Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1: Use of conventions

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

'Conventions' means commonly occurring; frequently seen - elements which when combined help an audience to identify the genre or type of media text. When looking at the slasher genre as a whole there is a wide range of slasher conventions.

Here is a vodcast we did as a group covering the conventions of eight film openings 




Films Mentioned:
Violent Enemy
The Outlaw of Josie Wales
Hot Fuzz
Nacho Libre
Bullet Boy
Casablanca
About A Boy
Wild At Heart

Common Conventions:

• Company Idnets
• Opening shot ELS
• Lots of shot variation
• Fast paced editing
• Digetic Sound
• Focus on the main character
• Non-digetic sound
• Mise en scene
• LS is used

Below is a table comparing our text to general conventions in film openings

Too summarise when comparing between the two, i think we cover the main conventions in film openings quite well. There may be a few things we could make more clear, however i think its sufficiently clear that the doctor is the protagonist and the patient is the antagonist. So it does challenge forms and conventions of real media products

Key slasher genre conventions:
As our film categorises into the slasher genre below is a vodcast on the overview of the slasher genre. It will cover some of the key conventions.



Our slasher conventions:

When looking at our own film we took into account a number of different conventions we had seen in previous slasher films and put them into our opening.

Crow sounds

Our first convention was the sound of the crows as heard in the opening of The last house on the left we felt this would link in well as the patient escaped the mental asylum as the sound of crows screeching is recognised with horror which is why it links well with our opening. As we wanted the audience to have some anticipation to what was going to happen.

Rock Music

Another convention linked in with sound was the rock music that we used. The music comes from Red Hot Chili Peppers - Cant Stop. Rock music was used in The Return of The Living Dead which is why we used to use this convention. It also links in with the death as the music stops as the 'scream queen' is killed.

POV shot

The POV camere shot was another convention we used however this convention has not been used many times in films we have seen apart fromHalloween which is where we got our shot form as our killer hides behind the bushes to give the audience a sense of view from the killer

False Scare

The convention of a false scare is not just apparent in most slasher films but in almost any horror film as well. The false scare brings up the audiences sense of anticipation to then relieve them to make the real scare of a much more significance to the audience

Scream Queen

Male Gaze Theory

The final girl was a new addition to our film opening, the convention of a scream queen is in a lot of slasher movies. We took our convention fromNightmare On Elm Street the scream queen was Heather Langenkamp who played Nancy. To anchor our final girl we used revealing clothes and made it apparent to our audience that she was sexually active.
  With our final girl we also played up to Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory. She believes that audiences have to view characters form the view of a hetrosexual male. Our camera lingers on parts of the female body in context of a males reaction. We used this to appeal to a wider male audience.

Weapon

We took our convention of the weapon from Halloween the iconic kitchen knife, because its nothing out of the un-ordinary it is just a standard kitchen knife, but it becomes a lot more scarier when it is put in to context of killing someone which is the effect we tried to achieve.



Other conventions we used:

Idents
First of all we included idents which are common in every single film whether it falls into the slasher genre or not. Most idents are the company logo name and brand image however we decided to theme one of idents for the slasher genre itself. To do this we used a serif font to show that the film would be a horror of some sort and in this case a slasher film.


Expostion
Like psycho provides an exposition for the audience so did we. The time and date and the setting for our film which isn't included in all slasher genre films.


Narrative enigma
Narrative enigma is very commonly used in alot of slasher films, Halloween is a key example as a POV shot i used to hide the killers identity. Which is what we did to a certain extent as it was just the opening we hid our killer identity for a short while in the first few shots to create a sense of anticipation for the audience however we did break this slasher convention because we showed our killer.

Location
We felt that the location would be a key part of our opening which is why we chose our first few shots to be filmed at a mental asylum. This is because we wanted our audience to follow our preferred reading, that a patient has escaped from this asylum and is seeking his revenge. For example Hell Night which is filmed in some woods.

Audience feedback in comparison to our preferred reading:



Ben gave us some really positive feed back on the start of our opening and credited our build up of the tension through our use of digetic and non digetic music and sound effects. the editing also is well done which is what we were trying to achieve a continuity for our opening. However for improvements our opening is very long and Ben suggested that we could shorten some of the takes, this is what we had considered previously in our other rough cuts but it is clear that some takes still need shortening and we can see that too. Also a bit more sound was suggested which we had also taken into consideration previously but what i think Ben means is sound linking scenes together for example the scene form the mental asylum to the scene of the doctor getting out of his car. Additionally Ben said that we could include a basic soundtrack which could work well with the opening to the film and the opening to the opening of the credits.

Facebook comments for our 5th Rough Cut

In comparison to our preferred reading i think the feed back we received was what we wanted as a group. There was no-one from our feedback who couldn't follow our preferred reading. 

In summary due to my research and planning previously i was very familiar with the slasher conventions we could include however there would be a few things i would change with our film. Firstly i would include a completely new character acting as the final girl to provide a binary opposition between her and the scream queen. I would also make the killer as many slasher films mask their killer (Scream, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) This all could have been taken into account if we had more time because at the time we were planning our production we really rushed into it with out thinking much through.