Q1. how does your product challenge the conventions of real media products?

Characters

The antagonist is usually given prevalence in horror films and shown as one of the main characters next to the protagonist. Our us of a female antagonist is unconventional because usually antagonists male and more obviously physically intimidating. The character is that of a female fatale who doesn’t take the detective seriously and is clearly not bothered by the gruesome crimes she had committed. This type of character is shown in Basic Instinct as well as Pulp Fiction and these were our main inspirations for our female antagonist character

The male detective character is a stock character in the sense that he is a classic 1st victim in a horror film. Because he is a detective he makes the audience feel safe and lures them into a false sense of security. This isn’t massively threatened by the female antagonists blasé nature however it undermines his authority and gives the feeling that she is in control. This contrasts with patriarchal ideologies in society that women are less dominant than men and less intellectually and physically imposing. Once the detective is killed the audience would feel a sense of tension and they would feel constantly on edge because its already been established that any one character could be killed. The film Halloween also does this in its opening when the main antagonist is a young boy who kills his sister implying that no one is safe.

The husband s face is never shown, this creates enigma and an air of mystery which adds to the horror conventions and also implies that the killer could be anyone. The idea of having a husband and wife double act was inspired by Bonnie and Clyde and the actual main reason for only showing POV shots of the husband was because we couldn’t find a realistic actor to portray him. However we were also partially inspired again by Halloweens opening and its use of POV shots of the knife which created enigma and suspense around who's point of view was actually being shown.

Mise-en-scene

Aswell as the cigarette we used a bloody knife which can be seen in all three locations. This type of prop is makes it obviously that the opening is that of a horror film, this was important to emphasise because the interrogation scene might lead the audience to think they were watching a thriller film.

We used a single desk lamp for lighting, this gave the shots an eerie feel and single lamps are also widely used for interrogations in movies. We took inspiration for our low key lighting on the two characters from The Dark Knight (Jackson, 2010) we also thought it would be a good idea because we didn’t want it to be to be too obvious that I’m 16 because the detective in the film is meant to be much older.

We used a cigarette as a prop, we were inspired by the character of Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994). The cigarette gives the image of a female fatale, we included this because we wanted her to be laid back and calm in the face of being interrogated. The dominant female character wasn’t conventional of horror and it challenged residual ideologies that women are less intimidating than men.

Our title was a plain serif font in white on a black back ground. This wasn’t massively conventional of horror because a lot of horror films will include references to the plot in their titles.

soundFree sound and YouTube were two sites we used when looking for sound to use in our opening. One of the most unusual features of our project was the inclusion of a semi-continuous clicking noise which showed that time was passing. It was non-diegetic and its main use other than showing that time had passed was to suspend the sense of tension that is present during the opening

Getting the various sound levels correct was important. We lowered the volume during the parts where the actor was speaking because this made it easy to hear clearly what was being said. We also used the sound effect of a camera flash as a photo is taken. The noise was old fashioned and added to the openings noir nature, it also reinforced to the audience that the police were involved and it was an official investigation.

In horror films there tends to be a slow beat throughout with sound focussed on action areas that release visceral pleasure. Our production did this as well so it was in this respect conventional of the horror genre.

Editing When you watch our opening one of the first things you pick up on would be the cutting rate, which is slow compared to other films of the horror genre. This slow cutting rate goes against normal horror conventions which tend to be fast paced to suit the action. We chose a slower rate because our opening contains a lot of dialogue.

We did also employ a faster cutting rate in the flashback scenes this created contrast with the rest of our piece and was conventional of horror. So in terms of editing and more specifically cutting rate we were both conventional and non-conventional.

We chose to desaturate our footage using image controls. This took a lot of the orange light from the lamp away, this improved the overall look of the footage aesthetically as well as making the footage look more typical and conventional of the horror genre. Another affect it had was making the lighting look more lowkey.

TypographyWe used a plain white font called Adobe Calson Pro on a black back ground. We chose it because it was typical film noir and its plain and easy to read. As I said its very plain and this challenges conventions as many films use more obviously horror related fonts that include features like being written in blood. Our title challenges conventions of horror through its lack of conventions of horror.

We thought a lot about hierarchy with our typography. The titles first show the actors names followed by producer , director and the film title. Each name was in larger font than there role because this looked professional . “Causation” was the largest word, because it’s the title of the film, obviously.

Monsters was our main inspiration for the title.

Camera workOur main scene is the interrogation scene in which the detective interviews the suspect. The interrogation scene from The Dark Knight heavily inspired us both in terms of content and camera work. It incorporates an array of slow moving shots which reinforce the unsteady undertone of the two characters as they converse. We wanted to emulate this because we felt it was very effective. Furthermore our shots were quite steady as a result so it looked really rather splendid. The steady nature of the shots could be interpreted as unconventional because a lot of horror films employ handi cam shots which convey unease.

Another positive from the Dark knight was the framing which was quite intimate and as a result had a visceral nature which made the audience feel as if they were part of the back and forth. Our use of over the shoulder shots also helped to keep the tension in the conversation.

How our opening is not conventional

The role of our antagonist is portrayed by a female actress; this challenges dominant ideologies because in most horror films the antagonist is a male character.

Horror films are usually associated with high cutting rates to build tension, however our opening has a slower cutting rate and we build tension through other mediums like dialogue which is cool.

We used a plain pretty standard white text font for a lot of the titles. We chose it because it stood out clearly and was visible against the background but didn't take attention away from what was happening on screen. The text wasn't conventional because most horror films use bold bright fonts to impose themselves upon the audience.

Our opening featured a lot of dialogue, this isn't normal for horror openings because they usually don't contain much speech.

Not many close ups are used in our piece, usually horror films use many close ups to intensify a scene or put the focus on one particular prop like a bloody knife or dead body. We convey horror through tracking shots and over the shoulder shots.

We used a clock and had the time clicking down which is rather unusual and quite innovative I think.

In terms of costume the characters are wearing normal clothes that don't particularly reflect that the opening is a horror opening.

We altered the colour for some of our shots slightly to give the scenes more of an eerie feeling. We also wanted the overall colour scheme of our opening to consist mainly of three colours.

How our opening is conventional

The locations is an isolated and desolate ware house with low key lighting, this is typical of a horror film.

The main colours we use are red and black which convey danger and death.

The exaggerated non-diegetic sound of the clock ticking helps build tension and also conveys that time is passing. Exaggerated sound is a convention of horror. We also used it in the flash back where we showed montage editing.

Props like the bloody knife that featured in our opening are conventional to horror.

The location of our typography is quite conventional and its positioning is similar to the True Detective opening.

We establish enigma by hinting through dialogue that there are two serial killers involved. In terms of plot, our piece centres on people being killed by serial killers. This idea is quite conventional to the horror genre.

Q.2 How does your media product

represent particular social groups?

Social groups that are represented and how they are represented

The social groups that we do cover are not accurately represented in my opinion because that would imply that many women in their 20’s have a tendency to commit murders.There is a binary opposition between the male and female character as he questions her and she gives flimsy answers before her husband murders him.

The antagonist in our piece is meant to be a female in her 20’s.Both the characters given prevalence in our piece are white and you can’t really tell what class group they belong to. Although they are both relatively well spoken which could lead to you saying they are middle or upper class.

social status isn’t a key feature in the opening and because only four people come into the scenes not many social classes are represented nor ideologies reflected.

How are representations technically structured?

The female character wears a red blouse with black trousers the colours indicate danger and are typical of film noir. The male character is smartly dressed in a blazer and shirt, this connotes that he is upper class. This shows us using costume and mise en scene to reflect social class. Another factor is that a lot of prevalence is given to the female character which shows that she is actually more in charge of the situations than the detective who is meant to be the voice of authority

Low key lighting imbeds a sense of criminality and the one source of light is typical of a police/detective interrogation scene in a noir movie.

Representations of gender.Both male and female characters are given equal prevalence in our opening. A female is not the conventional choice for a horror antagonist and the idea of a young women committing murderous crimes is unusual and goes against ideologies that men would be more likely to commit such crimes. Throughout the piece the female is portrayed as the more intelligent character and her persistence to not properly answer the his questions whilst using a monotone voice shows her lack of respect for authority. Along with her male partner she is shown to kill only men in the opening so she could be seen as matriarchal. Overall in our opening the only female character is shown to be dominant over men but in a negative way because she is a serial killer.

We challenged gender associated ideologies with our use of sound, mostly in terms of conversation. Although the male character is asking the questions the female is controlling the conversation by answering in a monotone voice and not giving anything away. This becomes more clear at the end when the male character is killed because the audience realise that the female was just stalling until her accomplished arrived. The way in which she ignores the questions shows she is cold hearted, its like Drake said “you know a girl is hurt, when she ignores you”.

Q3. What type of institution

might distribute your

film?

What type of distribution company might distribute our film?

From my own research into Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) I would of come to the conclusion that Bryanston Pictures should produce our film. However I don’t think this is a good idea because the company is American and Hasn’t released anything decent in a while. I think the film is more suited to the British independent route so I would choose Vertigo films as the distribution company. From the research that I’ve done into Monsters (Edwards, 2010). Vertigo have also released many other British independent films like StreetDance (2011, Giwa)

Vertigo Films specialise in distributing commercially driven independent cinema. This is well suited to our film because it has many of the characteristics of the independent films that Vertigo release. For example our film would have a low budget and no recognisable actors/actresses. It also doesn’t contain any key talent. Our opening would also be independent because it doesn’t include any characteristics of a tent pole industrial film.

Vertigo have made use of innovative release strategies in the past to increase buzz and revenue. Ideally our film would appeal to a mass audience but it might only appeal to a niche audience because it’s a low budget independent horror, because of this I think it could be trailed at some cinemas to get feedback and then if it does well it could be released to further cinemas.

In terms of synergistic promotional activity I don’t think our film would be able to attract a lot of interest because of its content. Other companies might not want to be associated with horror content involving murders. Furthermore films like The Hobbit (Jackson, 2012) were able to partake in synergistic activity with New Zealand Air because the movie is internationally renowned and was shot in New Zealand. Our film isn’t an internationally renowned tent pole film so I doubt it would attract such large investments from companies like New Zealand Air.

A trailer would obviously be made and released because trailers cost very little due to the content already being made. As well as this the film could be shown at film festivals, independent films gain a lot of publicity as a result of being shown at these festivals especially if they win awards. Utilising the opportunity that film festivals present for a film like ours makes sense because one of the main purposes of film festivals is to help the independent film making industry.

Guerrilla film distribution is a low budget way of distributing promoting and marketing a film. Vertigo have used Guerrilla film distribution in the past on Monsters which was a huge success as a British independent film. Moreover Guerrilla distribution typically involves methods like flyers, stickers posters and graffiti. However in recent times it has developed and expanded and it is now widely used on the internet. Instead of just drawing attention locally, the film can be networked through individual groups on Web 2.0. In terms of using the internet for Guerrilla distribution events can also be organised to promote the film, like flash mobs for example. Due to these factors a think Vertigo films could use a viral campaign as a really useful way of distributing the film and making it appeal to the target audience and even people outside the target age groups. Linking into earlier points the use of Web 2.0 and a viral campaign could attract a wider range of mainstream cinemas who are prepared to show the film. Which would broaden the films radius for being exhibited.

In the modern film industry social media is very important for distributing both industrial and independent films. Most modern films have social media pages and do things like run competitions, social media is used because its free and its particularly useful for horror films because most of the target audience will be on at least one social media site.

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The blog was used to keep track of what we were doing during the process of producing our opening. It was useful as a reference point for our collaborative work as a group. As a group we completed the group tasks together, on the individual tasks we each did separate work.

We used other online tools and websites such as YouTube as a source of information and inspiration that we used in our blog posts and in the actual production of our opening. A useful website for finding movie and TV show openings was Art of the Title which helped to give me a lot of ideas about different factors in our own opening. The creative process of producing the horror opening has definitely opened the door for me to a much wider range of resources that I didn’t know I could utilise.

Blogger was a key feature of our coursework because it made it easy to keep track of our work. Blogger is pretty easy and simple to use and it allowed us to personalise our web page to fit the themes of our opening which was useful. The fact that it is a simple site to understand made it comparatively easy for us to produce detailed blog posts quite quickly.

Blogger was also pragmatic because it gave us an easy way to manage and place content on the web. Overall I think running a blog was interesting because there are currently a growing amount of blog genres on the internet and I feel that basing one around making a horror opening is pretty groovy and innovative.

Most websites on the internet now allow the comment function! Blogger stays true to this trend as Callum King demonstrates in this screen shot.

The ability to receive and reply to comments allows you to receive feedback and criticisms so we know how to improve our posts.

We used YouTube as well as Blogger as I said earlier. YouTube was also vital because we had to upload all our pieces to YouTube before we embedded them onto our Blogger blog. YouTube helped us gage how popular our videos were and you can see one has got near to 250 views.YouTube is also more widely used than blogger so it opened up everything to a wider audience which let us receive comments from anyone. You can also see how all our various rough cuts are presented on YouTube.

Initially we had problems with casting and location but in terms of technology our project has run quite smoothly. To film our work we used Ben’s DSLR camera and a school tripod. We also made use of the schools track and dolly so that we could shoot tracking shots which made our work look much more professional. The main warehouse location for our interrogation scene was shot on two different sets so we had to sort out on set problems with lighting to ensure continuity. This meant we had to alter the brightness/contrast of the shots when we edited them.

As well as this we had to be aware of the rule of thirds and the 180 rule so that are opening made sense and looked realistic because if you break continuity the audience will have a less immersive viewing experience. We didn’t have an unlimited amount of shoots to get everything right so we have had to change and alter some things using aftereffects, for example some of our tracking shots were slightly rocky so they have had to be stabilised even though we did use steadicam.

Obviously the whole process required editing . The programme we used was Premiere Elements 9.0. we also used this for the preliminary task where we all used the soft wear to produce various effects and just basic editing to put shots together. We each took part in the editing and the main thing we learnt was how to use the Premiere programme. We used music throughout all the videos we have produced to emphasise certain things so getting the sound mix right and learning how to put edit sounds in was very important.

Our opening was legitimately a whole new ball game, before we started editing the opening the most complex editing we had done was the split screen inserted to the right for our preliminary.

We also had to alter the lighting and colour scheme of our piece. To do this we used image controls to alter the saturation of colours on the screen, another thing we did was changing the brightness/ contrast. On the left there is a before and after . The bottom one is the after, you can see that we made it darker and edited the amount and degree of shadow. This basically made the opening feel more intimidating and conventional of horror theme. One hard thing we learnt to do was ensure consistency of colour because otherwise it wouldn’t of looked professional.

Because we used two locations it was quite difficult to ensure continuity especially as we wanted to use shots from the two shoots seamlessly and make it seem as if they were natural and coming from the same warehouse location. Furthermore this two screen shots below show the two separate locations which we filmed with a two week gap. This gap could have been a problem because you might be able to tell that they were separate mainly due to my sideburns looking much more lively in the later segment we shot at school in the drama studio.

For our titles we took inspiration from Monsters (Edwards 2012) it’s a simple white Serif font on a black background . This doesn’t take any attention away from what's happening on screen so the audience thoroughly understand the story. We added key frames and changed the size of the text, this allowed us to have a slow zooming effect on the font. Simple titles are also classic and conventional of independent films.