Our Film Opening :

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

In our media products we use many conventions of horror movies. After researching various films we decided that a death scene/ or even the aftermath of a death scene was suitable as part of our movie opening, so the genre is introduced to the audience.
In many films that we watched, the murderer is usually kept a mystery until the end, but with our movie, we challenged this by naming and introducing the killer and the victim, but keeping the reason of the character’s death a mystery.

Our use of flashbacks was conventional as its's usually found in movies to give the audiences a glimpse of the character's past, so they can relate to the story better.
There's also the twist that the victim caused his own death, so we give the audience a chance to decide whether they sympathise with the murderer or not, as we see sad emotions also conveyed by the main actor.
The murderer herlself is a young aged female which challenges conventions of typical horror movie, firstly because killers are usually portrayed as angry, frustrated men usually at an older age.
Secondly, you would expect the girl to be shown as the weaker victim who gets hurt or killed.


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

We decided to represent teenagers with our media product, mainly because we were in a school full of teenagers and it would be much easier to film and also, it would be more likely to appeal to the sixthformers of our school.

As we swapped the roles of victim and perpetrator, and made the woman the murderer, the male instantly became the vulnerable character which the audience was more likely to feel sorry for.
The fact that we conveyed the male as the victim, went against the stereotype of young girly females being killed.
The couple shown in our clip represent typical young local teenagers, as they're dressed casually and in their normal style. This signifies that the event that takes place isn't a regular issue and that murder isn't her speciality especially as we're shown extreme emotion from the girl throughout the flashbacks of the couple.



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

From some research i undertook, i found that an institution that was more likely to distribute our media product was Fox Searchlight as i read that they deal with lower budget films more than others.
Also, other bigger institutions aren't as likely to take the risks with films that contains unknown actors and cheaper filming equipment.
However, i'm not very certain an institution would distribute my media product as it isn't exactly a Blockbuster, and the fact that its a low budget film doesn't help make it look any better.
It's possible that it could be released online as an web-based movie and people could use websites like Youtube to watch the movie and link to other websites.


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

I feel that the best audience would be teenagers and young adults, as they are most likely to appeal to the movie and relate to the storyline as well as the characters. I don't think that young children, possibly under the age of 12 would be suitable for our movie, as they are more easily influenced and this film could encourage children to hurt eachother when mistakes are made by eachother.
Adults may find it interesting however issues dealth by young teenagers may not really entertain them as much as its a completely different age group.

5)How did you attract/address the audience?

There are certain scenes we used which i thought could attract an audience, such as the voiceover and the flashbacks, the voiceover ( although suggested as an improvement from other feedback) was made to make the audience sympathise with the murderer, as she gives a slight glimpse of why she killed her boyfriend.
Also, the flashbacks of the couple allow the audience to connect emotionally with the movie clip as the couple are all loved up in the shots and they're portrayed happy and content with eachother.
We also added mystery to our clip by showing a scene where she washes the blood away from her hands, which i felt could attract an audience as we're not shown what she's done or how she did it but we know that she's killed him somehow and that he did something very wrong. I think the mystery would appeal to the audience and they'd be hooked on watching the rest of the film.

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

This project helped develop my editing skills on Final Cut Pro, as we had to master the tools and their uses. As the Final Cut Pro software is new to me and Simron, our editing became of a lower standard to other film openings, although i still feel that we tried our best and learnt alot about the programme.
As well as the editing process, we learnt alot from the filming part aswell, using the light to get better shots and knowing what angles to shoot from. Mastering the camera meant that we had to have alot of practice by shooting rehearsed scenes at the start.
We also learnt how to add sound over a film clip, including voiceovers, and also importing other types of files into our film.

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

From filming our preliminary task, i feel that we've learnt alot in the progression, such as the importance of lighting and getting the right angles whilst filming. As well as zooming in and getting steacy shots of the characters. I've also learnt alot about the conventional features of a horror film from the research we undertook before we began filmimg and editing.
You also learn the importance of team work and working effectively and efficiently.

Feedback from peers:

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To recieve feedback, we uploaded our film opening onto the YouTube website.Our media product gained mixed responses, as some people liked it and others felt there were many improvements to be made. We understand that people may feel like this as we did shoot a low budgeted film opening, and the actors weren't exactly Box Office Stars. However if we were to re-film our media product we definetly take into account everyones opinion and work on making it so that it catered to everyones taste.