Evaluation questions- 2, 5, 7 and 9 Ryan Webster

Question 2 – In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Some general forms and conventions of a ghost horror is film are being taken/dragged away by the ghost, not seeing being able to the whole of the spirit and also miscellaneous noises, so we thought we would firstly add in a ‘hand’ coming up and grabbing the victim and then the final shot the victim getting dragging away into darkness by something not seen. The main 2 films that we have seen this done are ‘Quarantine’ and ‘The grudge’. The reason we added this convention in particular is because it is quite common and also creates a great effect of the victim now being incapacitated. This also happens in Quarantine where the woman gets dragged away into the darkenss...

In many ghost horror there is also usually just the one person that enter the scary place first, this is shown also in ‘The grudge’ where the woman goes up to the attic to investigate noises so we used this idea however changed to be a cocky teenager not being scared of anything. In my opinion we followed all conventions of a ghost horror such as not being able to see the whole of the ghost as in our all you see is a bloody wrangled arm. We challenged the conventions of girls being too scared to enter the haunted house by making a girl run after the victim had been captured by the ghost, we did this to challenge the recessive ideology of the female in horror films.

Question 5 – How did you attract/address your audience.

We decided that the target audience for or horror film would be teenagers aged 16 – 25. We addressed this by using actors that are between these ages and dressed them accordingly. I think that we targeted the audience quite well as people between these ages are wanting to watch something that makes them jump, I believe that the hand appearing from no where and the victim being dragged away into the darkness accomplished this.

Question 7 – What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product.

To create our film we used many different technologies, these are as followed:

Internet, Blogger, Youtube, iMovie, Garageband, Logic express, Photoshop.

Without these programs we would not of been able to cut each clip up and put them together in specific places, created the titles for our film, created the music for our film, watch trailers of film of the same subgenre and create a updated blog of our progress through the project. We used Photoshop to create the beginning titles to our film and allowed us to edit the text to exactly how we wanted it, with out this program we would have been left with just plain text on a plain background. Using iMovie allowed us to add music from other software onto our finished film and sync it up. It also allowed us to make several takes of each frame so we could pick the best one out and use that one instead of just having to try and get it perfect in 1 take. We had to re-shoot a little bit at the end of our film on a different day, this day the weather was better and it was brighter outside, however with the use of editing we could darken the clip to match the rest of the film and you couldn’t tell the difference.
An example of the use of photoshop is our title...

I made sure the colour of the text was that of the shrubbery at the side so it looked as if the writing belonged there.

For the music we firstly used logic and then transferred it onto garage band... We did this so we could watch the film with the music with out adding the 2 together

We used high pitched violins to create tension, also this instrument is used in alot of other music for horror films.  We used a bass drum beat doubled up to make it sound like a heart beat, once danger strikes, we make the 'heart beat go faster and faster until the end shot where the victim gets dragged away. As you can see from the images, we made a gradual crescendo of music which i think makes more tension building up because it almost allows the audience to know something bad is possibly going to happen however they can not be sure when.

An example of the use of editing the actual film is that we darkened some clips...

Question 9
For our horror intro, I personally created the music for it using logic express and garageband, once completed i added it to the film.

 I also photoshopped the title image of the house with writing over the top.

We had to re-record The final shot of our film so i took the camera home and added it to the original film with the music over the top using imovie. Whilst doing this i added in the other titles such as 'Directed by' and 'Starring' into appropriate places.
For the planning side, i planned out the first 40 seconds with a story board...

Another part i had was to do a test shot of the hand coming up and grabbing the victim...

I added in blood, sticking out veins, and charred skin with bandage to create the effect of a spirit/ghost that died in a gruesome way.