A2 Steph's Media Blog

1. How does your media product

a. Use, develop or challenge norms and conventions of real media products

B. Represent particular social groups

Unlike many other horror films, the male is often portrayed as the strong, dominant character who is seen as protecting the more vulnerable female characters. However, our film challenged this social norm because Emma is the more sensible and responsible adult throughout our trailer. We thought that many horror films show women in a negative light, so we decided to go against the stereotype which films like –Amityville Horror – The Cottage – Scream - have followed. There is one error which i believe we have carried on from our AS project and that is the age of our actors. As we are in the target audience, the majority of our friends are also and this creates a problem as our age range is often negatively portrayed in many horror films as being dumb and irresponsible. However, it has many similar conventions of real media products for example the setting, is very common for a horror film – set in a remote environment and “immature” teenagers. I believe that a film needs some norms and conventions just to ensure the audience that is belongs in that certain that genre. I think one certain part of our trailer that made is stand out from other films was that during the trailer, we do not give away what the characters are running from or are scared of, giving it more suspense, which more horrors are meant to have.

Another is all the trailers we watched as our research and preparation for the practical work, so we decided to watch all different trailers from the horror genre and watched our for the location within it
Insidious – Mainly based within a house
Paranormal activity – Again house
Hatchet – Woods / cabin within the woods
Urban Legend – set within a university however scenes within the woods
The Blair witch project – set within the woods - our main influence

With those trailers we stuck with the main idea that we wanted to set out film within the woods therefore focused a lot on Hatchet, Urban Legend and The Blair Witch Project. We dissected them into the elements that we liked and made sure we placed them within our trailer. In my opinion, our film is very similar to the blair witch, in both its storyline and setting. In the print products, and even planning before we found actors, we knew that we wanted Emma wearing not very eye catching clothes, no make up, whereas Liam had brighter clothes - and this was to represent emma purity and innocent as the female lead, whereas Liam s character came across a bit more daring.

2. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

As shown in our trailer, 20^th century fox was one of our main distributors and purely for the reason that it is a company everybody knows worldwide with a history of distributing films of ever genre. We also commented on the trailer that it was by the same creators of Blair Witch and this was to ensure to the audience, that the two films will clearly have many similarity of the horror genre. Empire was clearly our magazine cover distributor - and that is mainly because it is a huge magazine company purely dedicated to film - and i am also a regular reader so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to advertise our product with them as we felt very comfortable.

3. Who would be the audience for your media project?

Our general age range was between 15 -21 and we then started to use certain social networking sites and available resources to gather some more information to improve our product. The site facebook came in very useful as it is known for is social connection which means we can received even better and more audience feedback for example, a friend of a friend. I plan to comment on this in our evaluation as I think we have covered our audience research very well by using a range of different methods such as social networking, allowing us to achieve the best product. Me and Imogen then took time out of lesson to find our younger friend in Year 8 to complete the voice over in an empty classroom ( to make sure the audio wasn't muffled).However, in the end , we ended up contacting our lead actress Emma Dixon and asked her do the voice over. As we didn't want the audience to think Emma was Ruby from the myth, we editing it on Adobe Photoshop CS3 and we heightened the pitch of her voice (as she was young when she died in our story). We tried overlaying the audio track over our trailer to see which one fitted in better and Emma's voice over was a dramatic improvement compared to our first version - as it sounded a lot of scary and dark. Another advantage of using Emma is one, that she already had experience with working with me and Imogen in this product so she knew what to expect and also she knew in detail what the story was about (as she acted in it) - so when it came to recording the voice over she knew perfectly to speak slowly and also put on a freaky and mysteries tone of voice.

We also used 6^th form to gather some audience feedback. All within our target audience range from around 15 to 21. We also asked a range of males and females to make sure our results were not biased as we want a target audience of both genders. By getting more audience feedback will ensure that our product will be finished at a higher standard because of involvement from the general public (who is the audience for our film). Our poster is close to completion. We are spending a lot of time in making sure that our poster and magazine cover are not to similar. For example, the magazine cover is aimed more at the specific film audience and the image is often covered in many other advertisements for films and other sponsors. Whereas our poster will be simply our main image, the name and some information in small writing at the bottom of the image with information such as director, actors, times of release etc.

4. How did you attract your audience?

To attract the audience, we first had to figure out what they wanted to view so we used this to our advantage by asking people in the age range of our target audience. One of the main criticisms we got from our script was to change the vocabulary we used in our voice over. We asked the whole media class to choose between two opinions and the majority (around 8 out of 10) preferred the 2nd script and that is the one we went with.

Unlike our as project were we only used a female actor, we decided to make sure we had at least 2 actors of different genders. We hoped that this would help to attract a wider audience of both genders as they will all have someone else to relate to .Also, the voice-over provided for the trailer greatly emphasises what the audience will see within the film - In our original plan - we thought that we would find our friends sister to do the voice over as she is only 12 and has quite a high pitch voice, however, when she actually read out the script, it sounded very minicy and in the end we used Emma - and the voiceover was perfect - and alot more easy to obtain as we already had Emma involved in our project. Our trailer has different clips to attract people to see the main feature (our film), for example, as ours is a horror – our trailer shows clips of people screaming, hiding, running. We were also sure to set our trailer in a realistic environment that our audience will be able to relate to hence being in a forest camping so our young audience should be able to relate the activity shown in our trailer and connect better with the material. And as you can see from our poster below, it is very similar of many other cult horror films such as Halloween and The Shining - both with an interesting image and huge bright font to attract hopefully an audience which is expecting. We took alot of inspiration from Empire and Total film as they are 2 of the largest film magazines in the UK – advertising films from all genres.

5. What have you learnt about technologies from the process at constructing this product?

When i first discovered the location, I knew it would be perfect for our film, after we had to revisit to get some extra footage, it became a real problem, travelling miles in a school day and we also had to make sure we arrived at the right time so the lighting was correct - (as we wanted to film around 4, when it began to get dark, but still light enough for the camera to pick up the image). Also, considering 2 out of the 4 of us (Emma, Liam, Me and Imogen) have part time jobs on weekday and weekends, we had to choose a date that was appropriate for all of our team members. However, the setting I found was perfect for all of the things we required from our movie setting, such as very large trees to create the atmosphere of darkness and unwariness and it was also a very remote area which I noticed when I was first visiting the area while walking my dog. While we were filming, we did not run into a single member of the public - this keeps our setting true to the story of being a remote place where nobody visits, coming across as more dangerous.

We had a few issues with editing, credits and just the general technologic equipment we were given from the school. One of the main concerns we had with editing was the light. We thought we would play it safe by filming at the end of day when it began to get dark, rather than filming at night. An advantage of this is that, even though the image we got is very light, we could dull/darken it down with our editing software. Even though this takes a bit more effort, we wanted to make sure we didn't lose any footage because of poor lighting. In the end, even though our film is still very (and this doesn't convey the typical horror style), we are certain, in our time frame, we will make our image alot darker, as it is very unlikely that horror films are based in the daytime. For example, Amityville Horror (2005), only around 15% of the film was shot in daylight and the rest was at night time - this being because of the uncertainty. However, we are at a disadvantage considering we do not have the best technological equipment. Our camera had quite poor sound recording quality and we had to make sure it wasn't too dark; otherwise we could pick up the image. Staying with editing, we finally have our editing of the title finished (with help from Darren Elliot); it contains both transitions of the text and a 3D quality. 3D texts use 3D primitives to draw the audience’s attention to the lines of the text on the screen - therefore making it more eyes catching and standing out to other competitors. In the end Darren Elliot, used Imogen's updated version of photoshop to ensure that the film could handle the credits ontop as it created many problems and set back our presentation time around 2 weeks.

Also, our print products are now of a very high standard (pictured above), you can see we have remembered to stick to our original colour scheme - that consists of red, black and white). After I completed detailed research in Empire front covers, with Imogene’s art skills, we were able to produce a very original looking movie poster.

After I research Empire’s - ((July 2008) The Dark Knight (2008)), even though it is not in the specific horror genre, the print product itself comes across as very threatening. They do this by the use of scratching lettering on the cover - it is meant to suggest to the audience that it was done by using a knife (suggesting that he is a very dangerous character that frequently carries weapons). To convey our research, we knew our main priority was to convey the feeling of terror and our main character becoming scared. Emma ( Our female actor), has her hands across her face to suggest that he is being chased and can’t even let the "killer" know where she is and they could hear her breathing. While was took, this photo, we were planning to use a long shot to show the environment, but we found that a close up was much more effective for representation fear in our characters eyes. We also research further in both Empire and Total film into the text that is shown on the front of horror film advertisements on their magazines. Imogen past experience from photo-shop in art came in very useful which means our print products came out at a very high quality and clearly represented our genre clearly.
We spent alot of time researching products for our trailer such as eden lake which we didn’t actually discover until we started our print products and have already started our trailer. And this created an issue - as we didn’t take any pictures when filming as we were planning to use some still shots from the videos we had already.however, these were of very poor quality, so we actually found a different setting to achieve these – which was much more assessable. technology actually came in very useful when it came to editing in a silhouettes of the villain, which Emma was hiding from. The silhouette was actually imogen wearing my coat therefore symbolising evil and darkness as she is shown in bad light, whereas, Emma represents the "good in the film".
The magazine cover i believed caused alot of problems however, when we finally completed the project, it became the best part of our package. we decided to use Empire as i am a monthly reader. We had to visit our 2^nd setting to get a photo of Emma looking terrified with her hand over her mouth indicating she is speechless – which also links in with our location – as no one could hear her regardless. On the photo, we added a small darkness tint, and this also helped our title and text to be even more eye-catching. Similar to Empire, we also advertised other horror films at the bottom, to clearly show that it was a certain magazine edition that was purely dedicated to horror films.

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

From both our task and our AS project, we have learnt how to plan and research in a lot more detail. And Imogen also used her past experience that she learnt from art in developing our print products in class.

We spent too much time trying to develop a story line and not enough time in finding quality actors. Our original plan was to of used 3 actors - 1 female and 2 male. However, even the use of these 2 actors became a struggle as they were never available at the same time and if they were, the transport then became an issue. however, if finding a 3 actor wasn’t hard enough - we then had the issue that we could fit a driver, 2 crew members and 2 actors into 1 car - along with all of the camping and film equipment - so in the end - 3 actors turned out to be more adequate. If we were to repeat the experience, I think - even though it would of been more of a struggle, that we should of used 3 actors as it is very unlikely and realistic to find a film with only two actors and no influence from any other outside influences - as they were set in such as remote environment. The biggest progression I think we've had in our knowledge in technology. Imogen's art skills really helped us to progress with our print products, however, Imogen missed a few lessons and this became an issue as the work was on her laptop on a updated version that was not on the school computers.

4. How did you attract your audience

· By using actors of the age – and of both genders – unlike AS – only a female actor. We hoped that this would help to attract a wider audience of both genders as they will all have someone else to relate to .

· The voice-over provided for the trailer greatly emphasises what the audience will see within the film - In our orignal plan - we thought that we would find our friends sister to do the voice over as she is only 12 and has quite a high pitch voice, however, when she actually read out the script, it sounded very minicy and in the end we used emma - and the voiceover was perfect - and alot more easy to obtain as we already had Emma involed in our project.

· Our trailer has different clips to attract people to see the main feature ( our film ), for example, as ours is a horror – our trailer shows clips of people screaming, hiding, running

· Most teenagers have been on camping holidays - so our young audience should be able to relate the activity shown in our trailer

And as you can see from our poster below, it is very similar of many other cult horror films such as Halloween and The Shining - both with an interesting image and huge bright font to attract hopefully an audience which is expecting

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

From both our task and our AS project, we have learnt how to plan and research in a lot more detail. And Imogen also used her past experience that she learnt from art in devleoping our print products in class.

What would you change?

We spent too much time trying to develop a story line and not enough time in finding quality actors. Our orignal plan was to of used 3 actors - 1 female and 2 male. However, even the use of these 2 actors became a struggle as they were never available at the same time and if they were, the transport then became an issue. however, if finding a 3 actor wasnt hard enough - we then had the issue that we could fit a driver, 2 crew members and 2 actors into 1 car - along with all of the camping and film equitment - so in the end - 3 actors turned out to be more adequate.