A2 MEDIA EVALUATION

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

By Jack Bricknell

How did your horror trailer fit the genre?Section A:For our media product we chose to do a gory horror with zombies because they have become increasingly popular in the last few years with the success of such films such as Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead. The decision to have zombies in our product gives us a lot of chances to experiment with gore effects and the killing of characters. Our trailer fits into the genre by using similar character types such as a male hero and victims, zombies have also become conventional in recent years like I mentioned before which makes me think there will be a large audience to appeal to. Although a gory horror is likely to be a fun genre to try to recreate it will also be one of the more challenging because of the high expectation of gore. We don’t have much of a budget so creating the effects will be challenging but there are ways that it can be done with everyday items like food colouring, water and meat which should still make it look quite good.

Influence

I think that our product has been heavily influence by ‘Shaun of the Dead’ because of the mix of comedy, horror and zombies, not to mention our main character ‘The Butcher’ who is just an average person with a normal job just like Shaun from SOTD, the only difference is in this case our hero is a butcher, we chose a butcher because we thought that this job would fit in well with the slaughtering of zombies and give it a bit of narrative e.g. he’s good at killing zombies because his profession is cutting up dead animals. SOTD also features a fair amount of gory scenes in it too from impaling an old man zombie with a swing-ball set to having someone ripped limb from limb, these are good scenes because they use everyday items in creative ways to kill characters which is more entertaining than watching someone get shot.

Thomas Schatz Genre Theory

Butchered can be linked to Thomas Schatz genre theory where he believes there are only two genres: ‘Genre of Order’ and ‘Genre of Integration’, Butchered fits into the ‘Genre of Order’ because our protagonist is a singular dominant male hero in a small town which he must help save from zombies who are the other characters who are contesting the area. The zombies also provide the conflict which will be resolved through violence and our hero is taking the responsibility to save his town. The only thing we have challenged in his theory is that we have given no indication to whether or not our main character has been killed leaving it as an open ending. By doing this we can keep the audience interested even when its finished by making them wonder if there will be a sequel.

How does our trailer fit the conventions of Horror?

Section B:I think that we have followed the conventions for horror quite well because we have used the same character archetypes, the use of zombies in our trailer is also very conventional as they are the main source of the gore for our trailer because we do not want to show any character deaths in the trailer that are important. We decided to make our trailer a hybrid of a scene and highlights trailer which gave us the opportunity to introduce some narrative at the beginning of the trailer (scene) and then halfway through we get to show lots of gore and action to keep the interest of the audience (highlights). It is not unconventional to make a hybrid of the two trailer types so id say that we where still staying with the conventions of horror with that choice.We also used several moments in our trailer where it was broken up with the use of text to keep a steady pace and to let the audience know what they are in for through the use of the text which could also be seen as comedic too.

What trailers did we try to recreate?

Like I said earlier we have taken some inspiration from Shaun of the Dead because of its good balance of comedy and horror, but I would say that Dawn of the Dead also had some influence on our trailer because of some of the effects that we tried to recreate such as the exploding head effect, biting effects or any of the gunshot effects. DOTD used a lot of gore effects that all looked really good and we wanted to get a similar level of gore in our trailer too so we took some inspiration from this film, DOTD also provided some characters that we took inspiration from in our trailer. The look of our zombies are somewhat intertextual to the original DOTD zombies because of the time the film was made the effects weren’t as extreme so a lot of the zombies looked like people just with green skin and some blood splattered about while ours where near enough the same but with pale white skin instead with some minimal latex effects. A zombie from ‘Butchered’

How did we create suspense and shock?

There are several places in our trailer where we tried to build suspense a good example is the music which I think was quite suspenseful when mixed with the shots of the butcher knife in the kitchen slowly cutting away at meat got across the feel that we were building up to something bigger and better which we did as the music progressively got faster so did our clips which is when we started adding more action shots. The text we used also created suspense using key words such as ‘Zombies’ and ‘Survival’ to break up the action and get the audience excited. Our gore effects that we used also gave the trailer some value of shock visually as we saw in the evaluation screening video.

What auteurs influenced your trailer?

Section C:I think that George A Romero influenced our trailer through his films by the way he used everyday people as his protagonists instead of the conventional ex-military action hero that is used in so many films. Romero also influenced our film through the ways that he kills off his zombies in his films by using lots of gore. We challenged Romero’s auteur style by making our setting an open area instead of a secluded one like he uses in most of his films e.g. shopping mall and underground military base.Another auteur that we took inspiration from was Robert Rodriguez especially on the text that we used in our trailer which greatly resembled the look and feel of his Planet ‘Terror film’.

George A Romero

What did I bring to the team?

I think that I did quite a lot of work in my team and I like to think I brought quite a few things to the team, I did all the make up for the zombies which took about 10 -15 minutes to do each person, I started by using white make-up over the face and black around the eyes and then I ripped up some tissue and applied it to their face with liquid latex, after it had dries I added some fake blood to different areas on the face. I also did the gore effects in the trailer my favourite was the bite effect, to do this I followed a tutorial on YouTube on how to make zombie bites out of liquid latex and tissue. When I finished making the zombie bite I applied it to the actors neck with some fake blood underneath and got another actor to bite it off. The other effect was the gunshot to the head for which I bought a Halloween mask that had a pump mechanism and hid it under the clothes and hat of an actor, when I said go he squeezed the pump which squirted out fake blood.I also played the character of the Hobo and edited most of the film in adobe premier. I was left to editing the most because I already knew the basics of how to use the programme however when it came to the more advanced things like using after effects I had some trouble.