Eval Q 1. Develop/Challenge Conventions

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

With our film we tried to use some of the common conventions for example the scream queen, final girl, the scream queen's boyfriend and the knife as the killer's weapon. But also we wanted to challenge it in a way and instead of starting as Toldorov's 5 part narrative theory states, with the first part being the state of equilibrium, we wanted to jump to his second part which was the disruption to this equilibrium.


And a good example that we looked at for influence was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ( Tobe hooper, 1974 ) because in this film they start with this disruption in equilibrium, where there's deformed body parts , so with out film we tried to create the same by using chopped up pieces of meat that is supposed to be human meat,and this gruesome scene that we've made for the opening represents this disruption to the equilibrium. Which  also challenges Todorov's 5 part narrative theory 


As for the killer in our film we've chosen to stick to the common convention with our killer being old and a male with a masked hidden identity. Also we used Mike Myers from John Carpenter's Halloween as an influence because of his masked identity, and so that we keep with providing narrative enigma instead of giving exposition for the killer's identity, but also his story behind the mask as he was scarred from his early childhood , and with our killer it's the same from his childhood he had a deranged obsession with butchering meat which leads to his psychological killings. Our killer also uses the common knife as his weapon to kill which is common in most slasher films.

Casey

And with our scream queen we also stuck with the common conventions with her being blonde, not academic and sexually active, because we thought going for the counter type would lead to some oppositional reading and not appeal to our audience because they would be used to the stereotypical scream queen. Then we showed her sexual activity by having her go to the bedroom with her boyfriend and included an ellipsis after representing the sexual activity that took place. Also to show her not being intellectual our final girl walked off carrying books whereas she just walked in the house with her boyfriend. And a good influence we looked at was Casey in Scream ( Wes Craven, 1996 ) as she was blonde and had a boyfriend, but also she was vulnerable and useless in fighting the killer.

Laurie Strode

Then for the final girl character we also stayed with the common conventions to use a dark haired actor. Then to make her look intellectual in comparison to the scream queen we used the prop of books for the final girl to carry, and to stay with the stereotypical final girl concept we've made it so she doesn't have a boyfriend and isn't sexually active and we showed this by having her walk away while the scream queen and her boyfriend went inside the house. We looked to Halloween for influence here as there's a scene where Laurie Strode , The final girl, was walking with her friends whiles she was carrying book and they were talking about their boyfriends, whereas Laurie didn't have a boyfriend and was more interested in studying which is how we've shown out final girl in our opening. We were originally going to go for a counter type final girl by choosing to have her as a blonde and sexually active, but we thought that this might confuse our audiences and that they might not be able to recognise that she's the final girl. 

Whiles for the scream queen's boyfriend we wanted to show the stereotypical 'Jock' of a boyfriend , and we signified this by show his dominance and control over the scream queen, and showing his part in also being sexually active.

My Ident.

We also included idents that we made as this is a common convention in most film openings and they often last up to 8 seconds right at the start of the opening titles and before anything else is on screen, these idents are often of the production company so with our idents we made them as if they were our production company idents, mine being Paper Plane Productions.



Also for our titles sequence we intended to make it so that it has the same effect as John Carpenter's Halloween ( 1978 ) with the non-diegetic soundtrack building up tension and the serif font on the black background to provide the sense of 

seriousness. We also choose this serif font as it's commonly used for slasher film.

And with our titles we choose to show the actors names as they're usual revealed at the start but because our actors haven't been in any films before we used the title 'Introducing...' because this is what's commonly used when an actor is being revealed for the first time. And to show that we understand the common conventions for the titles at the start of the film we made out that we had a star acting and revealed his name before the other actors which are of a less importance, and is showed as 'Starring...'.

Shower scene

Then with the editing we also showed some common conventions of editing that would be used at the start of other slasher films, for example when we finish with seeing the idents there's a transition and we used the 'fade to color' which is commonly used in the start of films at this point. Also for our violent scene we used the common convention of 'fast paced editing' where we chopped up long clips into much shorter takes and used takes from different angles, so that it gives a more realistic feel to it but you don't actually see any violence it just makes to feel like you have because it happens so fast, however in our violent scene we did chop up clips but we also slowed down the clips by modifying them in final cut pro which gives them a slow motion effect, and it did work but we did challenge the idea of 'fast paced editing' in away, a good example that we looked at was the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960 ) where they chopped up their takes in the scene and used lots of short takes, and they also used non-diegetic sound to good effect with the sound of high pitch violin, and we also used a non-diegetic soundtrack with our violent scene so we've also shown a common convention in this way.

Furthermore, with the non-diegetic soundtrack we've also shown how we understand the common conventions this way because we made our soundtrack so that it builds up the tension with long drawn out notes which pick up the tempo slowly until it gets to the climax, and this is how films normally do it. But also we've included diegetic sounds which are commonly used in films , for example in our film we have a loud bang and the scream of the scream queen, but we also had to edit some of the diegetic sounds out because it was windy on the day of filming it picked up the sound from the wind.

Jason Voorhees

And for the mise-en-scene aspect of our film we've also demonstrated commonly used conventions, for example with the fake blood that we used on the white apron when the killer is cutting up the meat so that it emphasises the gruesomeness. Then obviously with the killer's mask because a mask is used in most slasher films , and a good example that we looked at for influence is in Friday The 13th   ( Sean S. Cunningham, 1980 ) with the killer Jason Voorhees's mask.

Heart beat sountrack

And with the victims in our film we kept to the common convention of slasher films as it's normally a group of teenagers so we used teenagers in our film, and this will also relate to the audience so we're keeping our primary audience appeal. Then from here we also use this to appeal to our audience as they're of the teen age , and we've also chosen the commonly used target audience for the slasher genre , 15-24 years. And when we got feedback from a group of teenagers we realised that our soundtrack needed some alterations so that he had more effect to build up the tension, so we went back and editing some heartbeat sound effects and used these to build up the tension in the violent scene.

We chose to stick mainly to these common conventions to that our primary audience would be secured , because using counter types and going against the common conventions has the risk of not attracting our primary audience with them struggling to recognise it.