The document discusses the ways in which the opening sequence for a supernatural horror film uses and challenges conventions of the genre. It conforms to conventions such as using stock characters (an antagonist spirit and protagonist girl), an isolated house setting, and ominous sound design. However, it also challenges conventions with its depiction of extremely graphic violence. The document also examines how various technologies were used in constructing the opening sequence, such as cameras, lighting, editing software, and social media for sharing the work.

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 skull’s, 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.
> LOCATION
An 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. > SOUND
Have 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.
Hannah’s clothes are casual and her make-up is simple because it adds
verisimilitude to an otherwise unrealistic situation. Jane’s 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.
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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 wouldn’t 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 isn’t 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
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…
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 too…
Because 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 we’d 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. It’s 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 Alex’s 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 I’d 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 isn’t 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 didn’t 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 Hannah’s 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 didn’t 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 it’s 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: