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

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

2. Narrative
 In our opening we decided to use a lot of cross cutting between different scenes because this is a
common technique used in many thrillers and horrors such as inception. We were cross cutting between
four different scenes. A scene of the killer planning his murders, and then three other scenes of the
victims in normal situations. This helped to build the story because it helped establish each of the
characters and the relationships they had.
 The only dialogue we used in this opening was from the three victims. It was them saying things like
“Merry Christmas”. We chose to have them say this because this counteracted the theme of the film
which is about a serial killer and it made the film even more creepy. It also showed that the antagonist
has a hate for Christmas and hinted to the audience that yhis was why he was committing these murders.

3. Titles
• After much discussion we decided to name our film “12 Days”. This is
because of a number of reasons. We wanted to include the theme of
Christmas because it’s a Christmas film, but we wanted to be more discreet
about it and maybe make the plot slightly more mysterious by using a
number, like in the film “Se7en” or “The sixth sense”.
• For fonts, we looked at different horror and thriller movie fonts. We found that
most of them had been wrote all in capitals. We then looked at different fonts
we could use for the title. We selected a range of fonts that we thought were
effective for a psychological thriller, researching different films fonts. We
came up with three different fonts that could be used for our film. Our first
idea was to have a plain serif font coloured in green to represent Christmas.
But we thought that these colours were too bright for our film genre. So we
chose a similar font and decided to make it white and red. This is because
we thought it was more plain and the colour red represents blood and death,
which is a common theme in thrillers and horrors. The colours white and red
are used in a lot in titles such as “The marked ones” and “Jaws”.

4. Setting
 Our main setting for the film was an old wooden cabin which
was depicted as being the antagonists home. We chose this
because you don’t normally expect someone to be living in a
cabin rather than a house. It also seemed like quite a remote
location and therefore perfect for a thriller horror. We also
chose because it was a relatively easy location for our actors
to get to. We also chose it because it was quite dark and
therefore perfect to create tension. We were inspired by this
location from films like “Cabin In The Woods”.
 The other settings we had was different peoples houses, this
is because we wanted to show the victims in their own home
environments.

5. Camera work
 When planning our opening we planned to include a range of
different camera shots to try and conform to the thriller genre.
We did this to try and keep the audience interested at all times.
For the first shot we had an establishing shot of a living room to
try and set the scene. We then had a zoom, into a Christmas
tree, this was to create enigma, as it make the audience wonder
what's going to happen next.
 When it showed the killer in the next scene, there were a lot
more close ups and extreme close ups to build more tension.
Close ups are commonly used in thrillers and horrors such as
"Se7en". We also did this to hint that something bad was going
to happen.
 When we showed shots of the killers victims we went with a mid
shot to try and show a change in setting and atmosphere.

6. Editing
 We tried very hard to try and make our film as close to a conventional thriller as possible. At the start We
only had one cut to try and set the scene and give the audience a false sense of security. Then when it
cut to the scene of the killer we had a lot quicker cuts, this is commonly used in psychological thrillers to
boost tension.
 Another technique we used was to speed up and slow down some clips. For example, we slowed down
some of the clips of the victims to show their innocence. But we sped up some of the clips of the killer to
make him more intimidating.
 One more technique we used was cross-cutting. For example, we cut between the scenes of the three
victims and the killer, to try and build the audiences tension.