1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
We kept generally to film opening conventions of the past, such as the use of many, many close ups and mid shots without using many long shots – the only long shot used is at the begging, in order to contrast the “before gunshot” scene and the “after gunshot” scenes. Mid shots were used in order to show something happening to the audience (action shots), like putting the bag over the head of Tom and showing the room being empty again, and the close ups were used to either follow up on the action shots or to detach the audience in some way from direct contact with said action, like the shots of the blood on the floor or the eye being picked up.
Conventions to do with the genre itself were also thought about when it came to planning the opening – for one, the horror genre is probably best known for it’s overly graphic nature when it comes to certain things, and we’ve tried to implement that in via the fake blood and eye prop. Ms. Elger’s reaction of “urggghhh” probably best shows the link between the props and the genre. The killer himself is also very detached from the actual murder, no matter his past with the victim, very much like stereotypical murderers of horror-flick fame, like Michael Myers and Hannibal Lecter.
The character of the killer best represents the upper-middle class of society, being based on the character of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, a film that – at least in my eyes – was a commentary on the shallow and selfish side of society, with a man who was driven to murder over very minute things like “whose business card is flashier”. I go into the similarities that have been constructed between the two in evaluation activity 2, but essentially the guy has been made as an unattached, unsympathetic killer more concerned about his flooring than the man he chooses to kill, very much like Patrick Bateman (who, again, is more concerned about his outward appearance than anything else, staying married to a woman he doesn’t love, etcetera.).
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Lionsgate Entertainment is the type of media institution that would distribute our film, as they’re the United States’ most commercially successful independent film distribution company, with past success with similar films to our own, such American Psycho and Saw (the former of which was one of the inspirations for our film opening). Of course, with ours, we’d have to find a British distribution company of some sort with a similar past that would distribute it within the UK.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for our media product would be from ages 16+, with the somewhat gory nature of the action being a bit too graphic for younger audiences, but having elements attractive for young adults and adults. The audience would generally be people interested in horror films in some way, or who like to have a film that poses a question throughout. The film’s storyline was always planned to question the nature of the killer, and have the audience questioning whether the victims deserved to die or whether he was acting randomly – there were elements of the original storyboard that represented this, such as originally planning to have a board of photographs instead of a television, but this was scrapped in favour of keeping the audience linked to the action with the “camera” scene on the television instead.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
The target audience for our title would be people that are fairly interested in horrors (good ones, not the more recent “RUN AND DIE” type film that dares to put itself in the genre) – in order to keep up with their expectations from past successes with films of that genre, such as Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho (which was more of a dark comedy I guess), we took inspiration from the way they work. For example, the killer’s attitude towards the murder is somewhat methodical and surgical, very much like the character of Hannibal Lector who has a past as a psychologist (and an interest in other areas of medicine, as revealed in Hannibal Rising – horrible, horrible film, but still, not the point), and the character of Patrick Bateman who uses the murder of others as a vent for his own anger and doesn’t have much empathy for his victims. These types of films are also noted for their fairly graphic nature in the effects that they show, something we also tried to so with the use of fake blood and a fake eyeball.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I’ve learnt to schedule the filming process properly in order to allow time for errors – at multiple points we came across problems in the process of handing in the draft and the DVD. The draft, for example, was left to render the day before the deadline, and it was at that point that we found out that certain file formats were just dodgy to use (.MTS videos were just horrible in After Effects, especially at the rendering stage, and were scrapped in order to use HD AVI files instead). And this final hand in, despite everything going fairly well, has gone badly when it came to handing in the DVD – we originally had a DVD+R that we accidentally used by just dragging the file to it, which of course meant that we couldn’t burn over the current contents. We then tried to use a DVD-RW, which, despite working fairly well, we found was incompatible with some DVD players and so now we’ll be getting more DVD+Rs to use instead. In future, we’ll make sure to have a backup supply of disks so we won’t come across this problem again, and I’ll be sure to hook up the two DVD players I’ve got to check compatibility of the disk.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
I’d say we’ve learned what things are more appropriate for a film than a film opening – many of the original drafts we went through were clearly more single stories that ended after two minutes, but making a good film opening setting up a story rather than finishing one up. We eventually corrected this, ending the opening at the point where the killer leaves the house (post-murder).
We also learnt how to properly make a shooting schedule and account for editing time afterwards. With the preliminary task it was more of a “shoot now, and clip together some bits and bobs”, but with the film opening we had to think of appropriate times for both of us to film, that was after school (due to the setting) and that left us enough time to finish the editing in time for the deadline. We also had to organize them a lot better, due to problems we had with the preliminary – for example, the costumes and set stay relatively consistent throughout the entire film opening with only slight deviations that you can’t really notice (like the fact that the floor has slightly different newspapers in different shots, because of the shots being done on separate days and we had to re-do the room each time).
Overall, though I’m not that happy with what we got out in the end, I’d say we did a much better job in the film opening than the preliminary task, probably helped along by the fact we weren’t censored anymore – but I miss the pizza cutter.
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