Evaluation Question 1

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

Our group’s horror is called ‘Psych 1’ which was called this due to the film ‘Psych 9’ and we thought it was appropriate due to the mad scientist who has a psychological problem. In films like Scream, Casey is blonde; they are associated with being a bit ditzy and are most likely to be killed.

We’ve studied teen horror; and we have used teenagers for our production for that reason. After researching horror films I noticed how a lot of them are in the middle of nowhere or in/near a wooded area. I wrote a small essay on the film Hit and Run, directed by Enda McCallion, 2009, in which she ends up hitting a person while drunk with her car in the middle of nowhere in a wooded area, this made me think of how many other horror films I have seen that also used the convention of shooting in a woods. For example, the films Wrong Turn, directed by Rob Schmidt in 2003, Friday the 13^th, directed by Markus Nispal in 2009 and Dead Snow, directed by Tommy Wirkola, 2009. So I thought shooting our film in the woods would be a typical convention for a teen horror. And all of these have been successful films. The conventions in horrors are usually to if someone does something that is seen as ‘bad’, usually drinking, having sex and drugs then typically in a horror, they are going to be the people that die. In our production we gave it a bit of a twist and used a detention instead, making it appeal to a wider audience, and maybe even to a younger audience. Horrors always use a convention in the opening, someone always dies! We used school kids because we wanted it to be realistic.

The costumes we used were also quite conventional, the mad scientist wore a white lab coat and the teenagers wore casual clothing for a day at school, kind of like most American schools who don’t wear uniform. When filming our product we started the first part in the science room in the dark, but we had to change it as when we started filming in the woods, we wouldn’t have been able to see through the camera and had to shoot through the daytime. When we started editing though, we changed the brightness of the part in the woods to make it darker which ended up fitting in well with our product. When filming in the science room we had to use shots that weren’t so close to Dr Karloff as we wanted it to be a point of view shot, for when the rest of the characters see the murder. But we did add in some establishing shots at the beginning to give the audience a view of what a creepy room it was and to expect a scare. The dark setting was completely appropriate for our horror.

I think we were successful in completing everything we wanted in our product, all our shots, the setting we chose, the characters we wanted and the props. Our title which is shown at the end of our opening is a typical one that would be shown after it, it’s bright red, the colour red indicates danger or anger.