Nisa and Kara: The Wiz trailer

For our final film project, Kara and I decided to take on a classic, “The Wiz”, and create a horrific rendition of the original plot through a storyboard trailer. To do this, we had to incorporate things that are mainly seen in movies under the horror genre. This meant finding parts of the movie that had a lot of bottom angles, eerie non-diegetic sound and scenes that either foreshadowed or included the main characters encountering danger. This was a challenge considering the original nature of the movie, but knew that there were still sustainable parts that would be effective when put together. The majority of the movie uses high key lighting, colorful setting and upbeat non-diegetic sound. We were able to take the scenes that embodied darkness with the menacing costumes, emphasizing the horror in Dorothy and her friends’ faces while connecting it to the harrowing causes. Camera angles and techniques that are commonly used in horror movies include the birds eye/high angle shot, which makes the subject seem small and vulnerable, Close ups to display the emotion and capture detail, tracking shots during chases, a handheld camera shot and point of view shot to give insight to what the character is experiencing. We found a lot of these techniques in the scenes we chose, even before doing more research on what was commonly used in the genre. Depending on the character, There will be more of one technique used than the other. For main characters such as Dorothy and Evilene, there were many close-up and eye level shots, or establishing shots when they would change setting.

A major thing that we focused on in terms of zoom was the scenes of wear the lion is hanging, scarecrow is being attacked, and Dorothy is in the hurricane. When zoomed in on these scenes, it gives suspense and excites the crowd on what might happen next. This was included with darker lighting to exaggerate the whole idea of it being a horror film since darker lighting represents fear and suspense. The costumes do not change, only because we are directly using scenes from the movie, and it would serve no purpose to have the characters in different costumes otherwise the audience wouldn’t be able to identify the characters. We chose to use the main characters who were featured throughout the scenes to alter what is actually happening. The majority of the scenes are bad things happening to each of the characters and pulling just those images make it look scary when you just highlight the bad parts. The flashbacks are used through long shots that give the audience a feel of the surrounding and sound throughout each of the scenes. Lastly, the title was made with blood dripping off of it to illustrate the fact that it’s a horror movie. We didn’t really want to alter the title, because the scenes that are drawn actually happened. So instead we had blood drip off the letters to give a darker feel.