1. Question One

2. Q1~ In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? The genre of our opening sequence is supernatural horror. We deliberately formed to the conventions of this horror so that it would be evident and understandable to the audience. We conformed to the conventions through our use of:> STOCK CHARACTERS The antagonist is a spirit of a mentally disturbed young girl who is given the appearance of a hollowed out face, much like that of a skulls, so that it is bringing forth the visual knowledge that she is dead and separates her from the other characters in the film. We took inspiration for films such as Mr. Boogie from Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) and the old lady in Insidious (James Wan, 2010)The protagonist is a young girl who we decided would be American. She has moved into this house where previous victims of the ghost have been murdered a very common plotline for a supernatural horror sub-genre which causes her to become possessed.When we were deciding on how the film would continue we came up with the location of the film being set in America. This meant that the character would have to be American 3. I have written about this briefly on the blog before.> PLOT The iconography of a photo album left behind by the spirit to imbed the idea to research who it belongs to into the mind of the main character. The actions leading up to the protagonist gaining more knowledge and understanding of the owner of the music box and photo album would increase in intensity as the antagonist tries to torment them.> LOCATIONAn isolated house is used in The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001) as well.The house is isolated and the protagonist is completely alone. The normality of the house creates verisimilitude which is important in our sub-genre because the action would be too unrelatable without it.> TYPOGRAPHY The credits are written in a scrawled, hand written style appearing to be sinister and relevant to the genre. The title is similar except that it is written out slowly to reveal itself creating tension and suspense. 4. > SOUNDHave a listen to some of the background sound we used in our clip.A song from the music box which is used to hypnotize the protagonist is used to anchor the sound to the image of the opening music box. It creates tension because it begins to slow down as the song progresses slowing down the pace of the sequence and creating an ominous atmosphere. The sound mix of the screeching, scratchy, sharp and high pitched non-diegetic sounds are conventional in a supernatural horror film because they are sounds that make the audience uncomfortable.> MISE-EN-SCENE Costume Neutral coloured, plain clothing was conventional because it connotes a neutral or drained emotion thus creating an ominous atmosphere. Hannahs clothes are casual and her make-up is simple because it adds verisimilitude to an otherwise unrealistic situation. Janes black cape makes her look like the grim reaper adding to her fear factor. Lighting We used the convention of low-key lighting that created shadows from the characters movement. By lighting the behind the doorway when Hannah was entering the garage it created a silhouette that made Hannah look increasingly foreboding. Props jskjd shdjsfhkfdhks 5. > MISE-EN-SCENE cnt.We got inspiration for the rotational camera shot from Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)Camera The reveal swish pan bringing Jane into view when the audience wouldnt have expected her to appear is conventional because it is creating tension through the anxiety and unknown nature of the film. Editing A montage of the action along with fillers is ideal because it allows shots to show the credits this is vital and conventional of an opening sequence. The flickering images of the spirit is conventional because it gives the appearance that everything is not as it seems and differentiates the antagonist from the protagonist.We challenged conventions by:An example of one of our filler shots.Although supernatural horror films contain some vivid and gruesome violence it isnt usually to the extreme level that we took it in our opening sequence. We challenged this convention because we thought the blood would have the appropriate and elevated effect of the horror that is being inflicted upon the character. 6. DECONSTRUT A SHOT BY SAYING SOMETHING ABOUT POV 7. Question Two 8. Q2~How does your media product represent particular social groups? The stereotypical conventional characters in a horror film would involve an athletic male, who is seen as the 'Hero' character whilst his companion is a female who is weak, timid who provides a constant supply of shrill screams of fear and panic. The residual ideology between the genders has created a binary opposition between the hero and the victim to so that there is and unconscious associated with a masculine hero and an effeminate victim.The male character being all mucho and protective in The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012).A conventional character is a female who is made weak through her indecisiveness meaning that the audience views her in a negatively stereotypical way. We conformed to this because we thought that it would suit the narrative and that it would be an easily achievable representation for us to portray in the shots. 9. We were inspired to do this shot from Ameityvilejsbkfjhbkdj In the ECU from our sequence there is a tear rolling down her cheek. The purpose of this was to show that she was trying to fight the possession and that she was desperately trying not to kill herself. However, it comes across as that she is completely helpless and weak. It looks as know she is not trying to fight back and has instead given in to the spirit. The tear makes her seem over-emotional falling into the conventional dominant ideology constantly portrayed in horror films. These qualities demonstrated present Hannah as both a positive and negative stereotype. 10. Due to that fact that there is no speech from Hannah throughout the opening sequence there is a lack of sympathy that the audience feels for her. Instead she is distanced and acts as another way of creating fear and tension.During the opening sequence the ghost become an enigma meaning that no information about her gender, age or ethnicity are made apparent. However, when we were coming up with the concept of how the film would continue we established that the protagonist would find out about the identity of the spirits life when she was alive.The ghost is also female with the intention that her character will subversively challenge patriarchy by proving she can successfully control and manage in a position of power without the aid of a man.We bring in Japanese mythology through the paper cranes which brings in an additional social group. The main social group that is represented is White American an ideologically loaded choice of ethnicity and one that is used mainly in Hollywood films because they want to appeal to their largest audience and therefore have created a white-centric convention for their films. 11. Young people are the only people that are represented in our opening sequence. which is constructed by similar tooBecause of our limited range of gender, age and ethnicity we could be narrowing our audience demographic. 12. Question Six 13. Q6~ What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? We started off with using blogger to document our progression in understanding the task given to us and developing it into our own concepts that transformed into the opening sequence. We could create text posts to discuss the things that wed discovered; add inspirational video clips and our own creations from YouTube; post pictures; and link to other websites such as: Prezi and Slide Share. The blog enabled us to reach out to various media forms because not only can it be accessed on the internet but there is also a free app that people can purchase in the App store.We were able to create professional looking presentations using Prezi. We used Prezi specifically for expressing our concept development. Its clear presentation made it easy for us to communicate our ideas to anyone who could look on the blog but also to each other. The format of Prezi meant that it was easy to link it to the blog. When we were completing our audience research we used https://www.surveymonkey.com/home/ to come up with questions we wanted to ask people. We could send it to a selected number of people electronically (saving paper and further costs) and it was easy for them to reply. 14. YouTube was a very important part of the progress of all stages in production for our opening sequence. We used it to put up small shots that we had taken on our location reccies to put on the blog as documentation. We put the rough cuts and final pieces of all of the projects we completed (The Juice Slamdown, The Sound of the Wind and Possessed). Once the clips were on YouTube we could export them to various other forms of media: - It was simple to post inspirational clips and our own work on the blog via YouTube. - We could post a link to the video on numerous forms of social media such as Facebook, the official Possessed twitter site and any future social media networking sites that we branched out to. - YouTube was incredibly important when it came to researching the genre and opening sequences. Without it we would have struggled to view so many examples and taken inspiration from them. Social Networking sites allowed us to reach out to our target audience and a much wider audience. It is free which makes it easy for us to use. We created an official twitter page and posted the sequence on Facebook Posting online meant that we could get feedback on how to improve it and their opinions on the finishing project. 15. We used Alexs Cannon 60D camera to film the whole of our opening sequence because it was the highest quality camera that we had available to us and we thought that it would enable use to create a better looking product. Alex has had more experience with this camera and knows how to work it much better than we know the school cameras. We used a Tri-Pod to make sure all of the still shots we wanted actually remained completely steady. The tri-pod was easily adjustable and because Id never used one before AS Media Studies it was a fantastic learning experience. The adjustability also enabled us to achieve a huge variety of shots that we had got inspiration from and thought would be visually impeccable. We used a steadicam frame for the shot of Hannah in the doorway. Using it meant that the turning movemoent would be smooth. The smoothness would mean that the audience would be concentrating on the action within the shot rather than be drawn to the fact that it isnt real. We used lighting with lamps to make sure that the lighting was bright enough to avoid blurring on the camera and keep the footage at a high quality. We knew that we could edit the lighting afterwards so we didnt worry about the atmosphere the bright lighting created apart from the perfectly crisp shadows that gave an extra quality of sinister to the sequence. 16. Time stretch when the knife falls from Hannahs hand. 180 degree rule that we failed and then got right. 17. AFTER EFFECTS We wanted to create a more obvious look that the protagonist in the opening sequence was possessed by blackening out her eyes. I took on the challenge to learn how to create this effect in AfterEffects. It was very time consuming but we are all very happy with the outcome .Add some more text here. 18. BEFORE:Me and Alex discoloured the shots because the orange-yellow light that was created from the lamps we used didnt create the kind of atmosphere that we were trying to potray. After researching different films and their colour grading, I got inspiration from The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) and its complete desaturation and removal of almost all of its colour; and the extreme deep shadows shown in Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton, 2007). AFTER: