In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After looking through various horror films, I discovered that they all have very similar characters and plots. There is always a killer if it’s supernatural or human, there is always a specific victim who is usually the main character and the story is usually based on the victim resulting in defeating the killer whether it’s in one film or after a series.
We found it fairly difficult to use all of the same conventions in the
short opening, and however, I think we opened up the opportunity to do this. Our idea for the rest of the film was to go back to the time when she began to be possessed and develop the story from this point. The end repeats the opening again; this would make the audience feel slightly confused and have suitable effect on them- encouraging them to want to see the rest of the film. The way in which we finished the opening (and thus the ending), also allows for a sequel as she jumps towards the camera, This happens in ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’(1997) which shows it can be a successful way to entice the audience. The way that we have chosen to order our story isn’t unique but it is uncommon which could make us slightly different and challenge audience expectations..jpg)
I also discovered that there are different types of horror films like; thriller, slasher, paranormal etc. however, we thought that they might be slightly harder to film as an amateur film crew, so we decided that psychological horror would be the most suitable route for our first attempt. I also personally believe that the scariest area of a horror film is the unknown. A shot that helped class our film as a psychological horror was when the daughter would be seen, and then suddenly she would disappear; this created uncertainty and put the audience on edge. We gained our inspiration for this shot from a part of ‘The Grudge’ where there is an over-the-shoulder shot of the creature before it suddenly vanishes in a super natural way, we found that shot effective and decided to regenerate a similar effect in our opening.
We kept similar characters in our film as we had the main horror character, or ‘the killer’, and we had a single mum trying to control the situation as it grows out of her hands, this was the base of our characters but if we were to shoot the whole thing we would introduce more conventional characters as I think they are necessary to generate a good horror film
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
In the short opening sequence we only had two characters one a young girl, the other a single mum, these work well together as they can obtain a good relationship but the difference being that the young girl is possessed. The girl is very young and we tried to portrait this better by giving our actress ‘pink tails’ in her hair as this enhances the childlike features because she is so young when we reveal the fact she is possessed it dramatically changes the way the audience feel about her and affects the way she presents that social group. She was dressed in a casual red dress and a red coat which she removed during the opening, this clothing isn’t anything special and she still looks like a normal young girl, however, the red colour could represent the fact there is danger within her; this would also put pull her away from the typical view of her social group. We felt the park was quite a suitable place for the pair of characters as it is supposed to be quite a friendly, family environment so by adding this supernatural unknown, the danger escalates and makes the audience worried. 
The mum, however, is very much the common expectation of what you would expect from a character like her; she is constantly worrying over her daughter; dresses in darker, dull clothing. The type of coat is very basic with no eccentric additions showing that she is mature and level headed. It also shows that she her wealth can just get the necessary clothing but not much else, suggesting she doesn’t have a particularly high status in society. These features make her a more down to earth character and one that the audience can relate to better. She also comes across very caring, she fits in well with the typical view of that social group primarily because her main interest would be her daughter’s well-being.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Horror films often have sub-genres and I felt that our film opening can be classed as a psychological horror or supernatural thriller as it is about a possessed girl and her story as the demon within, slowly takes over. There were various films around that are based on possessed people; I also found that exorcism films slightly related to the same category so as these closely relate to our film I researched the production companies that make them. I found that Warner Bros., despite it being an unlikely consideration, made a few similar films, for example Fallen(1998), which wasn’t particularly successful, however The Exorcist(1972) balanced this as it has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards and 7 Golden Globes, from which they won 6 in total, which suggests that these films can be successful. Constantine(2005) also managed to generate $230,884,728 at the box office and The Wicker Man(1973/2006) clearly the 1973 success encouraged the remake, which was also perceived well showing that this type of film is still good for the modern day film industry. Each of these films would have displayed similar conventions and ideas and therefore would have been directed towards a similar audience so I felt Warner Bros. had the potential to produce our film, also I think the success that was generated from these films suggests that psychological horror is a genre that is still appreciated by the audience.
However, whilst researching I also discovered that United Artists might also produce our film as I found a similar number of films that they had made that generate similar psychological fears as other ‘possessed’ films. For example they made films such as Jeepers Creepers(2001) which had a low budget and still managed to generate nearly $60 million at the box office. Another example would be Burnt Offerings(1976) that achieved six awards including best horror film and best director also Carrie(1976) received great reviews such as one from ‘The Movie Guide’ that named the film " the landmark horror film" as well as being successful enough to gain the equivalent of $135 million in today’s money. Again with the ideas and fears shown with these films I also believed that they could possibly distribute our film.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
Typical conventions of psychological thrillers may effect the type of audience that would enjoy watching our film, for example, psychological horrors tend to contain less gore and blood, this can make our horror film more suitable for squeamish viewers. Horrors like ours can relate to the audience and demonstrate scary stories from everyday situations which can enhance the fear of it happening to you, these type of films are also slightly slower and more based around tension building and mental fear. I think that these features appeal more to women, because I think that men enjoy watching more physical/gory horrors.
After interviewing several people from different social groups specifically about horror films, I established that teenage boys prefer the gore and physically scary films compared to the girls who either don’t particularly like them at all or are very open minded. I spoke to some adults on their perspective of horror films and also discovered that males still enjoy the physically scary films, however a few responses would suggest that they are more open minded towards horror as they are older. However, the main point was that the majority of older females mentioned how psychological horror and suspense were the main things that they like from a horror film as they feel its something they can relate to, so I think that definitely helped narrow down the target audience. Some of the films that were mentioned were the extremely successful ‘The Sixth Sense’(1999) that received $673 million, another film was ‘Silent Hill’(2006) which was also considerably successful bringing in nearly $100 million. These two films both contain the idea of children being involved which mum’s will often find quite a scary idea. We used this information to create our film around the idea of the Mum loosing their child so we think it could be successful. I also believe that psychological thrillers are more for the patient/tension aspect and so teenagers may not be as interested due to the slower pace of the film, this would suggest that the target audience of our film is Women aged 20+.
Another consideration as to which women would watch this film would be income, if someone has a low income, possibly unemployed, they may not be as inclined to spend money they do not have for the cinema. Alternatively those who are employed are more likely to be the ones willing to spend disposable income on the film. However, women that have full-time careers may not have the time to sit and watch a film, this could interrupt the idea of working women being the ones to watch it, however, part-time workers may have the money and the time to watch our film, so our prioritized target audience would be part-time working women aged 20+.
My mum is an ideal example of our target market as she is a female part-time worker of the ideal age, as a part-time worker she is able to use the extra free time available effectively to free up weekends slightly better, this could give her time to travel to a cinema and watch our film. She doesn't have many hobbies or interests, as she likes to allow herself as much free time as possible, however she does watch television in the evening and enjoys listening to the radio. She is also a fan of psychological films, especially those that have a twist, so if we had created our full film it could appeal well to her.
How did you attract/address your audience?
As I mentioned before, we did some market research and discovered that there is an audience out there that would like to watch our film. With the target audience I just mentioned we would look to create a trailer as I would judge our audience to be people who watch television, ideally it would be between television programmes such as soap operas like Coronation Street or cooking programmes, they don't really have a lot of relevance to our film but both types of programmes that I believe they would watch. However, due to the watershed hours we would not be able to show a horror film advert at these times, so from our research we asked what television programmes they watch between 9:00 and 5:30, these programmes included more serial dramas like ‘Being Human’ and ‘Whitechapel’ which do actually fit in well with the horror genre, so this could be an optimum position for our adverts.
From the research that we discovered I wouldn't consider our target audience as being big YouTube fans so I don't think it would become majorly successful through viral videos, as that may be better aimed for teens, although I do believe they use social networks like Facebook and Twitter so we could aim to get adverts on there or try and generate a viral campign using them instead of YouTube. Also, in regards to radio stations I think the likes of BBC Radio 1 and 2, HeartFM, Magic or CapitalFM would be ideal radio stations to cover the majority our target audience, as national stations that can also be a good advertising slot, as I mentioned before, my mum is a fan of these stations so she would definitely be aware of the film if it was advertised this way.
I think the ending of our opening would be a particularly useful part of the film in terms of interesting the audience, as it is a scary moment that can make the audience interested in what happens next and possibly why it happened. The contrasting image of an innocent young girl with the inner demon she has become is quite an odd personality trait and could also be something that would interest viewers.What have you learned about technologies from the from the process of constructing this product?
Final cut was completely new to me as a film editing software and particularly jumping from windows moviemaker to that required me to get used to the new software; I felt that I managed the software well.
On the parts of editing I was responsible for, I found the rendering aspect to be quite annoying and awkward as it added considerable time to complete the editing but the rest of the software contained similar abilities as moviemaker. It just required a bit of attention to work out how to complete certain tasks.
In regards to filming we found that on our first trip to Weston where there was an ideal location, the camera ran out of battery during filming so we had to wait a considerable number of days before we could begin filming again due to other commitments that prevented people from being available. After this time we decided to change our location as the other position wasn't practical enough, but we did learn from the mistake and were sure to charge the camera before filming. We decided that during our film we would have parts where the daughter would suddenly disappear or appear; this required difficult and well-timed camera work and more takes than other scenes and despite many attempts still came out quite amateur.
We felt our non-diegetic music was good and we were easily able to download it from the Internet and put that straight on our film, this was straight forward but effective and, in my opinion, one of the more important parts of the film. Also at the beginning we added the tune of ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ which is a classic nursery rhyme, but in the film it came across very sinister and was depicted completely differently to the standard expectation of the music. The diegetic sound included shouts from the mum, otherwise we didn’t include anything else as the silence throughout the film built up tension and intrigue so we thought it was effective.
Looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
I felt that we had various similarities and differences between our two tasks, one similarity if the fact that both films have quite a mysterious element to them and the audience aren't particularly sure about the whole story and this could encourage them to want to find out more. I also think our sound is similar because we were trying to generate tension and anxiety which required good non-diegetic sound, I believe this was achieved well in both.
I found that our preliminary task wasn't great when looking at continuity issues however because we made this mistake with our practice task we were able to be more aware of it with our main task. For example, a minor issue that we remembered to keep the same was which hand the mum held the coat in, this was quite an insignificant part of the film but something we had to bare in mind, so we were able to get a slight idea of what real film crews have to think about. I also think we came to a better realization as to how long it actually takes to film so we were able to account for this for our main opening and with. Our better time management the battery problem didn't become as major as it could have. There were a couple of things that didn't work as well as the preliminary task, for example, the editing for the first task was done on windows movie maker which meant it was faster and still effective as I was able to complete it in one night, however due to the fact we had to use a Mac it was harder for us to gain access to one and the rendering aspect took a while so it took about a week to complete editing. Also with our first task I manned the camera and did the editing, this worked well as I was able to film what I knew would work when editing however because we distributed the jobs more fairly I filmed whilst having less input on the editing so there had more potential to be clashes of visual thoughts or ideas, I think that our group worked well together so this wasn't a huge problem.
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