EvaluationBY: DANIELLA RUNHAM

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

Studying film openings helped me when creating my own, because I knew what to include and how much to include and whether things were ‘too much’ or not. E.g. Sounds. How long you should keep the camera pointing in a certain direction, before it starts to look, not scary, just silly.

Also studying the history and seeing how the ‘horror genre’ has evolved throughout time, it helped me to realise how advanced we had to be when filming our own film opening, because society now, will not find things that were in ‘older’ horror movies, scary! They want something new, exciting and advanced.

Finally, analysing film openings (is tedious, yes!) but also very helpful when it comes to creating your own film opening. Because you know exactly, step by step, second by second, what you need to be putting into your film opening and how much detail needs to be put into it, for it to look like a ‘real’ horror film opening.

 How does your media product represent particular social

groups?  Our film opening shows a stereotypical teenage girl standing,

looking in the mirror in the toilets at her school. We then add more stereotypical behaviours to the girl, as we make her scream when she sees something ‘scary’ behind her. Whereas if we had a male actor looking in the mirror and he saw the same thing as the girl did, and he screamed, the audience would think he is just a ‘wimp’ because of the stereotype males have, to be all bold, brave and ‘hard’. But because it is a female, it makes the audience feel its scary as well, because it’s a woman screaming, whereas if it was a male, the audience would think there must be a different explanation to why he is screaming, because he is a male and he ‘shouldn’t’ (stereotypes, again!) find that scary.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Lionsgate Films and Hammer Films are both film companies that distribute horror films.

In my opinion I think that Lionsgate Films would be most likely to distribute our film, as Lionsgate Films distribute the more ‘real life’ horror films, such as: “The Cabin In The Woods” and “Acts Of Death”. And Hammer Films distribute horror films such as: “The Curse Of Frankenstein” and “The Curse Of The Werewolf”. And our film would be more based like the Lionsgate Films that are distributed, as its like something that ‘could’ happen in real life, whereas Hammer Films are more like the ‘made up’ horrors.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

My main target audience for our film opening would be teenagers and young adults. And the main reason for this is because they are able to relate to my film more, as that is the age range in our film.

Also I feel as our film would be too ‘scary’ and have too much of a ‘horror vibe’ to it, for younger children to watch as they may scare easily. And I think that older citizens may not enjoy the film as they may enjoy the older type of ‘horror’ they had when they were teenagers, and that’s the type of horror they relate to, and our type of horror in our film would be too ‘modern’ for them.

How did you attract/address your audience?

I made sure that my target audience would want to watch our film opening by making sure they can relate to it. I also made sure it was quite a modern style of filming, so the audience can clearly understand what is going on.

I also made sure that, in the film opening, they were not going to loose interest. I made sure the film opening looked thrilling and exciting all the way through, so it would make the audience want more.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Making this film opening helped me to learn about computers, cameras and the internet. And this is because I had to use a lot of technological equipment to be able to film this film opening to be able to get a good level of acceptance from the audience.

We had to use video recorders, to film the film opening and use different camera angles and shots. We had to use cameras to take pictures of the locations of where we were going to film the film opening and we also took some pictures of some of the misé en scene! And we also needed the internet to research about film openings, how they’ve evolved over time and to generally help us out with analysing film openings, so we know what to do step by step when we were filming ours, also we needed it to produce surveys and questionnaires to get audience feedback from after they had watched our film opening, and to document our process during the making of our film opening (on our blogs!.) And finally, we needed endless amounts of editing skills, to make our film opening to the best standards that we, as a group, are able to achieve.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

When first in the making of the preliminary task, I must admit, it was hard work. But from there we have evolved into knowing the preliminary task, like the back of our hand!

By doing the preliminary task, it helped me to realise how hard film making is, and it helped me to know that every time I was going to film something, I had to out my all into it, otherwise it would just turn out and look like I had put no effort into it at tall. For film making, you have to put your all into it, to make it look like something worthwhile.

I feel like since we have done the preliminary task it has made my editing skills improve, and that made it much easier to be able to edit our film opening.

Doing the preliminary task helped me to get ready for what we was about to endure. It helped me out during the making of our film opening as I felt like I had done small snippets of making the film before, because I had done the preliminary task, such as, editing skills, camera angles and shots and the research!

Summary.

Overall, making our film opening was hard work. But it paid off, by seeing the end result!

The thing we could have done better if we were to do this procedure again, would be to spend more time on film the film opening and getting lots of different shots for each bit, rather than getting a couple of shots and choosing out of them and then spend most of the time editing the film. In my opinion, yes we should take a long period of time to do the editing and make sure it is correct down to the last detail, because editing is important! But we should also spend a bit more time on the actual filming of the shots and angles, because in the end, that is what the audience are going to see and base their decision on whether it’s a good film opening or not, on.