Thursday, 27 April 2017
Evaluation: Question One
In what way does your
media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
By completing previous
research in which I analysed and studied before coming up with the final idea
for my opening sequence. This allowed me to clearly distinguish the forms and
conventions of a psychological horror film.
A film which I
personally focus the majority of my research on was Insidious. I took fragments
of the features in this opening sequence to incorporate within my own opening.
The lighting, which was low-key throughout the entirety of the beginning, this was
an aspect in which I individually liked and therefore suggested to the rest of
the group in order to try and include in my opening, we tried to mimic the low
key lighting by apply a vintage, dark filter. Other films I looked at were,
Silence of the Lambs, Gothika and The Shining, which also gave me inspiration
for my own sequence and allowed me to identify the common forms and conventions
to replicate in order for my product to be developed in such a way the it would
be recognisable in a much easier way as a psychological film. However, the
lighting used in our opening sequence also features high key natural lighting
which goes against the typical conventions of the genre.
In my research, the
conventions found in horrors are used to scare, thrill and entertain the
audience, they centre around the dark side of life. This feature is what we
wanted to develop in our film opening, this is evident as our main character is
found in an asylum as she is not a sane human being, you can also see the ‘dark
side’ being portrayed through our lighting. Due to the fact that we filmed
during the day it meant our footage was good quality and made it much easier
for us to create a filter over the top, to do this we reduced the saturation
massively and added an old fashioned filter, which also depicts the conventional
cold, spooky and out-dated feel.
My media product
involves both conventional and unconventional aspects of real media products.
As a group we did not want to move too far away from the conventional way in
producing our psychological horror film, due to the fact the genre in which we
chose to explore is confusing within itself and we didn’t want more factors
confusing the audience when watching the opening sequence. Nevertheless, we
also wanted to challenge this and make our film more unique to the typical and
conventional horror opening sequences, therefore incorporated flashbacks/ flash
forwards in the opening sequence.
Furthermore, I feel
that we have not only stuck to the typical conventions, them being low key
lighting throughout and a continuous scene, of a psychological horror genre but
tried to be diverse. By this I mean that compared to other opening sequences of
the same genre they do not contain fear and fright in the first few minutes of
the film, however, I feel like I have done so. For example, in the opening of
Insidious it consists of a basic tracking shot and nothing extremely
frightening or revealing happens within this, we completely flipped this idea
round in creating a clarifying opening by using a tension building non diegetic
sound throughout the sequence.
The sound used in our
sequence is very conventional due to the fact that there is diegetic sound of
screams, twigs breaking and the rustling of leaves and a non-diegetic sound in
which gets louder at certain points and develops a lot of fear for the end of
the sequence. Originally we wanted our non-diegetic sound to be different to
the typical psychological horror, still, I feel like sound is a key element
when identifying the genre of a film from its opening sequence so this being
more conformist is a good thing.
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