Theo Benjamin-Evaluation

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

 My film is similar to other media products, for example in the film Sinister the opening scene a flashback of what happened to a family that recently lived at this 'horror house'. This is similar to my media product as the opening scene shows flashbacks of what had happened in the house before and what it is like in the present day. The film Sinister also has its titles in white in the bottom corners of the screen which is the same as my media product. Conventions that are the same between Sinister and my media product are that we both use low key lighting and flashbacks of previous events. A way that my film challenges this media product is that whereas Sinister shows flashbacks throughout the entire film my product shows flashbacks during the opening scene so that there is an enigma and the audience are always thinking about what's going to happen next. Also the film sinister uses one long take for a flashback whereas in my film I use many long takes and get closer to the body. A difference between my product and Sinister was that they show their production and distribution companies after their opening scene whereas I show mine before the clip.  
Another horror film which has similar conventions to my media product is the American horror film Scream, as you can see I have used similar titles to these two influential films.

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

Our film represents a social group of victims. The victim in our horror film is a young female and this is shown throughout the opening. This is a classic horror convention as in most horror films young females are always the victims as they are vulnerable. A reason we chose a girl to be part of this ‘victim social group’ is because stereotypically girls are the weaker sex and are often seen as defenceless and in need of help, the reason we used a young girl  was because we followed horror film conventions and most horror film I’ve watched contain a young, good looking girl as the victim. These girls are always seen as needing protection and often make silly mistakes which lead them to death. A film that also uses female victims is Scream.





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

I believe the distribution company that would distribute my film is 'Brain Damage Films' (BDF). I believe the reason why this company would distribute my film is because for the past 14 years they have been one of the largest and most respected independent horror film distributors world wide. They specialise in distributing horror films and therefore help get smaller films off the ground and give them the green light to showing audiences their films. Another thing about BDF is that they have distributed a large amount of 'slasher' horror films and the majority of them have been successful and they still sell DVD versions of the films on their website. So like other media products they have distributed my film is conventional to all the things that they stand for.
Although Brain Damage Films are an American based film company they've distributed all types of horror films, I think that they'd show my film to an American and English audience.

4) Who would be the audience for you media product?

This is Yomi Yusuph, he is a 17 year old boy from London but he currently lives in Medway. He is currently a sixth form student and in his free time he enjoys going to the cinema and socialising with his friends. As he has a lot of leisure time he likes to go shopping at the local shopping centre and buys clothes from Zara and Topman. Yomi’s favourite films are The Purge and Insidious 2, he visits the cinema twice a month and his favourite genres are horror and action.He watches all his films at the cinema as he lives close to an Odeon, he goes with friends so they can enjoy the experience together. He isn’t a fan of watching online films but the ones he does enjoy in the cinema he purchases when they’re available on DVD. He watches a lot of television and his favourite series to watch are Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and The following. Yomi listens to music mostly from Kanye West and Jay Z, he would be the perfect audience member for my film because horror is his favourite genre and he enjoys films with an enigma.

 

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract my audience I handed out a questionnaire which was filled out by different people. I made sure that there was a variety of people so that I could get a range of answers and so I could get the best possible audience feedback. Here is an example of few of the questionnaires. These answered helped the construction of my film.

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

Picture one is of a tripod was used for the filming of the main task. It was key to the main task as it meant my camera work was steady at the points I wanted it to be and it made tilts and pans easier to perform. A main reason why the tripod was important to use was because the videos I watched online on Film Riot said that films with tripods were much more highly rated and more pleasing to watch than films with hand held cameras. Although the majority of horror films used hand held cameras I believe my film was a lot better with a camera used on a tripod.

The next picture is off a HD camera. This was what I used to film my main task, it’s essential to the main task as without it there would be no film. It produced videos throughout the entire project, not only for the main task video but for the audience feedback and for rough cuts.

Picture three which is of my memory stick. This has been used throughout my main task and preliminary as I have used it to save rough cuts, sound effects and pictures. This is probably one of the most important pieces of hardware as it has everything saved to it that I used to make the main task. Also used this to save updates and to show progression of each rough cut. Also all the computers I used for the main task were public and therefore anyone work I done would’ve been open for anyone to access.

My fourth picture is of a computer, none of this would've been possible to make without the use of the computer as it kept everything stored and meant I could upload things to blogger, go on YouTube and research things on the internet.

Finally this is Audacity. Audacity was used in our main task hand in hand with a pod casting kit for when we created a voice over in our original rough cut, this was important at the start of the task as it was going to be the only dialogue we used throughout the clip. This changed further on down the line as feedback from an audience suggested that the clip would look better overall without the voice over.

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

Since doing my preliminary task I feel like I have progressed a lot not only as a cinematographer but my whole sense of film language. This is because during the preliminary I didn’t know many of the different shot types or why certain shots were used. After doing some research and watching many Film Riot videos on YouTube I knew exactly why I wanted to use some of the shots I used, for example I learned that canted angle shots are used mostly in horror films to show the viewer that something’s wrong or something bad is about to happen. Therefore I used this camera shot when the viewer was first see’s the dead body.

During my preliminary task I made many errors such as filming in a bad location. As the co-location scout I should have chosen a more appropriate place to film because the building I used caused echoes to the voices of the actors, the way I solved this problem in my main task was by using a podcasting kit to record dialogue and have no dirty sound or background noise ruin the speech. Overall this turned out to not be a problem in my main task as my final clip used no dialogue whereas my first rough cut did.

The major mistake I made in my preliminary task was accidently using a jump cut, this happened by mistake as I stopped recording one part and then recorded again a few seconds later. The problem with this was that the actors had moved and therefore it was confusing to the audience and could be seen as a continuity error. In my main task this wasn’t a problem as I used long takes and therefore there wasn’t a lot of cutting done by the editor. Also there are flashbacks in my main task which are signified by a white flashing light, when I showed this to an audience they understood what the light signified and why it was used.

Also in my preliminary mise en scene wasn’t concentrated on as our actors were just dressed in their standard school clothes whereas in my main task the victim was wearing an all-black outfit, this was done to take away the audiences attention from what she was wearing so the audience could concentrate on the murder and the mystery of what had happened.

Finally the sound effects used in our preliminary task were very ‘classic horror’ by this I mean they’re all the type of sound effects you’d hear when you watch a horror film and this can get very repetitive if you’re a viewer that watches many horror films. This was different in my main task as we used a very eerie and tension building song which contained a piano.