'How did you attract/ address your audience?' (Activity 5)

I believe there are many aspects of our film that are much similar to the opening scenes from the horror film 'Scream' Straight away when the film begins you hear a scream and the title of the film is displayed in red. This gives the viewer a clear indication that the film is going to be a horror. This is extremely silmilar to our film which also begins with our logo: C+H Productions (in red, black and white font)


Typical conventions of a horror film:


Sound - Unusually a sound track is not played at all in the opening sequence but builds up suspense and tension in the way and form of diegetic sound, which Scream does. However, this is a contrast to our film which has music played through majoity of the time. Throughout the opening sequence of Scream, the phone continues to ring. This creates a short but effective adrenaline rush for the viewer and predicts in a way the future of the film. We have also been able to create this through the use of loud banging noises, which alert our character to have a look around the house.


Mise-en-scene - Dark and typically scary all round. These are all seen in the opening sequence and all are very sterotypical of a horror. The rain and dark atmosphere gives off uncertainty of what may happen. It sets the scene and allows the audience to establish what genre of film it may be. The location a typical scary house. Very open plan and surrounded by windows to extenuate the horror and fear from the outside and bring it to life. In comparison to 'The Dark' it is simliar because we have also used dark settings, as well as a open plan form of house.


Editing - Editing within 'Scream' is slow paced to start with, then gradually building up to quick shots when the character is on the phone, or when locking up the house: building up tension. This is again similar to our film as we used simliar shots like the character checking the window etc. Easily creating suspence.

Like 'Scream' our film is also a horror and both appeal to the same type of audience. Most would consist of viewers seeking a thrill and not many who would be following a particular actor and actress or necessarily a director, but these workers would usually specialize in Horror when being part of these films. As we are an independent company and this is our first product we will only be appealing to the thrill seekers and Horror fans, but with a good distributer we should gain some more recognition and attract other whom may not of watched our film at first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCStOMqpfk

'Looking back at your preliminary tasks, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?' (Activity 7)

Looking back from our preliminary task we have learnt a lot. We learnt many practical skills like how to edit a sequence and match the continuity and this was of great help in our finial piece. As the preliminary task was really short we were able to make sure everything matched the action. These precise skills made us think harder in our final film, as we knew what we had to look for and make sure it worked. This help greatly when we needed to consider the 180-degree rule when our character was watching TV, if we cut back to this scene and the camera was on the other side with the TV and character swapped this would confuse the audience and potentially detract from our sequence. 

Two Shot

Extreme Close Up

Part of Match on Action

 Establishing Shot

'Who would be the audience for your media product?' (Activity 4)

The Target Audience for our film will be young adult males. We made a questionnaire to get a better idea of this audience and when surveyed; males preferred Horror, Thriller and Action genres of films, where as most females preferred Romantic and Realistic films. To add to the fact our film is based towards a male audience is that we are using a female character as our protagonist. This, although fits in with our stereotypes of a babysitter, also could have sex appeal for a male audience.

'How does your media product represent particular social groups?' (Activity 2)

Our character - The babysitter, can be compared to Casey Becker, from Scream. She is a young teenage girl who in the film recieves a taunting and threatening phone call, and is ordered to answer horror film trivia to save the life of her boyfriend. I believe she is a good comparison because she is the stereotypical portrayal of your average vunerable character. She is a hard working woman , and most of the time, they bth do not depend on others to influence thier decisions. However, she does go under your more modern female as she is also inquisitve, strong minded and independant. She also represents middle class as they live in a wealthy area, in a nice house and is slightly isolated from other communities.