Media Evaluation

1. The film we have created for our media short film has the genre of horror and the sub-genre is psychological. In our film we have included a number of the conventions horror films, these included fear and terror. With our film being a Psychological Horror film we used the simple style that usually features a normal person or a story that involves revenge or somebody who is mentally ill for example films like Psycho and Hostel. Our film challenged these conventions by adding a new twist by setting the story in an ordinary person’s life. Our character Rachael seems like quite an ordinary person, but we added the unique twist of her best friends suddenly dying and their deaths being described by the police as “suicide” which Rachael thinks is totally wrong. Our conventions do hint what our main and sub-genre is because our film is quite stereotypically, although like I mentioned it does challenge the conventions. The conventions we used do indicate our films inspiration as it is quite similar to the storyline of The Strangers, IT by Stephen King and Scream 1. You can see the similarities between Scream and our film are because it uses horror and threatening behaviour. The opening sequence of Scream is similar to ours because the phone call in Scream is the threatening scene like in our film where the stalker is standing above Rachael. Another similarity is the main character in Scream is a women and she seems to be leading a normal life. Scream’s opening sequence differs from ours because the phone call she receives is from someone she doesn’t know, but who has a threatening voice. In our film you get to see the stalker within the first few seconds. Another difference is it takes a while before you actually realise the guy in Scream is watching Casey with the line “I wanna see who I’m looking at!”, whereas in our film you establish this straight away when the stalker is stood above Rachael in her nightmare.

2. In our film we stereotypically showed our main character, which was a female as quite passive and easily frightened. This is quite a stereotypical of women in some peoples opinions, we then showed our stalker character as a “male” who is very dominate and controlling. In the film Scream this is a similar sort of reaction, the main female character is quite scared and easily frightened, whereas the main male character is quite dominant. Also in Scream the storyline follows a normal group of students, which again is similar to our film as well. The only difference is in our film we have shown no blood our guts on the first two minutes, whereas in scream in the first ten minutes two people die in horrific ways. Our target audience was mainly males, aged between 15 to 40 years old. We aimed at film at males because the stalker character is most likely to be male which would attract a male audience. In Scream the main female character in the opening is older than our main character so this is quite a big difference from our film as it shows our film is aimed at a lower age range than Scream.

3. Our film would be an independent film, so it could be distributed by a company like Warner Home Video. From our research into films of a similar genre and similar sub-genre we found that Strangers and IT are made by much smaller companies like Vertigo and then distributed by companies like Warner Bros. It would be released into independent cinemas like “The Showroom” in Sheffield, then put onto DVD and then shown on TV or digital channels like Film4. I think that our film would offer opportunities because in our film we have used a specially designed mask for a main character. On release of our film we could then offer this mask to the general public and this would also offer us a chance to make more money from our film. This is quite similar to scream as it also contains a mask that was merchandised and is frequently used as part of Halloween costumes.

4. The target audience for our film is 15 to 40 year old people who would be interested in the horror of genre or even the genre of thriller. We would mainly aim our film at males this is because stereotypically men would be more interested in the story which surrounds the issue of being stalked and the main stalker character is also a male. We showed our film to a selected group of our target audience and we received these comments " the editing was really good", "the scene where clown disappeared and reappeared was really good" and "the film was typical of the genre". This feedback was really helpful because it helped us find out whether our target audience did like our film. From the feedback we received they did. The films that we choose as quite similar to our own is The Strangers and IT, both films surround the fear of the unknown and also the psychological fear of clowns. Films like these generally appeal to people who like horror and thriller films that play with people’s minds. We think that our film would be classified as a 15, this is because we use strong threat and menace e.g. the stalker situation is showing Rachael being threatened. This differs from Scream as it is classified as an 18 certification, this is because it shows blood, horror, threat and uses strong language.

BBFC Classifications Webesite = http://www.bbfc.co.uk/

Our Feedback = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTtvQNDvUA

5. As I mentioned we are aiming our film a 15 to 40 year olds who are mainly male. We attracted our audience by at first showing normal people who are 16, which would appeal to the lower end of our target audience. Also the use of real life settings would be aimed at the whole age range because it makes the film appear all the more real. The use of a male dominant character also attracted more males to our film because females would probably be unnerved because a female character is being stalked which to a women would be more threatening. We used some point of view shots to put the audience into Rachael’s position, this is because we wanted the audience to feel sorry for the main character and be interested in her story. We also used lots of extreme/long shots this was to show the main character and her friend being stalked, this was a good shot because the audience they felt part of the story as they could see the stalker, but Rachael and her friend couldn’t. This created an element of suspense because the audience didn’t know what was going to happen to the girls and the girls didn’t know they were being stalked by the killer. Shots like these are often used in horror films because they engage the audience and allow the audience to feel “part” of the story.

6. When we filmed our film we used a HDV1000 camera which was some new equipment college had got, the strengths of this particular camera are you have more control over the shot which means you can change the settings a lot more to get the best shot and this new equipment really enhanced the footage we got. You have a lot more control over the white balance as well which enables you to get a very high quality shot, which looks real. You can also film in widescreen on that camera so we got some very good wide angle shots which helped to establish our settings. The HDV1000 also has a very good zoom, so when we couldn’t get close enough we could use the zoom to get a high quality shot. The weaknesses of the HDV1000 was that with the size of the camera it was very hard to travel around with so when we were bringing the equipment home it was a very hard process because of the size of the camera ad its bag. Another downside was the HDV1000 had quite a poor sound quality even though it has a microphone fitted; we then had to get another microphone to film some sound sequences separately. One of the problems we faced during our filming process was that on one occasion we forgot to plug in the camera’s fitted microphone so we then had to film a complete scene again because of this mistake, this cost us quite a lot of time and effort. To edit our film we used Final Cut Express, I learnt a lot during our editing process as it helped me to understand how important creating smooth matches on action and consistency throughout our film was. In our film we use quite a lot of fades which was a video effect on Final Cut. We used this effect because in our film a lot of time had passed between some shots, so this effect was very handy to show this. For our sound we asked Rachael’s brother to create some music which was like music from a circus, we also took some music from the CD’s within college which were horror sounds as this fitted with our genre.

7. Looking back at my preliminary task, I think I have progressed quite well. When we started to plan for our film, I discovered how much planning goes into a short film never mind a full length feature film. The research into our chosen genre helped me to get a deeper understanding of what goes into a horror film and the storyboarding helped me to visualize what our film would or could look like. With this through planning it helped us organise what shots we needed to capture, the order to edit in and the effects we needed to add. This helped a film appear quite smooth. From our first task I have developed my editing skills quite a lot, my matches on action and my deeper understanding of continuity made our film look really good. With using the HDV1000 I have become a lot more confident with the equipment and by using Final Cut Express I can edit much better as well. I think that our final product is very good at fulfilling the tasks requirements as we featured all the things we wanted to, we incorporated all the conventions we needed and developed our filming and editing skills along the way.