In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Horror films are made and designed to:
- Frighten and panic the audience
- Cause apprehension
- Raise the audiences fears
- Shock the audience
- Never have a true happy ending
My film production confuses the audience. It confuses them because there is no gore in the opening, just unassuming and simple shots of a girl in a isolated room and in the woods. It isn’t until the end that the audience realises that the girl’s life has possibly be ended.
Characters:
In my production, there are two characters. There is a girl and the villain. However, other than seeing the characters face, you only see the hand, this leaves the audience with the unknown and wondering who it is. My film challenges the usual characteristics of horror character, because the girl is isolated on her own, without a male to protect her. There is no attribute to the way the villain kills its victims because it’s not been properly focused on, however you could say that in a way the killer does have a way he/she kills the victims, because the girl gets unknown calls and there is blood on the trees, this gives the audience the impression that something is probably going to happen to the girl, and in the same way, the others were killed.
Fears:
Usually in horror films, they show these characteristics of fear:- Vulnerability
- The unknown
- Death
There is obviously more but these are what are considered the top 3, I know this because I conducted a survey amongst 16/17 year olds and this is what they thought what the most popular.
My film production shows the conventions of the horror with fear, because it uses specific shots like close ups and point of view shots to express these fears. In my production there is a young, unaccompanied woman, who hears rustling sounds as she is walking through the woods. My production covers all 3 top areas of the characteristics of fear because it focusses on what are considered frightening to woman and that they are vulnerable when they’re alone and they need a man to look after them.
The title of my film and Font:
The title of my film is “Amelia” its called this because it’s the name of the girl in the production, The title is shown at the end of the production. I created a dark black background with the title shooting in onto the black without any sound, this was done purposely so that it creates a sense of the unknown and that they don’t know exactly what happened to the girl. It is in “Brush Script MT” font, which could be quite posh for a horror font, however this is what I was aiming for because in my view It made it look like as if someone else.
In the film, all the titles are the same font, I did this because I wanted to continue with the whole theme of oddness and creepy setting but also because I wanted to keep the flow of the titles appealing for the audience, in addition this was done because I wanted to keep it professional. The title “Amelia” is in the centre of the shot because I wanted to grab the audience’s attention as well as focus that the film is purely based upon Amelia, who is the main character. Even though the fonts are the same throughout the production, the titles at the start of the film are white, this was done for a reason, because we wanted it to stand out and attract the audience. The colour white symbolizes innocence and purity. White reflects light and is considered a calm colour. This is ironic because my production is a horror film and she evidentially dies, we chose white because we wanted to show that her life has ended and that the situation isn’t so calm. Though, at the end the title is in red and this is effective because the colour red is an emotionally intense colour and in this case the colour red connotes danger, death and blood.
Setting/Location:
For the setting of my production, I decided to use the school and the woods, and I did this for many reasons. Firstly, because it was convenient and I am at school every week day and it was easy to film with the schedule that I had, because it never interrupted anyone or my daily life. Secondly, because I wanted the character to be portrayed as vulnerable young woman, and this could have been easily done, if she was isolated in a class room and in the woods, furthermore, an isolated setting is a convention of horror and so is the woods. Thirdly, In many know horrors they seem to use small compact spaces such as small rooms or standard hours to create a sense of immobilisation, and we wanted to go against this by having a wider space which gives the audience the impression that anything could be out there, and this is done by the eerie music.
Costume and Props:
In any horror film, and generally in every film costume and props are very important because it can connote different things, whether it’s representing a role, showing signs of stereotypes they are both required. The costume in my production is simple but is yet still effective. The character is wearing a light blue long sleeved shirt and plain black trousers, she is generally covered, and this goes against the horror convention of woman because she is not seen an hypersexual. In the production I used very few props, but the most significant is the phone because it has a crack on it and this connotes carelessness and therefore gives the audience the impression that she is vulnerable. At first, our original character had brunette hair and we were considering giving that person a blonde wig and dress her in skimpy and revealing clothing so that we can go along with the convention of horror and connote the stereotypical blonde girl.
Camerawork and Editing:
My camera work mainly consisted of various different shots and distances. The main shots that were used were, close ups and medium long shot. In my opinion my favourite shot is the one where the character, Amelia is touching the tree with blood on it. This created a lot of emphasis and created fear. The editing I used for my production was hard and longitudinal because I got the same scene with different shots and put them into an sequential order, I then trimmed them to about 3-7 seconds long, I believe this a good amount because having anything longer will be longitudinal and it will bore the audience, it also created a good amount of the time for the titles to come in. In some of the shots the lighting changes, however in one shot, when the character is walking into the woods, it makes it look like the woods is dark. This is an advantage because it creates a sense of the unknown and makes the woods seem like it’s a very sinister and unsafe place to be. The software that I used was Adobe Premiere, this software has various effects such as “Speed up” this enabled me to quicken up the shots, and thus making them go faster. This helped a lot with the shots that were to elongated but still needed to be used because they are effective, for example when the character is walking, we needed to quicken that up, furthermore we didn’t speed it up to much as this would of made it unrealistic because she is walking a bit to fast and therefore made it very obvious that we’ve used editing effects.
