JB - Evaluation (1)

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When we began production of our film, we had to carefully plan out the elements of our film opening such as camera techniques, soundtracks, special effects and more. To give us some sort of idea of the conventions of current psychological horrors, we carried out research. This included analysis of existing film openings from the genre, followed by audience research which we carried out to ensure that our film opening would conform to the expectations of the target audience.

We found several conventions that seemed very relevant to our film opening, and so this changed our storyboard/plan for the film in some ways.
Perhaps one of the most significant conventions we found was the sense of mystery. By creating an antagonist which continually leaves who/what/why/where/how questions in the audience’s mind, a strong sense of suspense is also created which can be important for establishing the mood of the overall film. This was important because we were creating an opening for a psychological horror, so we wanted people to be able to immediately recognise that it was a psychological horror film – not an action film, for example – even if it isn’t staring them in the face, people will subliminally recognise the genre because they are used to seeing conventional features from other films in the same genre.

We created the sense of mystery in a chase scene towards the end of the opening sequence. Here, the antagonist is seen to be in several places at once, or to ‘teleport’, because when the protagonist is sprinting, he sees the antagonist at several points – all in different places. This is a very supernatural characteristic, so immediately the audience is in suspense because the antagonist is very unpredictable, and leaves them wondering what to expect next. We also used pull focusing, as well as point of view shots, to help contribute to the sense of mystery in the scene.

The locations that we chose were also conventional. Graveyards are typical of psychological horrors because they are associated with death, and woods are extremely common because they create a sense of claustrophobia – particularly when they are shot in dull lighting conditions, which was another conventional feature of horrors that we decided would be important to use. It was difficult to arrange the filming at the right time so we decided it would be more sensible to create the desired effect in the post-processing software we used - Adobe Premiere. We adjusted the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and exposure settings on the camera itself, and then further tweaked them on the actual footage once it had been recorded to make sure that it was the effect we wanted.


Continuing on with visual effects, we carefully planned out each individual shot so that the film opening would look like a continuous sequence rather than multiple unrelated shots that would simply confuse the audience. We adhered to the 180 degree rule and made sure that our actors were wearing the same clothing throughout the footage so that it looked like the same person, and made sure they stood in the same place when shooting from a different angle so that it was clear they were in the same location when the angle changed.

The typography was also another aspect to be carefully considered. For example if the font was very graffiti-like, it would seem very out of place in context with the footage and other conventional aspects of the film opening. We used the audience research to help us decide which styles of fonts the audience typically associated with the genre.

Finally, a non-visual technique that we carefully used was the soundtrack, which we used to anchor parts of the footage – for example the part where the antagonist leans over the protagonists shoulder and says “How well do you know the woods?” – the mood has clearly changed from slow-paced mystery to a fast-paced chase and the soundtrack clearly changes accordingly.