1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When coming up with ideas for our film we looked at the horror sub-genres of vampire and psychological thriller films. After looking at the codes and conventions and examples of these sub-genres we decided that a vampire film would be too hard to create realistically. We thought we wouldn’t be able to create the right effects not having the appropriate props, sets and costume. The codes and conventions of this sub-genre are; old fashioned costumes and sets e.g. an old mansion and graveyard, fangs, blood and very pale skin. We thought that the costumes and set would be hard to obtain and the others would come off looking unrealistic and therefore not have the right effect.
However, when looking at psychological thrillers and the history of horror, we noticed that horror has been moving closer to the audience to create a more terrifying effect. This has been achieved by the place the horror has been set has moved from a distant time in a different country to a suburban city. We wanted to push the boundary for that even more by not only having the horror happen in the society and use a child as the one causing the terror, like in many horror films, we wanted to make the audience feel unsafe where they already feel safe. Most horror films now happen in a suburban location at night time and we wanted to try something new, so we made our film be set in an apparently ordinary house, in the morning.
When we researched Hitchcock and watched the film Psycho, we admired the way he used voyeurism and we wanted to use that in our own film. We had different ideas of ways to accomplish that but we then needed to fit in into the film and in the end we included quite a few shots with the camera being the audience’s eyes and the main voyeuristic shot of the camera looking through the panels onto the stairs.
We decided to go with the victim being a representative of a typical teenage girl; covering a wide range of aspects included in stereotypes and so can hopefully appeal and relate to a wider range of the audience, instead of the typical tall, blond, thin horror victim. To do this we had her wearing clothes that had no brand and had school books and an instrument in the mise-en-scene. We also placed a new TV and a Wii games console in the mise-en-scene. We wanted to twist the horror and add a bit of mystery to it by having the victim become the villain. This will hopefully confuse the audience and challenge the way they feel about the character. They hopefully felt sorry and worried for the character at first and now it turns out the character is evil but it’s not her fault, leaving a sense of confusion as to how they are meant to feel about the character. This is what I think Tim Burton tried to accomplish in his film Sweeney Todd as at first he seems evil but you learn about his past and feel sorry for him, yet he is on a murderous rampage.
As you can see here, Sweeney Todd is with his wife and that he has a normal happy life. This contrasts with what happens to him in his life and the film and how he becomes. This is shown by the contrast in colour of the characters and that she was the reason he was good and happy.
We used the colour green a lot in our piece because that represents bad luck and we thought that that was appropriate for our character and this photo shows the amount of green we used. We has green walls, green duvet set and she put on a green shirt. This was to show that bad luck surrounding her and that she has no escape.
I thought that it was very effective and is one of the things that makes the film a success and therefore wanted to try and recreate a similar effect in our own film. The use of colour in Sweeney Todd is used very effectively and although Tim Burton mainly used black and white and contrasted that with colour we used colour to represent different things in our piece as well. He used a typical old fashioned horror convention of being set in the past and so the horror is further away from the audience where as we set ours very close to the audience.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
We had a teenage girl as the victim dressed in non matching pyjamas to show that she is from a middle/working class background and so will appeal to a wider audience as people may not relate well to an upper class person. We had them behave like a normal teenager and had items in the mise-en-scene to represent this such as a desk and computer with school work on it, a guitar and a picture of her friends at school. We also included items from her childhood like the cuddly toys and the items on her windowsill. This is to represent the idea that everything she owns and has in that room has been collected over her life, and she hasn’t gotten rid of anything. This means that even though she has a few nice and expensive things, like the big TV in the living room, her family have to work hard for what they have. It also she’s her age and the fact that she hasn’t left home yet, reinforcing her vulnerability and possible naivety.
I had recently moved house and have not got round to redecorating yet which meant that my house was a perfect location for this character to live. The house looks quite old and faded which went well with our story. We also couldn’t believe how well it fitted once we started looking into colour connotations and discovered that green represents bad luck which features a lot in our film. Green also represents envy which could show that pearl envy’s her because Emma is leading the life that Pearl never got to have. Most of the walls and carpets are green but none more than the room we chose to have as the characters’ bedroom which has green walls, carpet and ceiling. We thought that this was perfect as it shows that the bad luck is surrounding Emma (the victim) and spreading around the house, showing that Emma has no chance to escape her fate.
We don’t have the character talking in our film apart from at the very end when she is possessed and so would sound different anyway so in that sense we thought it would appeal to a wider audience range and it doesn’t discriminate any accents. We had a little girl playing the villain (Pearl, a ghost) and we chose her because she looks like a typical angelic girl. She is pale with blue eyes and blond hair. We also all had in mind how we wanted the chanting to go and she could chant it exactly how we imagined it. We had her dressed in her school uniform to show her age and innocence and coincidentally her school cardigan is green which we thought was good to show that she is giving bad luck to someone else as she had bad luck herself.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I think that our film is more like a Hollywood mainstream film rather than an Arthouse film as it uses typical Hollywood horror film conventions, mentioned earlier. I also think that it uses similar concepts that other Hollywood horror films use; such as a TV like in The Ring and a possessed girl like in Silent Hill. I think that the production company TriStar may publish our film as they have distributed quite a lot of horror films. Some of these include:
Our film has a girl being possessed in it so could be generalised with the other films where people get possessed, like Silent hill and Insidious above, which both made quite a good profit so hopefully ours would do the same. Even though our film is set in Britain not America, like most Hollywood films, I don’t think that that would be a problem because Britain and America are tied together quite well and whatever is popular in America is normally popular in Britain as well. I also think it may add a sense of Adventure to the horror of the film as it’s something new and different for audience to experience. I think it will also help the film be sold in both countries and possibly worldwide as Harry Potter is an all British film and is extremely popular all around the world.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Looking at the questionnaire results I got, we tired to create our film that would appeal to the biggest target audience. I think we managed to do this well as we followed the information we collected and made our film appropriate to the target audience we wanted.
I used this chart found on Pearl and Dean’s website to see what target audience to aim our horror film at as Paranormal Activity is considered a popular horror film. This chart shows that males prefer horror films to females but we shall aim it at both and that 15-24 year olds enjoy them more.
We attracted the audience by having modern items around that house that most teenagers now a days will have, such as the plasma screen TV, a computer, the Wii and the DVD’s. This means that the audience will find it easier to relate to the character and the film. The film starts off looking normal and so will draw in people’s interest as to see how it’s a horror film and what happens. We also made that the victim the audience see’s from the start and relate to become the villain, causing a slightly interesting twist in normal horror film plots. The female audience will be able to relate to the character as similar to them and the male audience will know people like her so will also relate to her.
6. What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?
From doing this task, I have learnt a lot about editing. We had done a lot of work before on camera angles and how to create them effectively with the camera but I have never really done editing before. I knew that editing took quite a bit of time but I didn’t realise just how long it took to get it exactly how you wanted it and how difficult and precise you needed to be. I’ve used Window’s Moviemaker before but using Final Cut definitely made the process a lot easier and better as we could do a lot more with it. Such as cutting footage and the smooth transitions we could create. We referred to the guide we were given as well to help us and experimented with a few bits of random footage before editing together our film so that we had an idea of how to use the software and what we could do. We worked out that we could slow down footage to make it run more smoothly and to make some of the mise-en-scene possibly more noticeable. We also realised that we could slow down the music on Final cut to make it fit in with the footage better. We learnt in the process to fully charge the camera before filming as it was mainly charged but ran out of battery just before we finished filming but luckily we brought a spare camera just in case and the quality was not significantly different.
We experimented how to use lighting efficiently and adding lamps into the background of shots or had the character turn on a light to help create shadows and light to express themes and feelings in our film. For example the character turning on the light when she walks into a room shows the dark presence of Pearl in the house and that Emma is a good character that brightens a room when she walks into it. It also represents that she’s walking into her fate and can’t be helped. The lamp in the corner of the room in the opening scene, made the cuddly bears cast shadows, showing that the innocence has a dark side and the feeling that Pearl could be shadowing Emma, waiting to possess her.We learnt that we could add in sound after we filmed it to have it non-diegetically as some of the sound didn’t work when we were filming it. We learnt that there are places we could get sounds from on the Internet which didn’t have a copyright on it meaning that we could use it in our film and the music we didn’t get from that I created which also meant that we didn’t infringe copyright laws. We learnt that we could slow down the speed of sounds and music on Final Cut which slowed down the tempo, making it fit better in the film.
I am most proud of some of the camera angles we did and the transition between some of them. I thought that we included some good camera angles and pan movements; for example the panning at the start of the bed with Emma asleep in and the whole stairs bit until she goes to walk into the kitchen. I liked the voyeurism we included in that bit, looking through the stairs and the way it was edited together. I also liked the bit where Catherine appears as I think the editing there was the best editing we did as even though we spent ages putting it together, it still manages to make me jump and catch me off guard. The sound adds to the effect as well and creates a sense of shock and panic as that is the first moment you see that something is going to go really wrong.7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
I feel that we have learnt how to time manage a lot more efficiently as we did all the main filming in one day so we had a lot of time to edit it after, resulting in being finished before the deadline. I learnt the amount of time editing takes as we didn’t do the editing together for the preliminary task which we learnt wasn’t good so we all did it together so we all learnt how to use the software, Final cut, which was a lot better. I think that we also became better at redoing shots, such as the medium shot of Emma screaming, when we weren’t happy with them. I think that we grew as a group and reflected ideas off each other, resulting in better ideas, mise-en-scene and camera shots. I think our group become more determined as we concentrated more on the main task and worked a lot harder to make it good. I think my knowledge of horror films has developed over the time from preliminary task to main task as I did a lot of research into them to make our horror film better. We also knew that red was a typical horror colour but we looked at different colour connotations and included them in our film for a better effect, such as green represents bad luck and envy.
