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

2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Exterminate Final Media AS Film Opening

Here is our groups final film opening

Response to props, costume and equipment

With the use of props and costumes I believed these must be selected sensitively to correctly convey the atmospheric tension that we're trying to present in the opening of our film and because there will be no dialogue in this opening it is important to get this right as I believe that the props and costumes with be our main way of communicating to our audiences. Props Initially with props, we believed that equipping the antagonist, Danny with a knife will be a suitable thing to as Danny is a borderline psychopath who is intelligent, coordinated and ruthless. However as we further developed our characters I noticed a bit of a discrepancy: we profiled Danny to be intelligent and coordinated however him stalking Sarah is an action fueled by longing and determination for her not through a clear thoughts. Although giving him a knife would show such brash action not be appropriate as a knife signifies death than a threat. So we decided to get rid of the knife as a prop. They keys which Sarah would carry was a carefully chosen prop as it signifies her hope of escaping her stalker, this relates to the audience who are all responsible for their own keys, something that is typically used to open a door to your house which is their safe haven now shown to be Sarah's lifeline and allows them to picture themselves in the same scenario. Costume Danny being dressed in a hoody was an obvious choice as he is supposed to emulate the dangerous, threatening feel, we also discussed whether he should be wearing it zipped or unzipped. This is because we believed that little details presented in the characters would hint bits of the characters' story, zipped up presenting Danny as a mysterious, shrouded man or unzipped presenting a more open individual. Eventually we decided to have him zipped up as this would add mysterious and unnerving feel to a character which the knows so little about. Sarah's costume is a typical normal girl costume to portray how normal the character is, this is so the audience can see her situation as if it was their own lives being snatched away from them when she is kidnapped at the end.

Update Market Research

Here is an updated version of our Market Research

Market research from kierajaffas

Locations

Location from kierajaffas

Props

Props from kierajaffas

Costume

Here is our characters costume codes

Costume from kierajaffas

Equipment

Equipment from kierajaffas

Change of location

Here we are filming the opening scene of our movie.






As you can see in the pictures above, we are filming our movie opening in the park. We have done this as we wanted a wider variety of locations in our opening, we felt only filming in Kiera's house was limiting the variations of lighting and shot types we could use. This location was also convenient to us as it is less than a minute away from our school, so there wasn't trouble when it came to travelling with the camera and the tripod. Although, we did encounter some problems with the camera while filming. We also felt the park would add create more of a scary atmosphere for the audience as it is a place people go to as a leisure activity. This makes it more relatable to the audience. We are creating a discomforting scene which will put doubt in the audiences mind, as it is a location they go to enjoy themselves. It wasn't dark when we filmed this scene but we aim to edit the lighting once we begin to edit our opening.

Original Script for Ex-Terminate

Here is the script for our original idea for our movie. However this is no longer our script as we have made changes to the treatment. We wasn't very fond of this script because it involved too much dialogue, which decreased the scary mood for the audience. Also, it took up too much time, it overrun our time limit of two minutes. There wasn't enough of a tension build up which there should always be at the beginning of a horror movie.

Possible Production Names

As a group, we brainstormed possible production names for our movie production company. We decided to make a chart consisting of three words associated with our film and list synonyms of the words, in hope of finding a production name we liked.









As you can see, this method wasn't suited to us. We couldn't think of many words associated with the topics we had chosen. Also, we had to take into consideration that the name of our production company didn't have to have anything to do with the genre and story-line of our movie. Due to this, we also came up with these three names:

Flashlight Studios
Tunnel Vision Studios
Skyhigh Studios

We liked these ideas as we felt they were original and had significance to film production and editing, rather than our movie. We also had an idea of how we would edit these names into our movie. These production names seemed stronger and more memorable to us than the ones we had on our chart.

Overall, our favourite production name was Tunnel Vision, as it infers that our movie is the only thing we want our audience to focus on. Also, it infers that we are a fully focused production team:

Tunnel Vision- narrowness of viewpoint resulting from concentration on a single idea, opinion, etc, to the exclusion of others

Although we wasn't concentrated on a single idea at the beginning, we now are and are now giving it our full attention. Which is why I think Tunnel Vision Studios will be an appropriate and suited name for our production company.

The Stepfather

Analysis of opening: Scary Movie 2

I decided to analyse the opening scene "Scary Movie 2" because originally we had decided that the genre of our film was going to be horror-comedy. Therefore i analysed so we were able to see the types of techniques used by the producers of this movie in order to fit the horror-comedy genre the movie has.

Scary movie 2 from jovinie_carter

Inspiration- The door to ideas

Here i have written an explanation to the choice of our film title and I came to that decision.

Treatment Changes

While filming our opening, we decided to change our treatment in order to involve a wider variety of shots. We also decided to add a scene in the park, so the opening wouldn't only be in one location. Here are the two other ideas we came up with; they are pretty much the same but only have a slight difference. Idea One Film opens with Sarah at home, talking to her friend over the phone. In this part of the video we plan to add information that will help set the scene for the audience however this is going to be all one-sided conversation and will follow Sarah’s speech. She then tells her friend about how with the recent breakout from prison by her ex-boyfriend she feels like she’s being watch/followed. The scene will show a flashback of Sarah walking home from work through the park and in the distance she sees a hooded man off the path near the trees. She stops to stare however is interrupted by a passer-by asking politely for her to move which she obliged. When she looks at the position the hooded figure was in, he is nowhere to be seen and she decides to ignore it and walk home however a hooded man comes into view of the camera unseen by Sarah. The scene then then changes back to Sarah at home on the phone to her friend. It is clear she is wary that the person in the park could have been Danny, but she tries to brush it off. She then hears an unusual noise coming from her hallway. She goes to investigate it and finds nothing. She is then grabbed by Danny from behind and strangled. The screen fades to black as we hear Sarah’s muffled scream. The title Ex-terminate then comes into sight. Idea Two Instead of Sarah being on the phone to her friend in the first scene, the film with open with Sarah in the park making her way home from work. She sees a hooded figure watching her from the trees. A pedestrian walks by, and in that second that she looks away, the figure disappears. She is confused, but carries on walking. She then hears a rustling noise behind her, and then footsteps. The footsteps get closer and closer and the pace picks up. It is clear she is being chased. She begins to run as the hooded figure chases her through the park. She makes it to her front door, but struggles to find her keys. In this time the character catches up with her and strangles her from behind. The screen fades to black as we hear Sarah’s muffled screams. The title ‘Ex-terminate’ comes into view. Later on in the film the audience would learn that the character chasing Sarah was her ex-boyfriend Danny.

Camera Angles / Shot Types

Overall, there are eleven main camera angles/shot types. In this post I will present the shot types and explain their impact and importance.

Camera Angles / Shot Types from shutupmeg

Old and new Storyboard for our movie

Here is the storyboard we began to create for the first treatment of our movie. However, this had to be changed as we changed our treatment. The new storyboard for our movie is below this one.
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Response to Nightmare on Elm Street and Shutter Island opening credits

Although these two films are very different being from different decades and have are different types of horror they also resort to similar techniques which is used constantly in the horror films today which our group can use in our film opening. They both use non-diegetic sound to set the tone and amplify the feeling on tension. They also both use different editing techniques to portray the tension whether it is sudden cuts in the different footage or a fade in, fade out to provide the viewers with a psychological/supernatural feel to the movie. They both use the credit timeline to their advantage both using red fonts to signify blood/ anger/ murder. This can all be used in our film opening and will no doubt amplify the impact our film opening into becoming a notable horror opening.

Target Audience Feeback

Audience feedback for new treatment

A Nightmare on Elm Street Opening Credits/ Scene Analysis

Shutter Island opening scene and credits

Response to Meeting

After heavy consideration we all once again agreed to subvert from the trending supernatural horror which many blockbuster titles were going for. We instead decided to go back to the classic roots of horror and create a serial killer/ stalker type movie. The details are still limited however so we will keep the blog updated when we have made a decision.

Treatment of our movie opening

Production Meeting video discussion

Response to Mood Board

Our mood board was made to correctly represent the ideas of which our group has come up with for our final film opening product. Although we have decided to abandon the supernatural thriller idea we still want to incorporate a few conventions used in supernatural films into our final product and this is why we have used images from films that are classified as supernatural in our mood board. We have decided to use props such as a knife and possibly a mask to our idea as it will be deal in a stalker/serial killer movie.

Mood Board

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Music and sound effects ideas for movie opening

After doing some research, we have found free, non copyrighted horror sound effects and music which we think will be appropriate for our movie opening. This video consists of a variety of different sound effects which include ones which would make the audience jump, there are also some very good tension building sound effects. They are very appropriate and match the genre of our movie. This is a very long piece of music, lasting almost 10 minutes. It is very dark, starting off slow then gradually getting higher and faster, raising the tension. It is the type of music that would excite and scare the audience as they would be waiting for the climax to happen.

Analysis of Existing Products

Response to Horror Film conventions

As our findings of conventions have signaled we have agreed that it is important to use our research and apply it to our final product of our opening. We have listed a few areas in which we may want our own film to take place such as deserted roads, parks, dark houses and alleyways. Our narrative is still undecided however we have agreed that our film will involve an protagonist and antagonist. We have also decided that our character types will most possibly involve a feminine character as they’re most commonly used to portray victims in horror films. We have all come to a conclusion that our horror film must have some elements of iconography present in our final product, one idea was to use POV shots to help emulate the fear and panic the victim feeling or the rush and pleasure the killer is feeling. This will be done to help provide the users with a more of an immersive experience rather than it being all third perspective camera shots.

Horror Film Conventions

Conventions used in horror films from Tenkin

Response to Market Research

Our market research was to give a basic knowledge of successful blockbuster horror films which generated a fairly high amount. This included the directors who oversaw the movie and the date to which it came out. It was also done to provide us with an accurate idea of the various types of horror films done in the recent years which we will consider whether to conform to or subvert at the next meeting.

Market Research

Market research from kierajaffas

Response to Target Audience Profile

As our audience were categorised in the ‘explorers’ and ‘social climbers’ area we decided that in order for our horror film opening to facilitate their need unique perspectives must be shown to provide and immersive experience. This might be done through the use of camera shots or lack of non-diegetic sounds/ music at certain moments, as this idea has not been fully discussed it is relative new area.

Typical Audience Profile

Response to Survey

Response to survey Taking the advice of our audience research findings, we all agreed that we should produce a Thriller/ Horror film opening as it seemed to be favourable with our target audience. After some lengthy discussion we decided to scrap the insanity idea which we initially believed to be our goal for this horror opening. This was because although many people from our survey had watched insidious, we were concerned as we did not wish to rehash that sort of film as it has been recycled constantly recently during the past decade.

Our Survey Results

Target Audience Research Questionnaire

Media survey from jovinie_carter

Research : Response to Brief

We have been given the task of creating a two minute opening of a movie. The genre of the movie and the storyline is entirely up to us. We have decided to create a horror film opening because we feel it is an exciting genre that would appeal to our target audience.

Preliminary Task