Thursday, March 25, 2010

Question 1:

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When we were choosing what genre conventions we were going to use in our film we researched into the horror genre and found out that the most common conventions of the genre were a usually powerless victim being threatened/preyed upon by a person/thing they cannot escape from but usually overcome or get killed by at the end.

We used the conventions of a weak, powerless female being hunted and eventually killed by the villain in the film owever we still stuck to a lot of the conventions of a traditional horror film. For example, the mysterious villain is very similar to the likes of Micheal Myers (from Halloween) and the masked killer from Scream - dressing all in black.

The same goes for the girl (Adrienne) playing the innocent, victimized child. Usually females are seen as stereotypical victims - like the female archetype of a "damsel in distress", as they need protection from a "masculine hero". This idea of a secretly evil younger female is the focal point of films like The Ring, The Grudge and Let The Right One In. We based our character on these kinds of girls by getting her to dress in quite bright, childish colours which convey her innocence and age to the audience.

We used the convention of a hand-held home movie feel to give it more realism, and we used this in quite a simple but effective way. I think our horror film challenges these conventions from the fact we didn't give our audience everything they thought was typical of the genre. For instance a lot of people said they liked the gore in horror films and we chose not to use that in our film because we do not have a hollywood budget to enable us to make the mise-en-scene/costume/makeup look believable.

The title of our film came from many other words that were related to our film and we eventually came up with 'Uninvited' which we thought was effective and appropriate because the main activity that was happening in our film was a birthday party and the villain/paedophile happened to be the univited guest causing unrest and trouble. The setting chosen, we thought was an integral part of our film because the log was a main part of the story and where the female got killed, making it an iconic part of the film.

After questioning our
target audience we found they felt the best aspects that create tension in the film are the scary music and sounds. We tried to focus a lot of this when creating our opening, researching into the music and editing used in other horror films such as Dead Silence. The opening of our film suggests that it is from the horror genre by the eerie tone in the music and the horror conventions (young girl, villain).

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