1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We used various codes and conventions of the horror genre in order to connote meaning in our own production. We followed the codes of Roland Barthes, relying heavily on the hermeneutic code for the purpose of suspense and making the viewer uncomfortable. We decided to follow this code in the way of not explaining why the murderer is killing Lucy's loved ones.
We also conformed to the proairetic code to imply actions in our product that imply a further narrative action. This keeps the viewer interested and wondering what is going to happen. We used vulnerable women as the main victims in order to intrigue the audience into watching the entire sequence so they can see whether the character survives or not.
I used archtypical vulnerable women characters in my production however, I did not make the victims exclusively women and conformed to the conventions of horror productions such as Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween - youth, whether a character is male or female in horror productions often makes a character vulnerable to either a gruesome end or a traumatic and bloody experience.
The costumes in the film are meant to be nondescript, this could be happening in most recent times or places, making the characters more understandable giving more viewers connectivity with the characters in our product. The mise-en-scene in general is domestic, very safe looking and average. I exploited the red and yellow curtains in the house to give an inter textual hint to the film "Arlington Road" - although a thriller, I used some of the techniques using colour - through the perfect looking suburbia, the red dabs of colour suddenly hint death, blood and that something is wrong.
I have used codes and conventions in my product which fits within the horror genre. In the horror production, we are expecting to see gore, hear eerie music designed to fray the viewer's nerves and see attacks in a suburban atmosphere, making the audience feel not altogether left out when it comes to the murderer's potential victims. All designed to make the viewer both terrified yet feel some sort of catharsis and understanding for the victims - making the killer all the more terrifying. In this way it fulfils the contractual nature of the horror genre.
There were inter textual moments where we hinted at being inspired by John Carpenter's Halloween by having shots of a suburban house thankfully similar to the one in Halloween. Not only that but we played on the whole "nightmare in suburbia" theme making typical viewers feel uneasy.
In this product a maternal and caring young woman is introduced as a carer for her younger, vulnerable, disabled little sister. She represents good in this sequence as she is portrayed as selfless for taking care of her sister. This comforms to Todorov's narrative and the notions of good and evil.
Similar to the main female character is John Carpenter's Halloween continually looking after the young children in the neighbourhood. Another similarity is Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street always looking after her alcoholic mother. The killer, therefore is the opposite of this. What kind of person could desire to hurt such a woman? The embodiment of evil (in other media products, examples of this include Freddie Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason Vorhees from Friday the 13th and Michael Myers from Halloween) However, I have not just used the codes and conventions of a horror film, I have used the codes and conventions of continuity during the editing process.
The music I imported during editing builds up to something terrible happening, it is eerie music, and then gets progressively louder as the film progresses - a technique I learned from the opening of John Carpenter's "Halloween".
2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our media product represents a social group of 18+ young people (although we realise under 18s will more than likely see the film) as this is who the victims are. It would be no good having a murderer going after for example, several OAPS and try to market the film to young people (as anything other than a dark comedy anyway) as the audience would share no horror, affinity and understanding. Horror films where young people are murdered over and over again are popular with young people as when there is finally retribution for the killer in the end (usually the case with exception of Halloween.) the viewer will feel that there was justice for the characters they felt connection with.
I have compared our main character, Lucy, to both Laurie Strode from John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978)
and Wes Craven's Nightmare On Elm Street's Nancy Thompson.
Lucy is a young, suburban woman who cares for her family as do both of these characters. The killers in both of their stories go after their family and friends for no apparent reason. The truth is always revealed very late into the film.
3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
The production company we came up with was a mixture of parts of our media team's names - "LoLuKu" i.e. Lloyd Williamson, Louise "Lu" Hart and Michaela Kuen. This not only puts our own names to the product but the name "LoLuKu" is nonsensical and we hope it has an enigmatic effect.
We seek inspiration from horror movie production companies such as "Lionsgate" a Canadian company well known for it's distribution of horror productions (such as House of 1000 Corpses, the Devil's Rejects and every Saw film to date).
4) Who would be the audience of your media production?
Our audience is going to be 18+ due to the gore content and the killing of a minor.
From all of this target audience, I chose a male audience named David Penny for analysing on our product. This is David. He is 23 years old and lives in East London. He is currently working as a youth leader in Norfolk. He wears
Gothic clothes often but is not unknown to be casual.David enjoys watching many genres of film, but particularly horror. He watches the latest horror movies as soon as they are in the cinema and visits the cinema often as well as having an extensive DVD collection. He enjoys the newest films as well as the classics.
David listens to rock music every day, particularly Gothic rock.
If this was screened at his local horror I believe David would certainly go to see it as he enjoys both new films and classics, appreciating the codes and conventions of both. He watched the newest Halloween and the oldest one and enjoyed comparing them.
We encouraged our target audience to take a questionnaire so we can understand what codes and conventions make them watch horror productions. The audience seemed to appreciate a mixture or gore and suspense, mixed in the way that makes the gore simply "jump out at you". We asked audience opinion on what too much gore did to their opinion of a horror film and they usually responded that they thought it made the film silly.
We also made a facebook group for our audience and encouraged their ideas and comments.
5) How did you attract/address your audience?
We created a facebook fan page and encouraged our target audience to give their opionions on the film so we could gain more of an understanding of who we were aiming our product at.
We also followed the codes and conventions of a horror production very carefully in order to connote to our target audience their expectations.
6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
We have learned very much about technology during our horror production, we learned to use camera equipment and other software such as FinalCut Pro, and used many websites such as www.soundcloud.com etc. Here is an example of what FinalCut Pro looks like on screen
It was rather interesting using the equipment also and I was very comfortable using the camera and editing programs.
(See our sound tech
Michaela below.)This is Lloyd and I testing equipment before renting it.
Me testing the sound.
Filming went well for a few days until there were so many continuity errors we had to re film several times as well as there being a house full of people. We used websites such as:
www.blogger.com: This helped us to promote our product, connote the meaning and rationale behind the film more through advertising and encouraging the audience to give feedback, we found out a lot about our audience which helped us a lot
www.youtube.com - we used youtube to put our sequence up for the public to view, encouraged feedback and put it on our blog for the audience we had already gaged an interest in to see.
www.soundcloud.com - essential to put the music we used for the sequence up onto the blog.
Software we used included:
FinalCut Pro, which was essential for my editing. I had to learn to use this software quickly as we did not have a lot of time. Luckily, the lighting was available via the lights in Lloyd's house so we did not have to edit the colours and lighting, the characters and props were clearly visible. FinalCut Pro enabled me to be very creative (such as adding sound in to connote what I wanted the audience to feel watching the product).
7)Looking back on your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full production?
Our preliminary task taught me a lot about using a camera and abiding by the 180 degree rule for example, as when we first shot our preliminary I broke pretty much every rule (the 30 degree rule, the 180 degree rule, the continuity was off etc) once we re-filmed our preliminary, we shot it again and this time obeyed the rules scrupulously. This worked and our preliminary was acceptable to our media department, which was a relief as we made so many mistakes with the first attempt at a preliminary. The cuts from one shot to another shot that matches the first shot action is named match on action.
The two characters in the same scene should always have same left-right relationship to each other which is called 180 degree rule. We should always use 180 degree rule otherwise it will very much disorientate the audience. During the editing process, when one shot is cut to another shot and again cut back to previous shot this is known as a "shot reverse shot". We explored this in our preliminary but thought in our final product where we planned to use a shot reverse shot that a point of view shot would be more appropriate in order to fully capture the trauma of the protagonist. We see her horrified expression up close at the discovery of her dead sister.
Working as a group proved to be very challenging at times, not everyone was available at the same time and tensions were running high after our initial project failed and we had to start over again in such a short time. However, we got everything done eventually and managed to avoid continuity errors (apart from the actress not wearing bangles in the final cut one moment and then having bare arms the next, but we simply ran out of time). We were all agreed on using the props such as fake blood and the medication, there were no arguments there. Admittedly, we did not manage the time as successfully as we could have but we had the end product ready by the deadline.
Audience feedback was generally positive, one or two noticed the continuity error with the actress's bangles being missing during the later scenes, but the audience were generally complimentary regarding the acting, cinematography, mise-en-scene (which they said was particularly appropriate) dialogue and verisimilitude.
