Q1. how does your product challenge the conventions

of real media products?

How our opening is not conventional

The role of our antagonist is portrayed by a female actress; this challenges dominant ideologies because in most horror films the antagonist is a male character. Horror films are usually associated with high cutting rates to build

tension, however our opening has a slower cutting rate and we build tension through other mediums like dialogue which is cool.

We used a plain pretty standard white text font for a lot of the titles. We chose it because it stood out clearly and was visible against the background but didn't take attention away from what was happening on screen. The text wasn't conventional because most horror films use bold bright fonts to impose themselves upon the audience.

Our opening featured a lot of dialogue, this isn't normal for horror openings because they usually don't contain much speech.

Not many close ups are used in our piece, usually horror films use many close ups to intensify a scene or put the focus on one particular prop like a bloody knife or dead body. We convey horror through tracking shots and over the shoulder shots.

We used a clock and had the time clicking down which is rather unusual and quite innovative I think.

In terms of costume the characters are wearing normal clothes that don't particularly reflect that the opening is a horror opening.

We altered the colour for some of our shots slightly to give the scenes more of an eerie feeling. We also wanted the overall colour scheme of our opening to consist mainly of three colours.

How our opening is conventional

The locations is an isolated and desolate ware house with low key lighting, this is typical of a horror film.

The main colours we use are red and black which convey danger and death.

The exaggerated non-diegetic sound of the clock ticking helps build tension and also conveys that time is passing. Exaggerated sound is a convention of horror. We also used it in the flash back where we showed montage editing.

Props like the bloody knife that featured in our opening are conventional to horror.

The location of our typography is quite conventional and its positioning is similar to the True Detective opening.

We establish enigma by hinting through dialogue that there are two serial killers involved. In terms of plot, our piece centres on people being killed by serial killers. This idea is quite conventional to the horror genre.

The antagonist in our piece is meant to be a female in her 20’s.Both the characters given prevalence in our piece are white and you can’t really tell what class group they belong to. Although they are both relatively well spoken which could lead to you saying they are middle or upper class.Having a female antagonist serial killer challenges the dominant ideological view that males are more likely to commit such crimes.There is no hint of physical disability in our opening however you could argue that the antagonists must be slightly mentally unstable because they are serial killers. Our sub-genre is psychological which also reflects this point.

Social status isn’t a key feature in the opening and because only four people come into the scenes not many social classes are represented nor ideologies reflected.The social groups that we do cover are not accurately represented in my opinion because that would imply that many women in their 20’s have a tendency to commit murders.There is a binary opposition between the male and female character as he questions her and she gives flimsy answers before her husband murders him. You could argue that detectives and people in similar roles are represented negatively because they are portrayed as quite hopeless at their job by our opening. This means our opening shows residual ideologies.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

we used a lot of tracking and over the shoulder shots to emphasise the back and forth nature of the opening. This highlighted the way in which the antagonist was prepared to answer back and be quite rude to the detective. Following on from the point raised in the previous slide a female antagonist challenges ideologies as it is not typical for the main evil character to be a women. This dismisses the residual ideologies about the role of women in society and so forth. Women can be serial killers too!

Both characters are young but this was mainly due to the lack of actors in the ideal age bracket especially in the case of the detective who would have been much older if we had more resources

Stereotypical characters in the horror genre are victims, final girl, a hero etc. in terms of characters our opening isn’t stereotypical of the horror genre in the sense of a typical male antagonist. The detective personality could be viewed as the typical first character to be killed in a horror film. He embodies traits such as being calm and not really seeing a threat in the situation. These type of characters usually make the audience feel calm however when they are killed the audience becomes worried because the death reinforces the fact that no one's safe.

Q3. What type of institution might distribute your film?

What type of distribution company might distribute our film??

From my own research into Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) I would of come to the conclusion that Bryanston Pictures should produce our film. However I don’t think this is a good idea because the company is American and Hasn’t released anything decent in a while. I think the film is more suited to the British independent route so I would choose Vertigo films as the distribution company. From the research that I’ve done into Monsters (Edwards, 2010). Vertigo have also released many other British independent films like StreetDance (2011, Giwa)

Vertigo Films specialise in distributing commercially driven independent cinema. This is well suited to our film because it has many of the characteristics of the independent films that Vertigo release. For example our film would have a low budget and no recognisable actors/actresses. It also doesn’t contain any key talent. Our opening would also be independent because it doesn’t include any characteristics of a tent pole industrial film.

Vertigo have made use of innovative release strategies in the past to increase buzz and revenue. Ideally our film would appeal to a mass audience but it might only appeal to a niche audience because it’s a low budget independent horror, because of this I think it could be trailed at some cinemas to get feedback and then if it does well it could be released to further cinemas.

In terms of synergistic promotional activity I don’t think our film would be able to attract a lot of interest because of its content. Other companies might not want to be associated with horror content involving murders. Furthermore films like The Hobbit (Jackson, 2012) were able to partake in synergistic activity with New Zealand Air because the movie is internationally renowned and was shot in New Zealand. Our film isn’t an internationally renowned tent pole film so I doubt it would attract such large investments from companies like New Zealand Air.

A trailer would obviously be made and released because trailers cost very little due to the content already being made. As well as this the film could be shown at film festivals, independent films gain a lot of publicity as a result of being shown at these festivals especially if they win awards. Utilising the opportunity that film festivals present for a film like ours makes sense because one of the main purposes of film festivals is to help the independent film making industry.

Guerrilla film distribution is a low budget way of distributing promoting and marketing a film. Vertigo have used Guerrilla film distribution in the past on Monsters which was a huge success as a British independent film. Moreover Guerrilla distribution typically involves methods like flyers, stickers posters and graffiti. However in recent times it has developed and expanded and it is now widely used on the internet. Instead of just drawing attention locally, the film can be networked through individual groups on Web 2.0. In terms of using the internet for Guerrilla distribution events can also be organised to promote the film, like flash mobs for example. Due to these factors a think Vertigo films could use a viral campaign as a really useful way of distributing the film and making it appeal to the target audience and even people outside the target age groups. Linking into earlier points the use of Web 2.0 and a viral campaign could attract a wider range of mainstream cinemas who are prepared to show the film. Which would broaden the films radius for being exhibited.

In the modern film industry social media is very important for distributing both industrial and independent films. Most modern films have social media pages and do things like run competitions, social media is used because its free and its particularly useful for horror films because most of the target audience will be on at least one social media site.

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing this product?

The blog was used to keep track of what we were doing during the process of producing our opening. It was useful as a reference point for our collaborative work as a group. As a group we completed the group tasks together, on the individual tasks we each did separate work.

We used other online tools and websites such as YouTube as a source of information and inspiration that we used in our blog posts and in the actual production of our opening. A useful website for finding movie and TV show openings was Art of the Title which helped to give me a lot of ideas about different factors in our own opening. The creative process of producing the horror opening has definitely opened the door for me to a much wider range of resources that I didn’t know I could utilise.

Blogger was a key feature of our coursework because it made it easy to keep track of our work. Blogger is pretty easy and simple to use and it allowed us to personalise our web page to fit the themes of our opening which was useful. The fact that it is a simple site to understand made it comparatively easy for us to produce detailed blog posts quite quickly. Blogger was also pragmatic because it gave us an easy way to manage and place content on the web. Overall I think running a blog was interesting because there are currently a growing amount of blog genres on the internet and I feel that basing one around making a horror opening is pretty groovy and innovative.

Initially we had problems with casting and location but in terms of technology our project has run quite smoothly. To film our work we used Ben’s DSLR camera and a school tripod. We also made use of the schools track and dolly so that we could shoot tracking shots which made our work look much more professional. The main warehouse location for our interrogation scene was shot on two different sets so we had to sort out on set problems with lighting to ensure continuity. This meant we had to alter the brightness/contrast of the shots when we edited them.

As well as this we had to be aware of the rule of thirds and the 180 rule so that are opening made sense and looked realistic because if you break continuity the audience will have a less immersive viewing experience. We didn’t have an unlimited amount of shoots to get everything right so we have had to change and alter some things using aftereffects, for example some of our tracking shots were slightly rocky so they have had to be stabilised even though we did use steadicam.