Research Into Similar Products - 1990s

The Blair Witch Project – 1999
Director: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez
Cover: See Right
Certificate: 15
Genre: Horror

The first shot in this movie is actually an insert, showing a white text against a black screen offering up a short prologue with detail as to what the film is about. The establishing shot shows a blurry camera mid-shot of a teenage girl. There is dialogue between her and the cameraman, meaning everything we see is a Point-Of-View (POV) shot from a character.
The camera zooms out to a long shot and shows the audience that the girl is in her home, which she then tells us, and the audience are treated to a tracking shot of the room.
A long shot of the girl is then again shown at the end of the track, where she then explains what the whole film will actually focus around. This is again like a forewarning or prologue to the film, allowing the user to make assumptions on what could then happen.

The camera then jump-cuts to a shot of various books, all of which focus on surviving in the woods, except for one. This exception is a clearly old book, that seems worn and typically unreadable from the cover. The girl explains how it contains a legend, furthering the audience’s knowledge into the film and the reason behind it.
We then jump-cut again to an outdoor shot of a car pulling into a drive. The camera is still shooting a POV shot of the cameraman, and we are taken to see the newcomer, unloading a car-boot-ful of supplies, and a larger camera. There is a tracking shot combined with dialogue of the first cameraman circling the newcomer, then the shot jump cuts to the other camera, showing a black and white shot of the first character we saw, the girl. This shot is given as a POV from the newcomer and his larger camera, distinguished by the removal of colour.

The penultimate jump cut moves the camera inside again with more character dialogue, showing us the newer character face down on a table complaining. We see a very short shot of this, before the final jump cut takes us to inside a car, a POV shot of one character leaving his house. There is an introduction of synchronous diagetic sound of a car stereo playing in the background.