Evaluation question number 1

In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?


Our film uses many of the typical themes and conventions present in horror/ thriller films we researched. The most common them being death, the idea of being powerless and having no control over something or someone out to get you.
Our film had a typical teen thriller story line. Based in a school, about people in school. This was done so that it would appeal to our audience and fit it with its genre.
Our story’s basic storyline is about the survival of 5 students in a classroom for detention, who die one by one unaware of the reason for it. By doing this we very much followed the forms and conventions of already made products as
This story line is very common in the thrillers I researched such as Final Destination 1 2 and 3.

Each of the film presents a group young people, dying in some sort of planned order. This film also has the same concept of people being powerless trying to surviving however near the end begin to understand what is going on. Other films with a similar story line are Prom Night, where a girl with a troubled past with a psycho after her, who killed her parents tries to move on with her life after he is sent to prison and go to prom. However this man is later released and still on the same mission. He therefore kills almost everyone in his path to get to his victim.
These two films were very helpful during planning as it contained a lot of our ideas; this is how we got to make Detention relate to other horror/thriller film opening sequences. Similarities include:

*Showing something happening to someone in the very beginning
*(This can sometimes not happen to the main character)
*Introducing an important character in the beginning.
*Relating our tittles to the atmosphere of our film/genre
*including music which fit the scene.

Typical themes present in most current horror films as well as Detention:

*Death
*Murder
*Vanity
*Jealousy
*Fear

Despite this our opening sequence includes certain aspects which I would consider challenge, other horror/thriller opening sequences. Firstly by making the ‘geek’ a character which is mostly ignored and inferior to everyone else round the mastermind behind everything happening in the school.
On the other and simply setting and filming our sequence in a school is what challenged other films the most. Most of the films I researched based around characters in the same age group as our characters would simply have several scenes in school, but death scenes or action scenes would happen outside. My group and I saw this and so took the idea of a school being a safe and positive environment and turning it around and making it the worst place to be.
This was achieved mostly through mis en scene. The school was empty and the classroom although with people in it seemed cold and gloomy. This is another typical aspect of horror films, the beginning is very rarely presenting something positive e.g.: a positive atmosphere. During planning we had trouble finding a room which would have the look we desired. We wanted an old looking room, not very modern and a bit dark to automatically set the scene, as the classroom shots are the first ones which would be seen by our audience.
The amount of character variety was also a twist, and challenges typical horror/thriller media products. Each of or five characters where extremely different. This was good as we could tell characters apart but also hard during planning, as only two or our characters would probably be present in a current horror film.
Because of this we then decided it would be best if we instead looked at typical high school romances and comedies. This was done because of the amount of different people present in schools. Each character in high school comedies acts in a very stereotypical manner. For example a popular girl would most likely be a cheerleader, be rude to everyone and be rich. During this I found that the stereotypical approach to things was a good idea as it allowed the audience to automatically know who is who very quickly. This was ideal for us as we only had two minutes roughly, and our sequence only showed all our characters for about 25-20 seconds. The way we opened our sequence was also inspired by the films mentioned above. In each they open in an eerie however subtle manner giving the sequence a tension building feel. During my research I have seen that almost all horror/ thriller films have some sort of death which happens in the first 5 minutes. We only had around 2 minutes so we tried too involve this element in. we made our tragedy very subtle by not showing what actually happens to Bianca (the main character). From the feedback we received some people said it was effective however others said this made it seem more like a film trailer rather than the opening sequence. I think this subtleness was achieved through our uses of fades in and fades out, instead of having jump cuts.

Our sequence didn’t not have any dialogue but only a sound track instead. We used typical music and sounds which would be present in other media products. Our sequence included high pitch sounds, which also faded in and out to increase anticipation. These sounds mostly came in when the screen was black with actors names, for audience o feel the need to see what was behind the screen. These sounds were very common in the films I researched, films like final destination 2 starts with a sort of violin sound but moves on to a kind of slow rock tune to set the mood of a teenager kind of world.

From the very beginning where we started our sequence, we developed the idea of our different characters. We tried to show the characters different status and characters by putting their names different positions of the screen. The different positioning of names on screen was also taken from final destination two, however we developed ours by having a black screen with tittles, in final destination the tittles come along the screen.

The character we developed upon the most was the geek, as in a lot of films, geeks are seen as people who focus on their education but can often use their intelligence for and positive things.
In this we didn’t want every single character to be too normal. We made her character much more complex by making her the last one to die as well as the smartest, ending up to be the reason for everything that has happened. Saw 5 is a good example where one of the kidnapped victims’s forced to take on challenges to survive ends up actually working for the reason behind all the distress. This is the same way which we tried to develop our narrative, by making the least capable therefore less expected person to be the cause of the children’s death. This is also how we challenged other media products, by making her evil under her sweet, smart powerless appearance.
Our film challenges normal media products in its opening by not having a lot of establishing shots of the surroundings but instead going straight to introduce the characters one by one. Films we have researched usually start of with a few shots of the surroundings of the scene. We felt this would not be necessary as by showing the classroom we could already tell that the film was set in a school. This would also be shown when Bianca left to go to the toilets. The mis en scene and props also helped us not need to have establishing sots of the school as the paper and pens are all things which would be found in a school. This apposes once again a film like final destination 2 which opens up with establishing shots of the fair ground, and showing clowns’ and the location before we get to meet the characters.

In horror films there is mostly a main target, in I know what you did last summer there is a main target however others around face death because they stand in the killers way. Our film challenges this very common narrative by making everybody a target for a reason. There was no one person more wanted than the other, in our film each person deserved to die.