2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Studying film openings helped me when creating my own, because I
knew what to include and how much to include and whether things
were „too much‟ or not. E.g. Sounds. How long you should keep the
camera pointing in a certain direction, before it starts to look, not
scary, just silly.
Also studying the history and seeing how the „horror genre‟ has evolved
throughout time, it helped me to realise how advanced we had to be
when filming our own film opening, because society now, will not find
things that were in „older‟ horror movies, scary! They want something
new, exciting and advanced.
Finally, analysing film openings (is tedious, yes!) but also very helpful
when it comes to creating your own film opening. Because you know
exactly, step by step, second by second, what you need to be putting
into your film opening and how much detail needs to be put into it, for it
to look like a „real‟ horror film opening.
3. How does your media product represent particular social
groups?
Our film opening shows a stereotypical teenage girl
standing, looking in the mirror in the toilets at her school. We then
add more stereotypical behaviours to the girl, as we make her
scream when she sees something „scary‟ behind her. Whereas if we
had a male actor looking in the mirror and he saw the same thing as
the girl did, and he screamed, the audience would think he is just a
„wimp‟ because of the stereotype males have, to be all bold, brave
and „hard‟. But because it is a female, it makes the audience feel its
scary as well, because it‟s a woman screaming, whereas if it was a
male, the audience would think there must be a different
explanation to why he is screaming, because he is a male and he
„shouldn‟t‟ (stereotypes, again!) find that scary.
4. What kind of media institution might distribute your media
product and why?
Lionsgate Films and Hammer Films are both film companies that
distribute horror films.
In my opinion I think that Lionsgate Films would be most likely to
distribute our film, as Lionsgate Films distribute the more „real life‟
horror films, such as: “The Cabin In The Woods” and “Acts Of Death”.
And Hammer Films distribute horror films such as: “The Curse Of
Frankenstein” and “The Curse Of The Werewolf”. And our film would
be more based like the Lionsgate Films that are distributed, as its like
something that „could‟ happen in real life, whereas Hammer Films
are more like the „made up‟ horrors.
5. Who would be the audience for your media product?
My main target audience for our film opening would be teenagers
and young adults. And the main reason for this is because they are
able to relate to my film more, as that is the age range in our film.
Also I feel as our film would be too „scary‟ and have too much of a
„horror vibe‟ to it, for younger children to watch as they may scare
easily. And I think that older citizens may not enjoy the film as they
may enjoy the older type of „horror‟ they had when they were
teenagers, and that‟s the type of horror they relate to, and our type
of horror in our film would be too „modern‟ for them.
6. How did you attract/address your audience?
I made sure that my target audience would want to watch our film
opening by making sure they can relate to it. I also made sure it was
quite a modern style of filming, so the audience can clearly
understand what is going on.
I also made sure that, in the film opening, they were not going to
loose interest. I made sure the film opening looked thrilling and
exciting all the way through, so it would make the audience want
more.
7. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of
constructing this product?
Making this film opening helped me to learn about
computers, cameras and the internet. And this is because I had to use
a lot of technological equipment to be able to film this film opening to
be able to get a good level of acceptance from the audience.
We had to use video recorders, to film the film opening and use
different camera angles and shots. We had to use cameras to take
pictures of the locations of where we were going to film the film
opening and we also took some pictures of some of the misé en scene!
And we also needed the internet to research about film openings, how
they‟ve evolved over time and to generally help us out with analysing
film openings, so we know what to do step by step when we were
filming ours, also we needed it to produce surveys and questionnaires to
get audience feedback from after they had watched our film
opening, and to document our process during the making of our film
opening (on our blogs!.) And finally, we needed endless amounts of
editing skills, to make our film opening to the best standards that we, as
a group, are able to achieve.
8. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you
have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
When first in the making of the preliminary task, I must admit, it was hard
work. But from there we have evolved into knowing the preliminary task,
like the back of our hand!
By doing the preliminary task, it helped me to realise how hard film
making is, and it helped me to know that every time I was going to film
something, I had to out my all into it, otherwise it would just turn out and
look like I had put no effort into it at tall. For film making, you have to
put your all into it, to make it look like something worthwhile.
I feel like since we have done the preliminary task it has made my
editing skills improve, and that made it much easier to be able to edit
our film opening.
Doing the preliminary task helped me to get ready for what we was
about to endure. It helped me out during the making of our film
opening as I felt like I had done small snippets of making the film before,
because I had done the preliminary task, such as, editing skills, camera
angles and shots and the research!
9. Summary.
Overall, making our film opening was hard work. But it paid off, by
seeing the end result!
The thing we could have done better if we were to do this
procedure again, would be to spend more time on film the film
opening and getting lots of different shots for each bit, rather than
getting a couple of shots and choosing out of them and then spend
most of the time editing the film. In my opinion, yes we should take a
long period of time to do the editing and make sure it is correct
down to the last detail, because editing is important! But we should
also spend a bit more time on the actual filming of the shots and
angles, because in the end, that is what the audience are going to
see and base their decision on whether it‟s a good film opening or
not, on.
