Evaluation Question 7

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

From when we done our preliminary task, we made sure our production was much better. When we look back on our preliminary task, I feel that we have used better shots after better knowledge of them from lessons after; we have used a bigger variety of them in our final product as in the first preliminary task, there were only 12 shots that had to be used.

When we researched we had to learn about the 180 degree rule and the rule of thirds, our prelim task actually covered it pretty well, when we needed to, we got Tom to be in the centre to draw the attention to him. We learnt from this and made sure we did this in our production. You can see this well when in our film – Dr Karloff is standing in the woods, in  the centre of the camera, with only trees around which makes the audience focus on him, and him only. There about one part where this didn’t count in our film – but because we gave it the independent feel. Right where they were running in the woods and we wanted the camera shaking as if they were being chased.

When we planned what was going to happen in our film we made sure that it was or will be popluar, I watched the human centipede (see blog post on the 7.5.11) and realised how similar our films are, on IMDB.com, that film didn’t have a well known cast, as well as ours didn’t.

When adding the sound, we already knew what we wanted to put in their, the sound starts of like most horrors do, a very eery sound, when the pupils of the school get chased however, we had quite a fast rock kind of track playing in the background because we wanted to build a suspense and grab the audience like ‘What’s going to happen next?!’

We had lighting problems with our production because we shot our first bit at night and the rest during the day, in editing we managed to darken it a bit, but not completely. This might not be too noticeable as it could have been day outside for all anyone knows

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

When actually attracting our target audience I think that the main elements that will bring their attention to our product are; using teens – by using them, the target audience of teenagers can kind of sit back and relate themselves as if they could be in the same position as the characters in our film and I think that will work more when it comes to scaring the audience. I also think that by adding typical horror conventions such as using the woods and a high school this may bring in the audience as they may have seen other films they might have liked that also used these conventions – just like the film hit and run that I researched, the film has teens and a part where she’s surrounded by a wooded area in the middle of no where. This will work more if they liked the other films that used the conventions of teens, woods and a high school etc. Our casting was easily picked as we thought using our group and a couple media students were best, especially when a couple were performing arts students too and by doing that we are showing average teens.

We didn’t aim to put any contemporary issues in our production but you could show knife crime as one of these contemporary issues.

We wanted some feedback so our Media group so we got them to watch it, the feedback we got was:

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups? on Prezi

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.

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