The Blair Witch Project - A Low-Budget Film Analysis

Movie Poster - The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Blair Witch Project, at time of release had the highest grossing to budget ratio of any film. The total production budget was $60,000 and the total worldwide gross is around $249 million. The film portrays three friends who are attempting to create a documentary about the 'Blair Witch' - a legend that surrounds their town.

Clearly, the film was a major success not only grossing millions of dollars, but also winning multiple awards including winning the Award of the Youth for a foreign film at the Cannes film festival in 1999. Although this is the case, the film comes across as remarkably amateur in comparison to the large majority of major movies.

 For example, there is only three actors that play a major role in the production, all of whom were unknown amateurs with this being their first film. This is most likely due to budget restrictions and the inability or perhaps the unwillingness to spend part of their budget on hiring actors who have experience. Keeping this in mind, the actors were impressive in the sense that if you knew nothing about the film beforehand, you would likely presume that these actors are professionals. This may be helped by the fact that this is a horror film and like most in the genre, there is a distinct lack of deep character development that you may see in other genres. This allowed the actors to simply play themselves rather than creating an alternate persona.

As well as this, location is a good sign of the budget of a film. The entire film (bar the establishing 20-30 minutes at the start) is shot inside a woods, which in fact could be anywhere in the world as there is no real signs as to location (without discussing plant types etc.) once they are inside. This can be used to their advantage as a woodland location is expected to be bare and natural with little to no effects/CGI etc. needed. This works on the budget side of things, however, it clearly creates a mono-tone kind of atmosphere for the viewer. Whether this is intentional to add to the horror theme or an unintentional repercussion of a limited budget can be debated, however I believe that it hinders the production values of the film.

Maryland woods - The setting of The Blair Witch Project

Action is the main area in which you can spot a low budget film in comparison to a Hollywood style high budget extravaganza. In The Blair Witch Project, this is the case and the real 'action' arguably lasts less than two minutes, situated right at the end of the film. Even in this section, the action was very simple and could easily be created using regular cameras and little post-production editing. This, for me, was the main factor in showing the low budget of the film. Horror films especially rely on the action at a climax to ensure that the pay off is worth the, often lengthy, build up. In this case, the action was muted at best and I believe that this almost stunted the whole film, and at its most important point.

Being a general critic of the horror genre, I may not be the best to evaluate the quality of one of it's creations and this may be shown here where personally, I thought the film was fairly weak, however, others clearly thought different due to the millions of dollars of grossing at the box office and the highly acclaimed awards that it won. One thing I can be sure of though, no matter the quality of this film, on watching, it is clear to see that this is a low budget affair due to the reasons I have discussed above.

Induction Film Analysis

This induction task was to create a short film based around a change of hands of some sort of package. In our team, we decided to base the film around a narcotics deal, with the backdrop being 1960’s America, a time where mafia activity specifically was prevalent.

The film begins with an establishing shot to gauge location and then transitions into another pair of establishing shots to show the two different sides of the ‘change of hands’. In order to create a contrast in characters to portray the storyline, we used costume and the mise en scene to show the difference between the two sides. The first side was the meeting around the table of the mafia gang, whom were wearing smarter clothing and portraying a more serious notion. We then transition to the more amateur like ‘gang’ who are crouched around a bin.

Throughout, we use this serious/mafia vs amateur gang theme throughout with body language and slot selection in order to maintain continuity. As well as this, we took the decision to produce the film in black and white. Firstly, this aligns with the continuity of a 1960’s movie and secondly, I would say that black and white can help to make amateur shots look more professional which helped vastly as we could only shoot this film in and around the perimeter of the college.

 For our soundtrack, we used ‘Ave Maria’ by Franz Peter Schubert. We used this contrapuntal music in a ‘Reservoir Dogs’ fashion in order to create an uncomfortable and on edge feeling in the viewer. I found that this also adds suspense as the viewer is almost waiting for a either a climax in the music or a change of music.

 Continuity was the main aim set for this task so we took time to ensure that each shot worked in conjunction with one another. One continuity error that I have spotted on re-watching is at 1:10 of the video. Before this, a shot shows myself and Gleb walking towards the centre of a room, however the next shot, showing the same from another angle, appears to show us at a position further back than when the previous shot ended.
 Another criticism that I have of the finished product is that at some points, the camera unintentionally goes out of focus. Although we used this feature purposely in some areas, in others, it was simply the result of a camera usage error.

Overall, I am happy with the end product of our induction task as I believe that with the exception of minor errors, we managed to maintain the continuity well. As well as this, the narrative is clear and there is a decisive ending.

Induction Image Representations

Image Connotations from George Gibbs