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

Final girl

Flash backs

Setting

Props

Make up

Shot types

Codes

Conventions

ChallengeI have included a final girl in my media product and believe that I have challenges the stereotypical final girl. A stereotypical final girl is typically seen to be quite petite (short and slim), marginally glamorous and natural looking these aspects are used to suggest that she is vulnerable (isn’t expecting to be shocked by these life changing scary event/ horrific events) and has such purity about her. However we have challenge this by using a brunette as my final girl protagonist I did this to make the audience feel more involved with the narrative and the event in the film opening could actually happen in their lives adding to the realism of the sequence and how involved the audience feel.

Typical final girl

Final girl in my opening sequence

The final girl is a trope in horror films, it refers to the last woman alive to confront the killer ostensibly by one left to tell the story.

Innocent

Sense of purity

Vulnerable

UseIn a physiological horror they are usually set in a realistic setting for example a house, an abandoned building, an old school or a building used my many on a daily basis. They are generally in the middle of nowhere or abandoned buildings. I have used an old built house in my media product as it is a familiar environment for all of our audience which would increase the realism of the sequence. This would make them feel scared in their surroundings as they would be imagining themselves in that environment.

There picture are examples of some of the locations that are generally used in physiological horrors.

This is the location I used on my opening sequence, this is an old house that has an old build to it and when it is dark has an even spookier feel to it.

My storyline also uses the conventions of existing physiological horrors as some include paranormal; mine is based around a young girl and her family moving into and living in a new house then an existing girl (which has now died) who used to live in the house is acting as a conscience and is following her every move. This is essential as for our audience to understand the kind of horror they are looking for there needs to be some of the main conventions of typical horror films, the typical conventions you will see in physiological horrors are spiritual figure and ghosts. Their main is to make people jump by building up tension to a certain point at which then there will be one major jump. They shock and the tension is what the audience will be looking for when looking to watch a horror if this type. The shock links to the enigma codes created by Bartes. An example of this in my media product is at the beginning there is the walk up to the front door of the house this signifies the beginning of the mystery, this is followed by a mysterious opening of the letter box but there are no one shown opening which straight away creates questions and tension to who opening the letter box? There will also be the question of who is wanting to get into the house and why?

This is the spiritual character we created, she didn’t wear this shirt in filming she wore a white ripped shit with blood on it. This created the old dirty look to it.

The audience will be very intrigued and will be watching and listening very carefully and focused to see what is going to happen then there is the shock when the letter box shut quickly after the zoom from the path to the letter box. The letter box being shut will be the dominant sound and the soundtrack that will be played in the back ground will be very quiet. This is the start of all the loud sudden noises to create the jumps and the scare factor (bangs, screams and slams). The main scare is at the end of my opening sequence when sally (protagonist character) meets the spirit in the dark basement of her new house, there is loud screams after the delayed reaction as this suggests how scared Sally felt with the build-up of suspense.

DevelopI used a non-linear structure which features flash backs and flash forwards this allowed me to experiment with what I could do within the narrative. I have developed this by not making it too predictable, I did this by not using flash forwards but using flash backs which leads to the audience not fully being able to predict all that is going to happen.