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.