CCR Q1 conventions, representations

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Q1a) Conventions

what i will discuss:

• general conventions
• conventions in horror/ what i did

- Illustrated version below -

- For my video on conventions i replicated the format of a wired autocomplete interview like this one -

General conventions vodcast i made at the beginning of the year:

• Ident length of 21 seconds (long compared to Warner Bros but short compared to Universal studios)
• common to have 3 or 4 idents
• largest shareholder studio at the beginning
• white text over black and seriff font are usually used for serious movies
• audio bridge created narrative enigma + exposition
• first shot tells us a lot about genre, characters ect.
• transition to main film is where we learn more about protagonist/hero (Propp)

Idents:

A summery of my idents is that in my team of three we all made one ident which is the conventional amount for a movie, we added an audio bridge to the last ident which is also conventional and we added original music to the rest.

My ident was named FatCat productions with inspiration from Black Cat productions.

Opening shot:

Our opening shot was of an abandoned factory where our scream queen was being held captive, we used a hand of god sequence as we had seen in the classic horror movie Psycho, a hand of god is a good technique as the gradual zoom of the shots creates a feeling that this could be about any one of us as an audience, it also creates exposition on where the first part or all the story is taking place. we also had ideas of having the first shot only be a still ELS of the place where the scream queen was being held we thought a hand of god would build tension even more.

We added an audio bridge of the opening music to our first shots to create some enigma on whats going on before showing our scream queen being ties up in the abandoned factory we were looking at before.

Titles:

Before settling on our official titles we went through a lot of different ideas, click here for more information.

in our final cut we found our font on DaFont.com and we used the font "Crimes Times Six" because the letters had a slashing pattern to the which worked well with the theme. The font only had capital letters so for the titles we used a basic font we found on final cut pro and made the size a lot smaller in comparison to the names.

All of the names were from the movie Final destination because it is a very well known slasher movie (Stuart Hall preferred reading).

• Here are a few examples i screen-shotted from our film opening

Final shot:

Our final scene is of a man walking down a street three years after the murder of our final girl took place and seeing a missing poster for her, we added this to the end to show how our movie would have progressed had we finished it. We don't know who the man is which creates narrative enigma and questions in the audiences minds. We thought it would be good to add a grown man for our secondary audience to relate to because there were no men in the opening.

Partially got our idea for this final shot from the IT remake where one of the ways they provide exposition is through missing people posters.

Sound:

Our sound was made on GarageBand and put onto Soundcloud by one of the members in our team, the inspiration was from the soundtrack of Friday the 13th, Halloween and Psycho. 

Have a subtle melody throughout the soundtrack and then to build up tension it would get louder.

Sound was also a big way in which we communicated with our secondary audience, an example of this is how we added 'Every step you take' by The Police to be playing on the radio. Along with this being a hint to the later events of the film, its also there for an older audience to pick up on, this also lets them identify with the main character because they may have similar music taste (Uses and Gratifications theory, personal identification')

Shot types:

we used an assortment of different shot types in order to create meaning.

The types of shots i used included medium close up, medium shot, extreme long shot (els), two shots, over the shoulder shots, worms eye and establishing shots.

Q1b) Representations 

What i covered in my YouTube style video:

• scream queen
• final girl
• sexuality 
• gender 
• ethnicity
• age