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

Looking back at the independent research into horror genre, the opening sequences of the film I looked at have a lot of similarities to ours. For example; I identified that in most opening sequences the titles come in late, looking at my timeline the first title in horror film ‘wrong turn’ doesn’t show until nearly one minute in, and this one thing we wanted to do in ours but because of the short time length we’re allowed and because we used most of our titles to cover up mistakes they didn’t come in as late as we’d wanted. The font we chose for the titles is pretty plain and has a basic colour scheme of black and white throughout and appears to the bottom right of the screen, this is common trend in the openings of horror films, as its subtle but does the job.

The first shot in our film is an establishing shot of the three girls going into the clock of flats carrying boxes, I think this is a good idea as it immediately sets the story, and introduces the characters, then the second scene is the three girls again walking up the stairs which is another technique that familiarizes the viewers with the characters. We wait until the girls get inside the flat to do close-ups on them, I feel this is because close-ups exaggerate whatever the person is saying at the time therefore it wouldn’t make sense to add them in anywhere, this is most definitely followed in tense moments of horror films the camera gets close to the character and creates tension.

It is recognised it not just horror films but in all movies that sound plays a big part in identifying what is going on, and we made a conscious effort to follow this, an example is the sound of the doorbell when the girls arrive home, once the doorbell rings there is a moment of suspense where character Laura walks towards the door, the original plan was to add in a hyperbolic doorbell noise but when filming the sound was loud enough so we left it as it was.

The mise-en-scene of our film was pretty simple, as I think a lot of horror films are. The setting is usually a secluded house/flat in which someone is moving into or has just moved into with minimal characters and costume, however we needed continuity when using props so it was just a case of remember what we were carrying and how.