The Fascination Project

 

I was very happy with our fascination film project, I want to thank my group members Yelena and Reyna for doing such a great job. I was just an actor on the project, they both contributed to the editing and they were awesome at it. I was interested in the horror genre because I thought it would be the most challenging to be make look serious, and it definitely was. Dr. Kyburz said that she preferred the version that she saw without the color grading, but personally I thought that the darker lighting made it feel more serious and thus scarier. We had considered waiting until it was darker but we weren't sure how long the trains would be running for, and we wanted to capitalize on having the train pass by.

I have never stood that close to a moving train before unless I was about to get on it. It was really strange to hide behind the tracks until I was visually separated from my group, and then walk onto the tracks as a train was moving past me. It was kind of a surreal feeling for those few seconds, preparing to try to look menacing as this train full of people can just see me right there. I felt out of place and a little goofy, but it felt okay because it was for the shot. We got all of our shots within a few hours, it was very efficient and focused even as we had fun with it.

I think it's difficult to come up with ideas for horror when you make them too detailed. One of our struggles early on was coming up with an idea that we didn't think would be too silly. We had many ideas for scenarios that could fit the horror genre, but we didn't have specific ideas on how to make them scary. Ultimately Yelena said she knew of a forest area that had train tracks running through it, and I asked what if I just appear from behind the train, that's kind of scary right? Then we ran with it, with the fake blood, and we broke some dead branches for loud cracking noises, and there was most of the details of the film. In the attempt to make a plot, we added the bedroom part and connected it to sleep paralysis, which is a real condition that affects people and can be quite scary. It kind of all just fell together, they edited everything and I think it went really well! In the future I think I would like to do a bit more with sound design, I found that part of the project super interesting and I was really happy with what they put together for our final product.