Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your Media Product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product develops the conventions of a general Horror movie opening. When thinking about the genre we were targeting we noticed that there were various long/close-ups but not many medium shots. Looking at the screen grabs from 9 different points in our film I would say that it is quite typical of a horror movie opening. Close ups seen in shots 2 and 4 show the characters expression – vital for telling the audience what they are feeling – this is a big part of thriller/horror films.

Long shots take up most of the screen grabs; this sets the scene and shows the location. The background and set is vital for this genre and this is why long shots are so important, spacious sets leave room for the character to move freely and any other characters to enter; since it is so open it also leaves a lot of room for sudden things to happen which builds tension, as you can see our set location is also in a wide area which is again typical of a horror movie.

Although it is set in the conventional place, the lighting challenges what is normally considered of a horror movie during shots 7 and 8 since we film out in the open, normally the lighting is dim; dark to make the mood eerie. This isn’t a problem though, because for the start of the film our character is seen running through a forested area which means the lighting will be naturally low.

The titles for the first and last screen grabs are made up of blacks, whites and reds; complimenting the horror theme because these are colours seen often, the audience will relate these colours to the genre and will give them an idea right from the start of what they should expect.
By using the normal conventions of a horror movie this should help the film to sell well, it is within the audiences’ expectations and therefore pleasing. However there are enough ideas about the opening to make it original so that it will not become boring and predictable.

I have recorded myself using 'CamStudio' to show me using Adobe Premiere Pro. The clip is of me importing a clip so that I could use it on the timeline for the film. Although APP is simple for importing and has a simple timeline, we have found that it is slow running, crashes often and is generally difficult to use. I would not suggest this programme to others wanting to create a clip longer than 5 minutes unless their computer runs smoothly without fault.

Editing

For the past few days I have been completing editing together the clips that we have filmed into the final peice. I have decided to do the editing out of the group (although I will receive feedback and critisism from the rest of the group) since I have had experience with using Adobe Premiere Pro before. Although Premiere Pro can be difficult at times, it is good for editing because the timeline is laid out simply and importing clips is easy to do.

This video gives you an idea of what it looks like, and gives some useful tips.

Email for music

Since we are using music in our film, we needed to email the band manager of the song we chose to make sure that we did not go against any copyright terms that might be in place, Curtis sent an email to make sure that this was okay.
Since they did not reply (we said they did not have to reply if allowed to use the song) we are okay to add it into the film.

Make-up

I decided to test out what the make-up would look like for the zombies in our film, instead of using face-paint I decided to use Acrylic paint because you can build up layers to make texture, which you cannot do with face make-up. Using three different colours of red (I may use more when doing it for the final) I painted what would perhaps be a bite mark onto the side of my neck. This is only a practice to see how using Acrylic would go; it is good, but does peel fairly quickly so we would perhaps have to keep re-applying it if the scenes go on for too long.

What does your target audience look like?

The target audience for our film opening is aimed at teenagers and young adults from the ages 16-21 who, as a group of friends, enjoy watching horror and thriller movies for fun when they get together. Films that these groups of people might enjoy are popular scary films like 28 weeks/days later, Paranormal Activity, The Ring, The Excorcist.

These types of films are popular and sell well with teenagers because getting scared on purpose is popular with young culture.
They would enjoy heavier bands, such as A Day To Remember, Bring Me The Horizon and Alesana. As well as watching movies, they would enjoy Television in general and watch popular shows (Sherlock, Supernatural etc.)

Because of this I think that our movie will sell well with this generation, even B-movies tend to become big hits since access to the internet is widely available and young adults will use it often in their spare time.

This means that we will probably use Internet-based advertising as a big part of our marketing distribution, The Internet also allows a lot of convergence (videos, advertisements, downloads.)

Continued to go out and film and have nearly finished, using the shots we did shoot we also created a rough draft to present to the class that would show them what kind of ideas we had. The first two images are of James during filming, when he was acting as the main role and the bottom image is one I took of Curtis when he was searching for a suitable place to film.

The video is of the group figuring out a place where Curtis could be out of shot and make noises and shake the branches (pretending to be a zombie). We had problems since Curtis was brightly dressed and could easily be seen on camera when not completely hidden.