In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
- 2. Is the form of our opening conventional? • The form of our opening is conventional of a horror film • This is shown in the titles, red connotes danger and death and is typical of a horror film • The plot follows a psychological horror theme • Character exposition is shown as very conventional of horror for example the final girl. • We create an enigma which can be interpreted in different ways to leave the audience to apply their own meaning to it. This is a frequent case in a lot of horror films as a lot, especially psychological are based around messing with the mind.
- 3. How does your opening conform or challenge the conventions of our chosen sub-genre of horror? • Our opening conforms to the conventions of our chosen subgenre of horror, psychological horror.
- 4. Character • Character exposition is shown a fair amount in our opening sequence with Charlie being the protagonist while introducing other characters throughout the sequence. • Charlie takes the final girl role, while Max is the psychopathic killer, with three materialistic teenage girls.
- 5. Plot • The plot shows conventions of horror as it involves aspects like murder and foreshadowing.
- 6. Mise-en-scene • We applied typical horror to most features of mise-en-scene. • The costumes were all the same, all the characters wore black which connotes darkness and fear. • Low key lighting was used to create a scary atmosphere. • Character blocking showed fear of the murderer which does not challenge the conventions of horror.
- 7. Sound • We used ambience to create suspense and sharp high pitched sounds to put the audience on edge. • This is typical in horror films to make the audience feel uncomfortable. • All the rest was non-diagetic sound to keep up the sense of reality.
- 8. Camera Work • We used a range of different camera shots, a lot of them being stills or pans. • We used point of view shots and candid angles to bring in a perspective but stills were mainly useful to catch the facial expressions and body movements of the characters. • In one scene we used tracking to zoom in on the action while building up suspense to the climactic moment.
- 9. Editing Style • We used continuity editing to make our opening more realistic, to pull the audience in. It looks more professional and therefore more effective if the shots flow as one.
- 10. Typography/ Title Position, Animation etc • The typography conforms to the conventions of horror, by using red writing the audience are reminded of the genre and the standard font makes it more serious and professional looking. • We wanted to keep the animations very simple so as not to take the audience’s eyes of the on-screen action so we faded the titles in and out. • We also positioned the credits in the corners of the screen for the same reason.
- 11. Colour/ Visual Techniques • We didn’t alter the colour and lighting too much because we wanted to keep it looking natural and realistic. • However as we filmed on different days, the scenes and slightly different lights which we fixed. • We wanted to distinguish a contrast between the fresh, natural light of the reality scenes and the darkness of the dream scenes. • We also applied a blurred edges to the dream scenes to highlight this.
- 12. Representation and Ideology • The victims are all females while the attacker is male, conveying a residual ideology of gender roles.