MP - Evaluation (1)

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

During the initial stage of our production, research was used to gain an insight into the main conventions of horror film openings. These include typography, sound-track, form, narrative, genre, style and mise-en-scene. Our audience research that all of these things are expected by the target audience and so we developed our opening sequence to fit with these expectations.

One of the most important conventions of horror film opening sequences is the soundtrack. Having different sounds and music at specific points throughout the opening sequence can change the entire mood of the start of the film. Something that arose was that many if not all horror opening sequences use calm, slow and obviously dischordant music, that is sometimes an adaptation of a child's lullaby, which is in high difference to teen films, that often use mainstream music as it relates to the characters in the film. We selected our music to fit our video, and this soundtrack challenges the conventions of horror film music in the fact that our soundtrack, whilst being very dischordant, is much quicker than most horror music, the main example of this being throughout the chase scene.

Using camera techniques and editing, we created continuity by editing our shots so that each one was an exact continuation with both character movement and sound. Another crucial point was ensuring that our actors were in the same position as in the previous shot and always dressed the same from one filming day to the next. We used many of shots and angles, including a large portion point-of-view shots. This gives a very chaotic feel to our film opening as well as placing the audience with the protagonist, a staple of horror films. Pull focus shots were also used, drawing the audiences attention onto a certain part in the frame.

Another main convention of horror is dark lighting and dull colour. We initially planned to film during the evening as darkness fell, and this worked well in our reccie shoots. However, due to availability of actors and crew, this wasn't really possible. To achieve the dull look, we had to use the Adobe Premier software to alter the saturation, contrast, brightness and hue of our footage. Our choice of locations; a graveyard and the local woods were shown to be two of the most popular settings for a horror film as our audience research revealed. The costume used was also planned with the audience research as a strong decider. The protagonist wore a plain, ordinary outfit and the antagonist had much darker clothes giving connotation of dread.