1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenges forms of conventions of real media products?
Our product uses many conventions of our chosen genre, as we chose a thriller for our genre we decided we want to play it somewhat safe and follow the conventions. Firstly we chose to have a male killer and a female victim found similarly in popular thrillers such as ‘Scream’. All tough we realized this could be seen as sexist and thus tarnish our product; we decided to go with it, as it is the most common convention found throughout thrillers. We were aware that we could have challenged this by reversing the roles, but for the sake of realism we had to have the man as the killer as our male actor is taller and larger than our female actor. This also goes along with what Prop said on that “women are seen as the victim” this soon became a genre staple and can be found in most popular thrillers.
We also noticed that night time was a popular conventions which can be found in almost any thriller, we found this out when we watched ‘I know what you did last summer’ where practically the whole movie takes place in the dark. This is done in order to create a better atmosphere for our product, as the night is a common fear; it is the fear of the unknown, the fear that anything can be lurking in the shadows. This is the fear we decided to use. This in combination with the soundtrack we used creates a rather creepy atmosphere.
The film hostel uses a mixture of distorted and abstract sounds in order to make the scenes unsettling for an audience. We decided to go with a dark, low tone music track and we edited it ourselves to make it fit better with our product, we also used a heartbeat that we distorted and twisted to sound creepier. All of these sounds can be similarly found in any thrillers, they’re common staples and add to the product in a positive way. Over all we stuck to conventions and didn’t really decide to challenge them, of course there were disputes among the group about what we were to do and we discussed intently to come up with our conclusions.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The general conventions for this genre of film will be a group of people, usually teenagers. We decided to use a single person and we wanted the victim to be a person that has no unrealistic features about them. Originally our victim was intended to be someone everyone and anyone could be, so every person could feel the fear. But of course we could only have one gender as our victim so we stuck with convention and did go with a female; this was the only problem with our idea. Obviously we cannot represent both genders with only one character. So we attempted to come up with a new idea based around why our victim would be female and not male. With popular thrillers such as ‘Taken’ we noticed a running trend, all victims were female and we still had trouble coming to a conclusion as to why? Then we all came together and had a long discussion filled with ideas and suggestions. We finally came up with the conclusion, using a female victim attracts both genders.
We love to be scared and shocked, women would want to watch a film about a female victim as they would feel more scared as they can relate well with the female on screen. Men are attracted to these types of films for a few reasons; first of all as a woman is the victim a man would usually play the killer/kidnapper and even the hero. With this men can feel empowered, feeling as if they’re the dominant gender as they’re dominating women and saving them. This also ties in with the old “damsel in distress” stereotype. Within some thrillers like ‘hostage’ women are often sexualized. Directors do this in order to attract men, almost like using a beautiful woman as bait for the man. We only decided to play on the empowerment and decided not to sexualize our female actress.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and Why?
Platinum dune – we have thought about this question clearly and decided that platinum dune would be interested in distributing our product. This institution is quite experienced in the horror genre and they are a production company that works in the ‘motion pictures’ industry and was created by filmmakers Michael Bay, Brad Fuller and Andrew Form in 2001. Because of our ideal horror/thriller genre, we think they would be interested in it as they specialize in horror films such as Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street. We think they would be interested because a movie that they produced “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is similar to our production because it has a female victim and a male “badie”. We don’t have a problem with them being well known as they are slowly getting there.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
As a group we decided that our audience would be people ages eighteen and upwards, this was so that we could use any situations and themes without much limits. We wanted our piece to be accessible to all genders, we succeeded this by not sexualizing our victim, she may be female which does fall into the convention of the female victim being weaker than the man (similar to what prop said about the man being the stronger). As our piece is set in an estate we planned for our audience to be people who could relate, so typically working class people. We wanted people from all walks of life, we didn’t aim at a specific race, we never used one race to represent in our piece and we wanted ethically diverse actors.
5. Q5: How did you attract/address your audience?
Stereotypical audience for genre – with horror, the stereotypical audience normally targeted would probably be 15 and over. Some even aim for 18 and over. The reason is that most horror films made have pretty much violence, some sexual scenes and death. The more violent scenes with graphic images are going to be certificate 18+. Most often, bad languages are used and this is not suitable for audiences below the 18+ certificate. Horror movies don’t take a lot of intellect to understand as they generally go on the basis of killings. “Kill List” is a movie which goes along this stereotype as it involves a series of killing after killing.
The target audience for our opening sequence would have to understand the general conventions of a horror film because our plot is based on real conventions (stereotypical male “baddie” and vulnerable female victim). Our opening sequence is made to keep our audience alert with our tense sound effects and camera shot so we wouldn’t expect a more feminine woman to watch as their general choice of genre would be chick flicks.
Some horror films like “Saw” would have a wide range of audience they choose to target, for example someone who doesn’t mind the sight of blood. Some even tend to use settings which appeal to certain audiences like “Attack the Block” which is based on a typical London house block. They could also target people by the choice of characters they use, for example a young vulnerable female. Some horrors use little sense of realism which compared to our production; we tend to be as realistic as possible. We chose the idea of focusing on realism because most people would enjoy and be alert especially those who live in estates like this because the focus on the film (typical backstreet or estate where unsuspecting events go on) is likely to happen in real life. This is a way we can use our production to tap into our target audiences’ mind, because of unsuspecting events in “innocent looking” estates, they are less likely to forget the situations and plots in our horror movie. Using this idea is where the sub-genre ‘thriller’ comes through. Most thriller movies tend to make the audience mind juggle around as they don’t reveal the answers during the movie. An example of this would be “inception”. This movie was made very well as it gains the full attention of the audience. They made the audience figure out the puzzling plots in the movie.
Our characters are a typical innocent young female and a scary looking man. This character choice indicates that most teenagers especially boys are more likely to buy a ticket to watch at the cinema because stereotypically, males like to be dominant. Not forgetting the females of similar age to our female character as we would like to make them have an idea of how vulnerable innocent young girls could be around men.
We set the scene during nighttime to make it more interesting and scary. I went on and did a little research of my own on Google and saw that they were right. The house that we used is a good location for horror because the street is empty at nighttime and all you see are cars parked by the kerb. This indicates that no one comes out during nighttime and everyone minds their own business. This could appeal to the older audience who stay at home at nighttime. The camera shots that we used were very well thought of to make it as interesting as possible. We used quick cuts and shot reverse shot of our killer and our victim to keep our audience engaged. We aimed for younger audience so we had to make sure they wouldn’t be bored when watching our production. At first I used blue bubbly font to do the title sequence and then invited a group of young audience between the ages of 15-20. They all didn’t like the idea of blue bubbly font as it brings up the idea of fun and comic. It had no relation to horror films so they suggested the idea of white simple font for horror. I did a little research about it and they were right so we changed our font to simple white. We decided to make the fonts as interesting as the movie by using fade in and out effects. We think it worked well as our young audience enjoyed it.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Throughout the process of creating our product we have gain useful knowledge on a lot of the technologies that were required and which at the beginning we had very little idea of how to work with the tools we had. First of all we had to become used to the cameras, we used the … model of cameras to record our piece and we had… for other filming uses such as vlogging. Of course to go along with our cameras, these were pretty straightforward to use, just a few clips and screws and it’s done. We also were using Macs which most of us had never really used in the past, to be honest they were easy to use and we quickly got the hang of how to use then effectively by learning all the shortcuts and tools available to us. There were a bunch of programs on the macs that we were all unfamiliar with, programs such as Premiere Pro. This is able to make raw footage look a lot more professional by allowing us to edit clips together as well as add some nice effects for an overall polish, we had a few issues at first as we had no idea what all the button and tools on the program did but after a couple after school sessions of learning I was able to become rather comfortable with all the assets at my fingertips. Finally the last program we used logic pro, this was a program that allowed us to create, distort and tweak sounds and music. We used this program in order to get the creepy sound effects we wanted, we didn’t want to just copy some sounds off the internet we wanted the sounds to be our own.
At first, we found it difficult to navigate with the vast amount of buttons and gadgets in the program, but after a while I was able to create the sounds we wanted for our piece.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Looking all the way back to the beginning of this journey, we feel that we have become more comfortable with the equipment we had and skills that we needed to learn in order to create a good product. We feel that our skills have become more advanced. At the beginning of the course we had little idea what we was getting into, our skills were weak and as was our knowledge of the said medium and also our ideas were far too unrealistic, we wanted things that we just couldn’t do. Now that our final product is finished, it is clear that our skills have come further then what they were at the beginning. On our preliminary the footage was rather off, it was rough and the editing was rather bad to be honest. We were aware at the time that it wasn’t amazing and we knew that we had to get more comfortable with using the programs at hand. We feel as if we achieved what we wanted and that our final product looks far better than our preliminary, we watch them both for a before and after and found that our final product looked a lot smoother and the lighting, continuity, sounds, acting and continuity was far better. We also became more alert of the keywords and focused on them areas such as mise-en-scene and sounds. Overall the experience has been an educational one; we’ve learnt new skills and even learnt what the industry is like.
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