In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

By Chloe wood

The genre that we decided to focus on was horror, and because of this we did extensive amounts of research into horror, we first completed some research in a broad range of horror sub-genres, we focussed on the conventions

of each and tried to find reoccurring conventions, we explored the age rating they were given and studied the trailers and openings for each. We both researched into 3 different horror films this allowed us to cover a broad

range of films in depth. After this first batch of research we began to focus our style of horror to certain areas and this is when we decided to create a survey to question the public as to what their opinions were, we questioned a

large amount of anonymous people on an online website that allowed us to reach out to a great amount of different ages/genders and personalities.

After this fist questionnaire we decided to narrow down the audience and chose specifically to focus on 15-30 year olds, in doing this we also decided to make our questions more in depth and gaining a further opinion. We created a focus group and asked them many questions on their opinions and surprisingly we

found that there answers were very near to the path we wanted to take. From this research we were able to define the type of audience that we wanted to focus on, we saw that many people preferred a

supernatural horror storyline and so this is the pathway we decided to go down. These first simple types of research allowed us to build the foundation of our film and me and Abbie had many discussions about

what we wanted to focus on.

It came to a point in our production where we did decide to change our storyline quite drastically and after choosing this we had to complete another round of research this time we had a lot more knowledge on

horror conventions, we knew that our target audience wanted suspense and mystery and this is what we focussed on we again studied many horror films of this nature, the film that we decided to centre around the most was the woman in black and because of this we completed a heavy amount of research and this is why there are many qualities of the woman in black in our opening however we did know that we did not what to copy the woman in black and so this is where our other research came into balance, we completed another

survey asking the public what they wanted and we found that we had made the right decision and again looking back at our previous research we found that after gaining further knowledge on the subject of horror

we were at first missing what our results were telling us and this was the result of our final film.

We found that in many of the films we had researched there was always an element of great suspense, and this signifier was an almost constant in all the films we researched, we decided to make this our centre point in our movie opening, we tried many different ways of creating this suspense that would leave that audience on the edge of their

seats. Firstly with our first storyline we had a fair amount of dialog and the storyline was quite simple it seemed to be lacking in suspense and in fact gave far too much away in the scene, after choosing our new storyline we refined the mistakes we had made before and decided to delete the dialog from the opening and this seemed to quite quickly

change the atmosphere that the shots created.

Through our last days of filming and going into our early days of editing we decided that we wanted to almost give the audience a greater insight into the context of the opening as we felt that although tense the situation was not quite tense enough to insinuate that there was something terrible and wrong going on, after looking back over our movie research we felt as though we had to use a presence and this was the reasoning behind the breathing at the start of the opening although minimal it was enough to add a greater element of fear into the shots, we found that

by not revealing the villain was a great benefit and also found that conventionally an audience fear the villain further if they do not see it face and understand the reasoning behind their injustice. For example in the woman in black the reasoning behind the girls committing suicide is not disclosed at first, building tension and intrigue in the

audience.

We wanted a character that the audience would see as innocent and not deserving of this crime, we found in our research that the audience would be more affected by a death of they felt emotionally connected, and we

wanted this we wanted the audience to feel the pain of the death and by doing this the audience would be more enthusiastic about knowing what would happen after and the question as to what happened to this ‘poor girl’. Usually in the films we had watched we saw that to do this the character would have to give off some sort of youth about it/helplessness that would create an urge to protect, we did this by having our actor be gentle

and shy and interacting with the toys.

We also thought about the location that we used and researched into the conventional locations that were used in the type of horror movies we had chosen, we studied them and found that for children the most fearsome location was

somewhere normal but lacking anyone else, the area remote of any other human life specifically adults we found that this was because in having this location the audience would fear for the child even more and provoke the audience to feel tense and constantly anticipating danger. The location we chose, an empty landing, was secluded enough to many

the scene feel more intimate and claustrophobic, the location allowed us to change the lighting easily and the huge window allowed a sinister effect of shadows. We found that there was a great amount of fear in stairs and falling

down we also felt that this would cater to a large amount of people and their fears also we thought that the simplicity of a child falling down the stairs, as it is such an easy thing to do and is very normal and we believed that this in fact

would emphasize the abnormality of the scene creating further confusion.

We planned to encode these signifiers in our story board by hand drawing them, this allowed us to become closer to the shots/location as we were able to see the location from different angles and abbie used very detailed sketches

signifying the lighting and the positioning that would allow us to follow the storyboard fully.