SE7EN

Here is the final version of our group's film poster.

We chose to use a black background with bright white contrasting light effects in the photograph, as well as bright red text for the title & release date. This is because all these components connote danger and darkness, and are stereotypical colours for a horror/thriller poster.
The pose of the girl shows she is walking towards the door at the end of a corridor, and by using corridors it adds a sense of never-ending-ness as well as a feeling of being 'trapped' , as the viewer is behind the character it gives a sense that there is no turning back for the girl. As well as this, the bright light coming from behind the door draws the audience's attention to the door, and the fact it is closed, making them wonder what is behind the door and creating a feeling of impending doom for the character approaching it. The fact the girl appears quite small in the corridor makes her appear weak and like a victim, which plays on stereotypes of female characters in horror/thriller genre films as being the victim of a 'killer'. By using this stereotype, it makes it easier to convey to the audience the message our poster is trying to send: that this girl is in danger.
Our poster also includes a block of information text, which is used to name the important cast and crew members as well as companies involved; and underneath are the logos from the two companies. Our own, Se7en, and our imagined distributor, DNA Studios' official logo.
It also includes a rating certificate of 15, which instantly shows the target audience and by placing it on the poster the audience knows that they can go see it in the cinema.
We also included social media links and a website link.

In creating our poster, we made sure to follow the basics of composition and pulling the eye in order to guide an audience's gaze through the poster to what we want them to focus on, which is the main female character in our movie.

We used film noir as an inspiration for the colour scheme and look of our poster, as shown by comparing our photo to screenshots from film noir films. We used this in order to show a moody, mysterious feel in our poster that would make the audience curious as to what would happen in the film. To achieve this, we used black and white with high contrasts in Photoshop to make the sharp contrasts from bright and dark.

Here are some close-ups of text on our poster, firstly the title text using a font that we chose as it looks like smudged charcoal, which should attract the audience to the title as it is an unusual font. Secondly, the basic information about our film including the cast, crew, music and production companies.

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

Our film use all the key conventions of the Phycological thriller genre, infused with elements of the horror genre, to create the stereotypical suspense filled atmosphere the audience would expect. The film presents the viewer with an initial sense of security through a mundane setting that they would be familiar with, and then adds a sudden sinister twist to cause disturbance and unease in the viewer which makes them question their initial interpretation of the situation.

No conventions were broken on a technical level through the filming and editing of our production, we avoided continuity errors by carefully pre-planning the placement of props within the shot, and matching costumery, hair and make-up, to insure continuity remained, even when singular scenes were filmed on separate days. Avoiding breaking continuity is key throughout the film, to avoid the audience becoming confused by the obscurities these errors can cause, Other methods used to insure continuity on a technical level were making sure not to cross the 180 degree line, especially during shot reverse shots of characters engaging in conversations. This was due to the fact errors in this could prevent us achieving the audience response we wanted, which was to shock the audience at the films climax by presenting them with something unexpected, as breaking of the 180 degree rule may lead the viewer to assume something was amiss with the situation from the very start and leave them expecting something to occur, rather than being blissfuly unaware there was anything irregular with the situation until the twists occurred.

Another convention we focused on was used elliptical editing in order to speed up the passage of time as the characters moved from location to location, this is a typical convention in the psychological thriller genre, such as in the opening scene of Donnie Darko, where you see donnie awaken far from his home, and then cuts to him arriving home on his bike, we did something similar by having one character walk into the character as she leaves cutting it to black and then reopening on the back of another character walking away from the camera, the continuity in what the characters are wearing indicated to the audience that it is still the same day and that they have just traveled to their new location however does so in only a few seconds screen time, which helped us to condense the film to 5 minutes.

Establishing shots were also key on a technical level to establish to the setting of each scene to the audience, few of the locations are ever described by the characters and therefore it is left to the viewer to interpret where about the characters are, the intel establishing shot in scene one shows all three characters, all female teenagers, in a plainly decorated room, sitting around a table drawing, this does not appear like a setting commonly associated with the home, and therefore suggests they are either at school or at work, which is later reinforced with the second establishing shoot in scene two, of the two girls searching the cupboards, this shows two cupboards filled with text books, and a white board mounted on the wall which would heavily suggest that they are in a college or school, which is intact where we set the film.

Other various shots we used to match the codes and conventions of the genre were handheld shots, achieved on the GoPro mounted on the study cam, operated by myself, handheld somewhat shakey camera work is common place in many horror films, such as one of which i looked at, 28 days later. We used this during the chase scene as the motion of the camera resulted in an immersive experience that made the viewer feel as though they were slightly disorientated and running from the killer alongside with the protagonist.

As i was working on the majority of the films cinematography i wanted to pay homage to the styles of my favourite directors, for example i kept a high level of symmetry and centralism on the key focus within the shots as a reference to the style of Wes Anderson, with the main intention of this being to make our film aesthetically pleasing as Anderson’s are, and despite the genre of his work differing greatly from ours this did not look out of place, nor did it break conventions of the genre, as in films such as Donnie Darko centralism within the frame is used throughout.

One particular scene, follows the conventions of the horror.thriller genre strongly and was also inspired my the works of another of my favourite directors, Guillimero Del Toro, this scene being the dark corridor scene where the protagonist flashes a camera to light her way. This is a direct reference to the ending scene of Del Toro’s Julia’s Eyes, where the killer used a camera flash to hunt for the protagonist in the dark, the corridor refers to and earlier scene where the protagonist encounters the killer in a corridor in the interworking of an old building, in our film the flashing of the camera in the dark forms a silhouette of the protagonist, which is a convention that had been used endlessly throughout the horror genre/thriller. This scene build suspense, and the dark hallway is deemed as sinister, and the light at the end of the hallway the protagonist is walking towards seems like a beacon of safety, this leads the audience to believe the protagonist is safe one she reaches the light, however our film breaks the usual convention within the genre that the killer would attack in the dark, as was the case in most of the films we researched, however in our film once the girl has left the darkness, then she is attacked in brought daylight which we did in order to achieve an element of shock that the audience would not be expecting from the genre.

Our opening titles, which were inspired by the opening titles of Seven, which used a high technical level of conventions of the genre, our titles included extreme close ups of the killer, cut-ins to different parts of the killers body, and cutaways to various props with strong genre iconography, such as a ‘scrap book’ featuring scribbled on pictures of the actors, inspired by D’s book in the film Red Dragon, and other objects like the mask, which was inspired by numerous hour films, as mass are an icon feature of several cult horror killers.

The fast paced editing on the opening scene using only extreme closeup and cutaways was created to instantly catch the viewers attention, not fully revealing the appearance of the killer, or what their intentions of identity are, intrigues the audience to keep watching to find out more, however the film then cuts a more mundane setting, with slow paced editing between the establishing shot and mid-shots which lures the audience back into s sense of security and dissociate what the are seeing with what they saw in the opening titles, so when things quickly take a sinister turn, and the killer first appears in the door, it is more of a shock to the viewer than it would have been if the film had been edited in a manor that the killer had been in the entire film from start the finish.

Editing in an appropriate score was also a major priority when following the conventions of the genre films such as 28 days later us scores that start out slow in pace and then build up with that action, and therefore we chose a quiet yet sinister sounding score to back the scene where the protagonist is locked in the classroom as despite there bing little action we wanted the viewer to be aware that something was not quite right and feel a sense of unease. Then later a more quickly passed score was used on the chase scene, the high energy of the score adds to the energy within the scenes and devotes a more frenzied atmosphere that the viewer can feel emerges in, resulting in them feeling a sense of fear which is a key convention of the genre.

Our film was from the start intended to be a horror or thriller genre production, as all the members of our group had prior experience and existing knowledge of the iconography and codes and conventions of the genre through past experience from their AS level production. We wanted to combine the convention of the sub genre of thriller, psychological thriller, with the conventions of horror, as we found we all found the deep plot development and clever twists of physical thrillers were something often lacking from horror films, in the same way that the distinctive horror villains and memorable iconography of the horror genre was often some thing lacking in psychological thrillers. Therefore we decided to merge the two conventions of each genre to great the plot for our production, to create something that was somewhat unique for both genres. we agreed on calling it a psychological thriller/ horror, due to the psychological thriller aspect being the the more prevalent of the two in the terms of the codes and conventions used as a whole, with the main horror aspect being the killers appearance.

We did however, on a few levels, subvert fro the conventions of both genres, for example, we had a female killer which went against the stereotype often portrayed in the horror/thriller genres that the killer would be male, made evident in my research through the recognition that in every film that had a killer, that killer turned out to be male, and my inability to find thew films to speak of where the killer was female and killing due to reasons that were not due to previously being done wrong by another male character. However in most cases we stuck to the deliberately tried to start true to the conventions of the genre, such as with closing the film on a flashback, which is one of the most prominent conventions we observed in our research of the psychological thriller genre.

In line with the codes and conventions of the genre we also applied a major theory to our production, Levi Strauss’ theory of Binary Opposites in order to visually give the audience an impression of the characters, this theory can be most easily identified in the scene where the protagonist wakes up after being knocked out by the killer, the binary opposite of light and dark is prevalent, with the connotations of light being that of innocence and darkness taking a most sinister tone, the audience interprets a lot from this scene, firstly from the fact the killer is wearing dark clothing, and the protagonist light, the filter on this scene was also edited to have a greater exposer on the protagonists side, leaving the killer in shadow, which as the same effect of the viewer instantly deeming the darkness being the thing to fear.

It is in my opinion that our film successfully followed, developed and challenged the existing codes and conventions of existing media products for the horror/thriller genre. through extensive research we were able to identify the key codes and conventions that appealed to us in each genre and successful find a way to merge them together to create something new. We established the atmosphere and appearance of the genres we were portraying threw closely sticking the conventions we identified, but also added a subtle subversion to some conventions such as the breaking of the male killer stereotype to form something the audience may well have never seen done before with in the genre, that will leave a lasting impression on them. Both the following and breaking of these codes and conventions resulted in the production of a film the delivered to the audience everything we intend it to do, and that was to intrigue, to unsettle, and to ultimately shock.

SE7EN

Friday, 17 April 2015

Charcoal Final Film

Thursday, 16 April 2015

Final Film Poster

Wednesday, 15 April 2015

Radio Trailer Final

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4