2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge
forms and conventions of real media products?
In the film the use of fast jump cuts allow the appearance on the mystical being B.A.S.E. to appear to be
moving around the scene to aid or scare the other characters.
When shooting the office scene we used a multi camera set-up, allow us to both give a sense of
conversation as well as a wider shot of the speaker, this challenges many films in the genre as this type of
conversation would use reverse shots in mainstream films.
When cutting to dream/remembering sequences an electronic fuzz sound was used to emphasise the cut
and make it sound more aggressive, this is a trope of the industry and seen on many feature length and
short films.
The film was shown in black and white this conforms to industry conventions, in terms of a horror film.
Using a red, black and white filter has connotations of the‘spooky’ theme.Therefore the filters that we
used in our film follows the forms and conventions of a horror genre film.
The music used in the film tension building as used in nearly all films in the horror/thriller genre.The
music used is almost a trope of the movie soundtrack arena for horror/thrillers it has a quiet, building,
bassy tones with quick changing elements of sound .
My poster challenges conventions of the genre of horror movie poster, having both protagonist and
antagonist together as the main features of the poster.
3. How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary texts?
My ancillary text was a poster, I had originally hoped to take forward a
dual poster campaign similar to the dark knight system of original and the
joker edited versions of the posters. My posters were reversals of each
other highlighting the differences between the good and the evil in the
characters, despite this I took considered feedback and reduced the
posters to a single venture (The final piece is on the top, alternative piece
is the lower left picture)
I have taken inspiration for my poster from other thrillers such as the
recent StarTrek films (lower right).This is however, challenging horror
film tropes.
The primary colours used on the poster is black and red the same at the
film its self, I have also incorporated the same font for the title as it is in
the film itself.
I have the main characters in costume they wear in the film. I have
B.A.S.E. stood behind Brian looking over his shoulder very much how he
is presented in the film, this combined with the phrase on the poster
‘HauntingYou On 25.3.14’.These two factor tell the audience that it is a
horror, thriller or something tied to those genres
4. For my double page spread I have taken conventions
from Empire’s magazine article for the film‘Duplicity’.
There are numerous concepts I have taken from this
piece to form to the conventions of modern articles
Firstly the top and bottom banners, although only on
the top in duplicity have have done them on both sides
of the page as I feel I holds the viewers eyes into the
main article
I have both of the main characters in the side of the
article in duplicity they are spilt whereas in my article
they are together, similar to my poster to add cohesion
between the ancillary pieces
Also, I have the multiple images around the page of
behind the scenes with captions added, in a similar
format to duplicity.
Some features I have included the were not inspired
duplicity and example of this is the little fact file
containing, Running time, Cast and Certificate. I have
however, seen this in other peer work were it appears
to be effective
5. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Using quantified data, I was able to deduce where the weak parts of the film were and that gave us stimulus
and a direction to go onto address them.
We can see that the sound on our rough cut was the weakest, with many pinning the blame on the office
scene which we went on to balance the voice levels.As many people found the Professors voice was a
substantially higher volume than Brian's
When conducting this research I decided to use a questionnaire format opposed to video interviews, as
the data is more useable and can help my team go further.
6. How did you use media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages
For the planning stages such as storyboarding, I used the 500 year old media technology the pencil, as it
allows me to easy show my ideas for set design and character direction, although there are computerised
drawing technologies such as Google Sketch up and 2D Design, none of them allow the user to be as
creatively boundless as pencil and paper.
When filming we used digital Camcorders For the filming as they have the features we require such as large
removable storage and a large zoom.We used different cameras for different shooting days, we gained
footage in different qualities , file formats and frame rates for instance we have got 576p 25 FPS in .MOD
format along side 1080p 25 FPS in .MTS.This results in not only obvious differences in film quality and
aspect ratio, but also issues with editing where we had to convert the file formats to .mp4 to suite our
editing software which took up swathes of our time.
For editing we used theAdobe Premiere Pro CS6 which very successfully handled our video once we had
converted it.
The first time we shot the office scene we used a boom microphone and external recorders, to edit the
sound we usedAudacity a audio editing software with a wide range of features. We re-shot the scene in the
end without the boom and recorders due to issues with the sound on the first attempt and it didn’t seem to
have that many advantages in terms of sound quality over the built in recorders in the cameras.
7. How did you use media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages continued
For the posters I made initial drawings on paper for the same reasons as I did the storyboards on paper.
I shoot stills on my Canon Powershot SX160 compact camera as it has a high enough resolution and enough
zoom for the distance I was looking to have my subjects away.
I used mainly two programs beingAdobe Photoshop CS3 & CS6 and Microsoft Paint. Photoshop for its
ability to manipulate photographs, in terms of cutting and colour editing. I used paint as a canvas to move
and place images before doing advanced editing in Photoshop.
For my double page spread I wrote the article on MicrosoftWord and then transferred the text inAdobe
InDesign CS6 & CC to arrange the images, text and titles.
I have also used imgur.com to host my pictures and youtube.com to host my video
(For album of pictures and screenshots: http://imgur.com/gallery/SsPsP/new)
