this helped to further our horror theme. The second doll was an extremely obvious representation of horror - we used extremely dark makeup, black eyeshadow, black lipstick, large fake eyelashes and pale foundation. It could be said that this makeup makes this doll more fearful, however the use of makeup within our production was intended to show a contrast between the pair evoking more fear.