Our media evaluation

Lizz parry

Matthew Johns

Matthew Earl

How does your media representparticular social groups

All media products represent a particular group of some sort. Our horror opening represents teenagers. We were told that our horror film had to appeal to a teen audience as the certificate is 15, we also did some background research looking into different horror openings. The trend we noticed throughout the majority of films was that there were mainly female victims, this is most probably because females tend to seem more vulnerable than males. The one film in particular that stood out of our group was “the curse of Lizzie Borden”. This film has the typical ideas of the genre, with the teenage girl as the victim. We took a character from our own opening and compared them to the character in this film. There are many similarities to these characters however many differences too as we tried to make our film more unique

What kind of company might distribute your film and why

AS a group we discussed what kind of media institution may want to distribute our media product. We feel as though going with a company that specializes in the horror genre. Twisted pictures does exactly that and has a reasonable budget for doing so. Twisted pictures is most famous for creating horror productions they especially gained wide attention through the film saw Distributing with this company gives the advantage of using cgi and expensive upgraded technology. Things that can give the film a better quality making more people want to watch it. Most films done by this institution have been successful such as these http://www.idb.com/company/co0137447/ However if this film was not a success then the institution would make no profit and having a higher or lower

budget wouldn't have made a difference. As well as Twisted Pictures our film could be distributed by warp films as they have produced many low budget yet successful films such as “four lions” and “this is England”. Although this institution do not produce films within the horror genre if this film was to be the first film of that genre proced by them it may stand out to the other media products they have distributed.

Who would be the audience for your film opening? As a group, we decided that the target audience for our film opening was late-aged teenagers between 15 and 19 years old, because they are the age group that use social-networking sites and are very sociable people, meaning that our film opening could be spread around quickly, causing more people to watch it. To keep to the age group we targeted, we decided that our film opening should be a minimum of a 15 certificate. By browsing the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) website, we gained an idea of what could and couldn’t be include, also including language, something 15-19 years old would associate with. Another aspect of our film opening we knew that the target audience would associate with is costume. By having actors of that age, we needed to make them look like the age group too. To do this, our main character, ‘Sarah Gardener’ was dressed in a costume from high street stores ‘Topshop’ and ‘Miss Selfridge’ as they convey older teenage fashion, something that recognises our character as a teenager. As our production is not aimed at a specific niche audience, actually, our film opening appeals to a diverse range of audiences, not just 15-19 year olds. Although this was our target audience, we feel that our film opening is suitable for a wide range of audiences, but will have our upmost desired effect upon the teenage target, purely due to the fact that it was members of the target audience that created the production.

How did you attract your audience?

Before we started to make our film we thoroughly researched the genre by watching existing horror films, 2 of the films we watched were “jeepers creepers” and “dead wood”, the reason

that we chose to watch these films is that both of them have the same certificate as our we will be, this certificate is 15, and therefore these films have a large relevance to the teenage market

at which we are aiming. We then incorporated themes and ideas into our film so we could make it appropriate for our target audience, within our film we used facebook, facebook is a

social networking site that allows people to contact each other, we included it because its primary users are teenagers and therefore this relates well to them.

What have we learnt about technologies from the process of making our film

In the course of making our teen horror we used many new pieces of technology, equipment and software. One of the most important pieces of equipment we used was the camera

We also used the tripod in conjunction with the camera so that we could get steady footage and not lose any marks for this

After we uploaded the footage into I movies we then exported the footage as a QuickTime movie Which enabled us to edit it in final cut

The most difficult part of exporting our film was remembering to export it in dv-pal so we could keep the high quality of the footage. Final cut was the hardest part of creating our film and it took the most time as it is a complicated piece of software, to get the sound for our movie we used a website called freesound, in order to get a sound track to play in the back ground to our film we used a piece of software called garage band which enables you to create a musical score by mixing together different instruments and different ways of playing them, for our group this was not difficult as two members of our group are music students and have used it before.

In order to get our movie onto a DVD we had to export it again from final cut in DV-PAL into idvd which allowed us to burn the movie onto a dvd and add the start menu.

We kept a blog of everything that we were doing using blogspot, which is a subsidiary of the large internet company google, on this blog we kept a record of everything we had done relating to our coursework, we also put our finished film on it and PowerPoint's we had created relating to the horror genre using a website which enables you to embed powerpoints into blogs, called slideshar

In what ways does your film opening use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real film openings?

As part of the group’s planning and research, we firstly looked at www.artofthetitle.com to get an idea of what titles to include in our media film. The website breaks down the opening sequences of well known films and TV and many different genres, making it even easier to develop an understanding of what is included in the films. Although the film openings has similarities to trailers, it does indeed use titles as seen in real film openings, inc luding main actors, director, editor and music director.

The title of the film was put in red, because it signifies danger and was put in a ‘horror’ font. This follows the traditional titles from horror films because red is also connotes blood.

This is one of the settings used in our opening film. This definitely follows the conventional pattern of teen horrors, as the majority of teen horror films include chase scenes. When the innocent character gets chased by the evil character, leading to the downfall of the innocent character, and as in traditional teen horrors, the innocent character’s most painful moments aren’t seen on screen, to increase the tension.

This screenshot represents a typical teenage costume, this clearly shows that this character is a teenager, and is easy to distinguish, just like a typical teen horror film. She is also the first person to appear on screen, to clearly show that she is the main protagonist. She is also holding a knife, the most significant prop in the opening. This challenges the typical horror opening because it is later revealed that she is the victim, yet she is holding a weapon, which would suggest her as being a malicious character, with more to reveal that what meets the eye.

This shot shows a typical camera shot, made famous by Sergio Leone, which focuses purely on a character’s eyes, because it shows their reaction the clearest as well as their emotion. It is also edited very quickly to tie in with a sense of panic and urgency. This isn’t typical of a horror film, however it is more famous with westerns, however by linking these together, it broadens the horizons of camera work.

This is a typical example of our titles, it is clear, bold and the font is white in a black background to further make this stand out. After looking at www.artofthetitle.com , these titles are very typical of a horror film to make the main actors and behind the scenes crew stand out to the audience.

This shot intensifies the horror genre, because of the use of a knife, as well as high pitched orchestral music, this suggests immediately to the audience that the film is of a horror genre. This use of prop straight away makes the audience think to why the girl is holding the knife outside of the kitchen, because it is obvious that the knife is not being used for cooking purposes.

This is a screenshot of the first introduction of the male antagonist in the opening. This character is initially introduced in very short flashes to illustrate an idea that he is a figure of the girl’s imagination, the following scene shows the boy live, but the girl only appears in flashes. This shows that there is a connection between the two and it is only a matter of time before they meet.

Looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learned

• The main think that we have learned is how to use the new technology that we have used such as the camera and final cut, which we did not know how to use at all before this piece of work. This is extremely visible in the fact that our footage from the preliminary task is not of as high quality as the finished piece, the editing in our preliminary task is also cruder and simply uses jump cuts as we did not know how to use transitions or filters at that stage,

• Apart from the technology we have also learnt the conventions that are used within a horror film, the main reason we learnt this was so that we could use these conventions within our own film. To find out these conventions we simply watched horror films with a similar certificate.