By Siobhan Powell

Dream Stalker -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzkwf3Cn

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In what way does your media project use, develop or challenge form and conventions of real media products?
I would definitely say that the finished media product that myself and my group created did fit its genre. The chosen genre of my groups finished product is horror and I strongly believe that we successfully managed to show that the horror genre was apart of our film opening. The horror genre is a philosophy of literature which is intended to scare or frighten the audience, including feelings such as terror and fearfulness and horror can either be supernatural or nonsupernatural. You can find out more information about the horror genre here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_fiction
The codes and conventions we decided to focus on were: The type of music used - One of the main conventions of horror has to the music, it has to have a purpose and the purpose for our piece was to fill the audience with suspense and fear in order for the purpose to be fulfilled and for the audience to want to carry on watching the rest of the piece. I think we successfully achieved our purpose as the music does exactly what we want it to. We were particularly interested in a soundtrack called Abducted and you can view that here : http://www.freeplaymusic.com/search/category_search.php?t=v&i=1502

Camera Angels and Shots: I would say that getting a good camera angel on a piece of
footage is very important when trying to get the right reaction emotions and reactions from it. Not only did we want to show a variety of different camera angels and shots, but we wanted to use them effectively to our advantage and try to fit them in with our horror genre. The most common of shots that we used in our opening were:

Over the shoulder and long shot

Ground View

Close up shot

Medium shot

Props and Costume - For our piece, we decided that our costumes and props were to be
on a basic level because we wanted to make our film opening as realistic as possible and not over exaggerate. We wanted to show the stalker and his victim, the teenage girl so we decided that the stalker should wear a piece of clothing with a hood to portray his evil and broody character. As for the teenage girl, we decided that she should wear casual clothes because as I said we didn t want to make the piece un realistic. The showing of the news and the reporter signifies that she should wear formal clothing as most news reporters do to show they are quite important people on television. When it comes to props, we didn t really use any as we felt we didn t need to. The only prop we decided that was going to be necessary was a plastic knife for the very ending of the opening.

Dressing formal to show an important character is being portrayed.

Wearing a hoodie to symbolise terror.

Location and Setting For our piece, the location was a factor that we paid great
attention to because we wanted the location to match the storyline that we had created. We decided to film our opening outside of school because we felt it wouldn t be as realistic as it could be if it was filmed inside a school building. So with permission, we was able to film inside Scott s Nan s house. I think filming inside of a house works well because it creates a sort of tense atmosphere to the audience.

How does your media product present particular social groups?

In our media product, the characters include two females and two males, including the camera man. The two females portray the roles of one teenage victim and one news reporter, and the one male represents the stalker and the other male is our camera man. At the beginning of the opening, the teenage victim is shown being followed to her home by an unknown man. Stereotypically it is often the females who are portrayed as being less dominating than the males and its also the females who can be shown as being quite vulnerable in dangerous situations. I think our film opening doesn t really show any social groups because in our film a teenage girls get killed which seems to be the common themes for horror films. A few examples of films that show teenage social groups would be Scream , Prom Night and Sorority Row . Here are where you can find out more about the films: Scream- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_(film) Prom Night- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prom_Night_(2008_film) Sorority Row- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorority_Row

Victim

Stalker

News Reporter

What Kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I think different film companies such as Dimension films, New Line Cinema, Universal and others companies that produce their own horror film, which I think roughly, has the same sort of storyline as our film opening.

All of these companies produce horror films, so I think these would be able to produce our film because each of the companies have produced a film which I think has a similar storyline to ours.

Who would be the audience for your product?

I think a suitable audience for our horror film opening would be a 15 rating because, as our film contains violence and killings, so I strongly believe that it would not be suitable for anyone below the age of 15. Also if someone younger was to watch this opening, it might influence them in the wrong way giving them the idea that stalking someone and eventually killing them is the right thing to do even though it is not. And even though this opening to made up, it still might have an impact on the younger audience so that s why we decided that it would be best if the audience for our opening would be 15+.

Here is the BBFC (British board of film classification) and its where people can decided on the age rating of a particular film: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines/152/

How did you attract/address your audience?

I think we attracted our audience at the beginning of our opening by our choice of music, we decided it might attract our audience because the piece of music we chose was very tense and quite edgy, also it starts to build up tension so the audience will be drawn into the action and they will want to see what happens next. We addressed our audience with the camera shots we used, following the actors around to make the audience feel as if they were part of the action. Also following the actors around adds to the effect and creates more tension.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I think that everyone including myself was very lucky when making this product because we had access to some very good equipment such as: Apple Mac suite and computers HD camera and tripod Final cut editing and software By having all of this equipment available for us all to use, we was able to do some good editing. Final cut was fairly easy to use although I did find some bits relatively hard but because I've used this more than once I now find it a lot easier to use. I think the editing was good and overall I think myself and my group have made a good piece of film. I have learnt that filming and editing is not as easy as it looks, but I have also leant new skills for example how to use final cut, also filming and editing takes a very long time but if your patient and you work as team, you will create a some really products.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Myself and my group wanted our preliminary task to stand out and be different from the rest, we thought it would be good practise for when we start our actual opening. So we decided to make our little storyline simple yet funny because we wanted to make the audience laugh. I think filming the preliminary gave us more understanding about the different types of camera angels and shots, and I also learnt about the 180 degree rule. We were told that our preliminary task should include the following: Match on action shot The 180 degree rule Shot reverse shot The 180 degree is very important in film making, it states that two people in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship with each other.

Here is more information about the 180 degree rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180 _degree_rule