The believability of the form is key to authentic content Instead of going for big and effective cinematic surround sound, they chose to stick with authenticity and presented their material with two audio channels, just like it would sound if the student's material had really been found-footage (and nevertheless orchestrating crackles and snaps that make the nighttime tent-scenes so utterly scary). The team's consequence in connotating an authentic found-footage-feeling to their film can also be seen in their decision to not mix the film in 5.1, but in stereo. The subtleness of inexplicable things happening in the film are translated into a considerate soundtrack. Even if sound effects had been added during the process of audio-postproduction, the soundtrack as it appears to audiences feels raw, real and trustworthy. The raw soundtrack of (at least seemingly) untreated location sound recordings helped to establish an immediate closeness to the material and opened it up for emotional involvement. The absence of any score or music in Blair Witch Project, as well as no obvious sound effects that have been added to support a jump scare, is what made it authentic to audiences. Taking a closer look at what happens in the soundtrack of the film though, you'll notice that director Adam Wingard chose to break with a pivotal element that made the original such a believable classic of its genre: the authenticity and believability of the sound. But why? It's sound that makes the differenceĭisregarding any logical issues with the film (like, why does it sound plausible for everyone in the film to go look for Heather, years after she went missing in the woods in the first film), sound plays such an important role in Blair Witch - as in any other found-footage film. Although the film first holds up to its genre and starts out really entertaining, Blair Witch ultimately fails to be convincing found-footage horror.
It doesn't only say so at the beginning of the film, but also adopts the typical stylistics of found-footage as a genre: shaky camera, semi-professional framing, rough cuts, raw audio, random cutaways and arbitrary lighting. Like so many others since The Blair Witch Project, Blair Witch tries to immerse us into the action and give us that little extra bit of scare and unease by pretending to be real. Just as in the original, Blair Witch opens with a disclaimer, which claims the footage shown was found in the woods near Burkittsville and edited together. Shortly before Blair Witch Project hit cinemas, Myrick and Sánchez published Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), a 44-minute mockumentary that introduced audiences on the Sci-Fi-Channel to the case of those three missing college students trying to investigate the Blair Witch myth. And advertising at selected college campuses instead of a big nationwide marketing campaign helped to create a feeling that if you got to know about The Blair Witch Project, you thought you were discovering something special. Spreading chunks of information on different websites and forums kept people talking about the myth. Accurate timelines, detailed mythology, photographs, evidence and reports from eye-witnesses made people believe in the existence of a witch in Burkittsville. You can still access their old website on the Internet Archive. Myrick and Sánchez especially made use of viral marketing on the internet, back when such a strategy was something people hadn't seen before. Over this period, they forged and spread false information about the Blair Witch and the students that had supposedly gone missing during their investigation. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had planned and written the project for six years and created their own witch-mythology prior to the release of the film. The students disappear and only later their video footage is found in the woods, edited together and presented as The Blair Witch Project.
The film follows three college students as they shoot a documentary about a witch that has been said to haunt the woods around Burkittsville, a small town in Maryland formerly known as Blair. When in 1999 The Blair Witch Project came out, it established itself as one of the first and best examples of world-building and transmedia storytelling in the horror genre.
0 kommentar(er)
