Evaluation

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media?

The conventions I spotted in my research on horror movies were things like the fact that most scenes were conducted at nights and the film always starts during the day to show a happy start or more of a “normal” start however the film starts to move the time to night only because all sinister actions happen at night. We have embedded these ideas into our film by starting the film by moving into our new house during the day and all the sinister actions that take place happen at night.  Another convention would be the fact that most psychological horror movies are to do with haunting and ghosts or consists of an object that causes the haunting and in our film it is a child’s doll. The way we developed these conventional ideas was by actually going to the location we are going to shoot. We did a mini shooting before we actually started the initial shooting. We had to go around the house and move objects around and add objects to suit the scene such as filler lights to create the low key lighting in the scene and the dust on the door when it’s jammed to create an old look. We have incorporated a new idea that has mostly only been used in thriller films. We have done this because although it has been used in thriller it creates suspense and is used as a jump scare. Overall our media product conforms to the general conventions of a horror movie. We have kept it like this because traditional horror movies tend to be scarier that the new ones. We also didn’t want to try something totally new because we didn’t want to get the wrong message across to the audience.

Question 2: How did you find the filming process?

My individual are was mise en scene. My aim was to sort out all the costumes props lighting, basically whatever is in the frame. I had for example choose who is going to wear what, I made Vishal wear a black shirt with black trousers as he is the priest and stereotypically priests wear black. He also has a bible in his hand and wears a cross necklace. For when we was supposed to do the outside shooting a limitation was that the weather was not suitable for the scene. We didn’t want any rain scene. We had to cancel the shooting that day and reschedule it on a day that was slightly sunny. As a group we had been quit organised overall however there were times when someone couldn’t make it to the shooting. As our groups were not self-chosen. Chosen by the teachers, we had to get to know each other more. By the end of the last day of shooting we all knew each other well and were comfortable with each other. The overall experience was great as it was a challenge to work with someone new and overcoming that makes the experience better. The planning of our film was changed here and there. We always had something in the film we weren’t too satisfied with. For example our first plot idea was totally different to what we ended up doing initially. We also started our rehearsals at school, just to practice our lines so that when we do our shooting no time was wasted on reading the lines. Something we would improve for the next time is the props we used for the scenes because sometimes the props didn’t really go well with the scene, or just the lay out in the frame. Post-production was the major part of making the movie and also the hardest. We used adobe premiere pro. When we first started editing it took us a while to get the hang of how the software works but then once we got the hang of it, it was easier and even fun. One reason why it was hard was because sometimes we realised that we could’ve used another angle in a scene so we went and reshot a scene from that angle.

Question 3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The research we undertook before producing the film told us about what people want to watch so we made the film in a way that the audience would prefer. For the location we chose a normal house even though our research suggested a mansion however we were not able to find or even afford that so we had to make the movie in a normal sized house. The questionnaire didn’t really change out initial ideas because our ideas and the audiences results were almost similar. i feel like the older audience preferred the film to take place in an abandoned house as that's how olden films were made and were more of the traditional horror genre.

How did you incorporate a range of media technologies within the research and planning stages of your film? 

Before I posted any of my research it was initially typed up in word document and then i transferred it to any of the software i used such as Prezi, Powtoons, Slideshare etc...

I have used, blogger itself, where the research and planing and all the work is displayed on the blog. I have also used other websites such as Prezi- which is a online presentation software and Storyboard- which I created my storyboard on, these different kinds of software made creating products easier and made it easier for me to showcase my planning. For the creation of my film, we used Adobe premiere pro to add sound into the edited parts of the film, these sounds included actual voice and non diegetic sound effects that I found and used in the film. For my planning stage of my film, I used survey monkey, but if i used social media such as Whatsapp or snapchat or instagaram to ask my target audience directly what they thought of my ideas and thoughts it would have been more helpful in creating a proper audience. Using Adobe premiere pro, was quite challenging, but it improved the quality of the film, as it made editing much more easier, with more transitions being available to use, and it made it easy to import the sound on each clip,