Links To My Co-Producers Blogs

Wednesday 16 March 2011

JW - Evaluation Question One

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We feel that even with our production only lasting two minutes, we have established many common codes and conventions that are used often in slasher movies.
Firstly, our title of 'Oblivious' could easily be used for a Hollywood style production of a slasher. Because, just like many other slasher movies (Scream, Halloween, Madman, Hatchet and many more), the title is short, memorable and gives a slight insight into what the film could be and what might happen in it.

'1. Lacking all memory; forgetful.
2. Lacking conscious awareness; unmindful.'

The above is a definition of 'oblivious' from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/oblivious. The reason we have called our production this, is primarily based on the opening two minutes where our scream queen has no awareness of her killer or what is going on. However, as you can see in our plot overview post, the rest of the film would pan out so that we are all oblivious as to who the killer is.

Our company idents (seen below) are not really reflective of the horror genre. The music signifies a more sci-fi feel to the idents - due to the sound. However, the names of our idents could easily be used for horror movies. Firstly, 'Hawk Eye' - the name and the ident both signify that you are being watched, this idea could be formatted in a horror picture because the killer would be watching his/her victims before killing them. Following on from this, 'Jagged Edge' could very easily connote a jagged edged knife. The killer in our film uses a knife (see reasons why), knives (being the most common in slasher movies) could easily have a 'jagged edge'.



The use of a variety of shot types in our production also relates to real media products, firstly, our establishing shot(s) are setting the location. They are located around the front of our main location, and we based our establishing shot on the establishing shot of Halloween (seen below).


We were aiming to have our establishing shots be similar to this image, with only the bedroom light on and very little known about what's going on inside the house.

Whilst in our main location (interior of the house) we aimed to keep as many aspects connoting verisimilitude as possible, we did this because we wanted to make our location seem as real as possible. This would add to the scare factor, because our audience watching the production could in-vision themselves in the same situation.


These two photos are two location shots and connote the upper-middle class status of the house and it also signifies the idea that our characters are fairly average people - there is nothing special about their house that would make them stand out.



Slasher movies generally involve a psychotic killer, stalking, scaring and eventually killing a group of teenagers, classic examples of killers arMichael Myers off Halloween, Ghostface off Scream, Freddy Krueger from The Nightmare On Elm Street series, Jason Voorhees from the Friday The 13th series and many more. In our production, we have stuck with the classic idea portrayed in many of the aforementioned slasher movies of not revealing the killers' identity. This adds a huge element of narrative enigma into our production which will keep audience members intrigued, it could potentially also build up to a big finale at the end of our production. 


Similarly to other slasher movies, our opening sequence ends on a strong sense of narrative enigma. We have hidden our killers' identity, but as-well as this, the audience will wondering why the girl was chosen to be killed, how she was killed (since we do not show it on screen) and finally what will happen to the killer. As I saw in A Nightmare On Elm Street, hiding the killers' identity is a key aspect to keeping the audience involved in our production.

    No comments:

    Post a Comment

    Please make sure your comments are appropriate, the owner shall be checking all messages before they are published.