Evaluation question 1
- 1. Evaluation question 1 In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- 2. Classic Horror Genre Our production very much conforms to the classic stereotypes of a horror genre production, it uses the similar characters, Editing techniques, camera techniques, narration styles and acting styles of these generic horror genre films such as the “Blair Witch Project” , “28 Days Later” and The “exorcist”.
- 3. The Title The title we uses is classic to how horror movies chose their titles in the modern film industry, it gives a brief overview on what our production Is about for example “The Conjuring” Is a film about spirts or demons invading a family's life and terrorising them as so the viewer can easily tell it is about demons haunting someone just from the effective title. This is the same principle as our film “DIABLO”, the Spanish word for Devil, it give the viewer an idea that it has something to do with the devil . The font of the title is also effective, if someone is not able to figure out it is a horror film from the title they can still tell it is a horror film just from looking at the font as it is very creepy and horror like.
- 4. Film setting Horror films have a consistent setting for their productions, much of the time they are set in forests such as ours examples of this can include Friday the 13th, the evil dead and Texas chainsaw massacre. I believe these settings are used as they give the viewer a sense that the protagonist is venerable in the forests and is far from civilisation, trapped almost. The forest setting is also very dark and is full of obstacles to avoid. Our forest setting(Left) and forest setting from Friday the 13th (Right)
- 5. Editing Our production uses techniques consistently found in a horror film such as editing out light colours from shots such as orange, yellow and red and adding in darker colours such as purple, blue and green. This gives the effect of tension darkness and general horror to a shot as is for the reason it is used so much in horror films. (Shot from the film “30 days of night” compared to shot from opening scene of our movie). Our production uses quick cuts to short close ups and reaction shots show the viewer the fear and emotion expressed by the actors in our production as is used in many other horror films seen below. (from left to right “30 days of night” our production and “Blair witch project).
- 6. Editing 2 A classic horror paradigm our film used was a POV shot of the monster which was then edited to look like it is from the monsters point of view by adding a colour effect to it. This was popularised by the original action/horror film “The Predator” (seen below on the left) and has been used in many films to come including ours.
- 7. Sound We used sound in our production to give effect the seamlessly harmless clips into suspenseful shots that keep the viewer on edge. We used sound techniques such as stings, ambience, diegetic sound and NON diegetic sounds in our production to create these horror themes. Stings were used to create short quick “Jump scares” during the scene where the therapist is revealed as the Diablo. These are used constantly in jump scares in conventional horror movies such as Insidious. In the build up to these jump scares ambience is used to keep the viewer on edge, again we used ambience during the forest running scene to keep the user on edge before the final jump scare.
- 8. Chase Scene A chase scene is typical in most horror films. Some examples of chase scenes is the start of ‘28 weeks later’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw massacre’. These scenes are typical of a horror film opening as they set the scene and give a brief introduction of the protagonist. It also allows us to gather a great range of camera shots seen in our chase scene. 28 days later chase scene(Left) our production(Right)