What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

In our media class we did voiceovers for our movies which describes movie companies that would publish our films.
Below is our voiceover and script:

Craig: Our film company was called “Bloodthirsty Productions” and the logo shows a corpse emerging from the ground. This creates an atmosphere for our movie, as it is a horror film and as of such, will contain gore and other similar themes of horror.
Michael: Our movie is a common type of horror film, it features a slasher type villain, and unsuspecting teens. They share similar conventions to large, well known films such as Scream and Friday 13^th and as a result we believe there are many companies who would publish our film.
Craig: Many of these companies can be found on the internet, or at independent film festivals. Websites such as Dead4movie.com – a website for independent films to be published on for free – can be a hot spot for agents to spot raw talent and potential.
Michael: Production companies are large businesses like any other, they seek talent and in return want a share on the profits. These companies provide distributors and they market and, as the title suggests, distribute the film once it is finished.
Michael: Film roles are important regarding their position as the director takes the helm of the product but without editors, actors, and cameramen, there is no way the director can produce a film. This is why teamwork and organization is very important in a film making process.
Michael: There are many things in our film that are common amongst other independent films, and big budget films alike. Here in this scene you can see Craig falling over and crawling away as the villain approaches. This is a very common stereotype in horror films, and while these conventions are commonly parodied and mocked, people do like stereotypical scenes, this is why we used it.
 Craig: When people make independent films they take a gamble, as nothing is free to produce and there is no guarantee they’ll make their money back. This is a small price to pay for those determined enough to try to get into the industry, but if it pays off there are many, many opportunities to become successful.
Craig: Thank you for watching our movie.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our movie, our teens are rather generic naive people who don't suspect anything until it is too late, this is a convention used in other movies following the teen slasher genre of horror.
Our main character, plaid by Craig is a gamer who is talking with his friend, played by Ed, until he parts ways with Ed. Now alone, Craig takes a shortcut through some woods, where he is stalked, pursued and finally stabbed to death by his chaser, who is dressed in casuals with a white mask.
Craig, as the main character, follows the conventions of the initial murder character who is unsuspecting and naive, and as a result this ends in Craig getting murdered by a psychopath.
This bears resemblence to Hostel's Josh, who through his naivity gets dragged into a hostile situation and murdered.

You can notice some similarities between these characters, most noticeably in the age of the characters. Both of the characters (Josh and Craig) wear informal clothing and stand in a slouching manner. They also both get killed in the movie introduction of the film through their naivity, another convention used in many films. Both characters are portrayed as stereotypical teenagers as they both look for fun in life and act in a naive fashion, as of such they both fall into a hostile situation.

During the planning I told Craig to dress in normal every day clothes (old ones as they'd get torn and dirty) and come down to navigation wharf where we filmed the intro, this is because he needed to look like an average teenager, and I believe this worked well.

As a finished product, I'd say Craig represents the teenage social group well, as he dresses in informal clothing, he is naive and he also talks about casual everyday topics such as the internet, this worked to our advantage in the films I believe as they are both common topics for teenagers that wouldn't normally apply to older adults.

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

From our introduction to this unit of work we studied horror movie intros from Dracula movies, Link here, and the one thing above all that stuck out about these intros is the lighting and other various methods including titles, settings and other scenery.
Film makers use these conventions to key into our subconscience and make us feel the fears the characters are feeling, and as of such, we used them in our key scenes to replicate this emotion.
Below are 9 scenes which used the convention in this way:

Frames (From left to right):

1. Title

2. Setting and location

3. Costumes and props

4. Camerawork and editing

5. Title font and style

6. story opening

7. Genre conventions

8. Characters

9. Special effects

Screenshot 1 immediately implicates a horror movie directly from the name alone, it is a solitary title and connotes an underlying sense of dread and terror, creating a foreboding atmosphere. Other movies that use this title are The Uninvited, The Blair Witch Project and The hills have eyes. The lighting is low key also, once again this adds a foreboding atmosphere that will key into the subconscience of the viewer to automatically register it as a horror movie.

Speaking from an audio perspective it also stays true to the conventions in that it uses low tone music and a swift breeze of wind to make it sound foreboding and uninviting.

The camerawork is also typical for the horror movie intro as the camera slowly moves into the sky where the title appears.

Screenshot 2 is the summarisation of the location, as you can see, it is a lowly lit forest, which is incredibly isolated. This setting is quite typical in horror movies, as it plays on our fears as an audience member, the fear of getting lost in the woods. The most evident example of a setting such as this is the blair witch project, in which a group of teens venture into a forest to shoot a documentary, and were never found again.

The forest is conveniently located just east from Navigation Wharf, the location of our intro, just outside of town.

This location follows the old isolation convention of horror movies, and thanks to that, we could expand on it, where Craig doesn't know just what he's getting into until it's too late. This in itself is a convention of teen slashers, as teens are often portrayed as being naive.

Screenshot 3 shows some costumes and props used in our film, especially toward the ending. As Craig is just a teen he is only wearing casual wear, much like all other teen portrayals in movies. This is a convention as it can add a fear that it could happen to anyone, and sometimes it does.

The other props we used were the shard of wood seen in the image, this was pulled off a broken fence somebody had discarded near the forest, as a result it looks very painful and thanks to this we could also tear a hole in an old pair of jeans that Craig was wearing.

We also used a fake knife, this made it easier for the illusion that Craig was being stabbed as it was retractable so it looked as if it had been plunged into his skin, thus adding realism.

Screenshot 4 showed some editing we used, as we used a fade transition at that point, and also we placed Ed's name for the opening credits.

We also used other various shots, including the shot reverse shot, and also a Dutch Tilt.

Screenshot 5 is our title sequence, in the film the name appears and briskly blows out of shot and fades out. This allowed us to make the title sequence look more authentic. We also used a rigid font style in keeping with other various conventions of movie openings.

Screenshot 6 shows the story opening, in this opening, Craig and Ed are walking towards the camera, talking about a game that was released recently. As we can see, this is typical teen behaviour, they then conclude their sentence by saying I'll see you online. These are typical everyday conversations for most teenagers and so it adds that convention that is shown at every intro to a horror movie, where everything seems alright until they are isolated and suddenly everything starts going crazy.

Screenshot 7 is the genre conventions. In this shot Craig is alone in a forest, this happens just after I run through the shot behind him. These are typical in a horror movie as it shows that he is a vulnerable target and it also adds a foreboding sense to the film, thus creating suspense.

Screenshot 8 shows two of our 3 characters; Ed and Craig. These characters are typical teenagers and are portrayed as such. They follow the typical conventions of teenager characters in horror movies, as they are naive, and they talk about stereotypical things for teenagers such as video games.

Screenshot 9 shows our special effects, in this screenshot we see Craig get stabbed with blood coming from his mouth. This was our most noticeable special effect and it was also easy to make, food dye and water.

We also used transitions and slow motion blurring in our movie to add to the feeling of the atmosphere.

Student Questionnaire

Our questionnaire was fairly basic, it comprised of the basic conventions of a questionnaire and as of such was simple and straight forward.
Thanks to this information we recieved some decisive information on the common views of our films, how many people liked the title, what could be improved etc, everything we needed to know, we knew from these results.
In total, 13 people filled in these questionnaires.
The order of the questions for the chart are below:
1. What age group are you?
2. What's your gender?
3. How did you feel about our movie introduction
4. What do you think of the name The Dread Woods?
5. Did it feel and look like an actual movie introduction?
6. Does the music/special effects fit with the feel, (help you feel what is happening)?
7. Do you understand the storyline thus far?
8. Would you watch the movie through to the end (judging from what you’ve seen)?
9. What could we improve upon?
10. Do you have any other comments?
The results to our questionnaire are in chart form for convenience:

Horror movie production companies

In our original plans, the logo and production company weere easy to plan, we were originally in a team of 5 (which was too many people) so fortunately we were split.
This allowed for easier planning and as a result we had decided on a company name and also a logo.
The name was "Spudfish entertainment" which was based off my Xbox live gamertag, we chose this because we were in a creative rut and Spudfish was catchy.
Over the course of time we had changed the logo, the first was the truest to our original plans:

However, everybody else's logos looked better, and I decided it looked too basic, and rather generic.

Therefore I decided to modernise it, with a camera emerging from the mist:

This didn't seem to work either, however. Unfortunately the people watching our film disagreed with the logo and the company name, so we were had to change it.
The title of the company became "Bloodthirsty productions" and the logo was changed altogether.

This in my opinion is better than the original, however, I still have my doubts about it's image as a horror movie company.
However, it seems to fit, so until the next feedback, it stays.
Thank you for reading my blog.

Our horror's first draft

The horror movie we shot was successful in my personal opinion, however, various aspects needed changing.
The first draft's filming spanned over three days, plus an extra day to refilm dark scenes for continuity errors.

Below is our first draft completed:

(Unfortunately the Credit to ZREO in the video isn't coming up, I've uploaded this 3 times now - it's meant to be in the black bit at the end.)

Special thanks to ZREO music for providing the opening title music (shadow temple theme)

Research: Seven intro sequence

Seven has an incredible introduction, in the short space of two minutes, eight seconds, we see many, many images related to forensic science and detective work, giving an early insight to the film's atmosphere; a gritty murder mystery story.

Below is my timeline:
0:01, we see a book in a dark atmosphere, "New line cinema presents" dashing across a small space in the scene, a page is turned.
0:06, director's name "An Arnold Kopelson production", no background emphasises his importance in this film.
0:08, a diagram of two hands are shown on screen, at 0:11, "a film by David Fincher" appears on top of the image.
0:12, a metal device is turned, we then cut to a razor, slicing some paper.
0:13 "Brad Pitt", written in a blackboard style font to emphasize the autopsy atmosphere.
0:15 the razor slices some skin off from a finger
0:17 "Morgan Freeman"
0:20, a teabag is dipped into a mug
0:21, autopsy photograph of a murder victim
0:22, teabag is shown mixing in with the water
0:23, "Se7en" dashes across the screen, at 0:26 a stack of books appear.
0:28, a photo album is opened
0:29, the pages in the book shown at 0:01 are being turned again
0:30, many cast names are shown against a black backdrop
0:32, a document is being written out
0:33, "Richard Roundtree"
0:36, a photograph is shown developing in a darkroom
0:38, "R. Lee Ermy"
0:39, a film strip of photographs being cut by a pair of scissors
0:40, scissors cut another photo by a book
0:41, John C McGinley
0:43, sellotape being sliced by a metal blade and a photo over a document
0:45, extreme close up of a dollar bill, "In God we trust"
0:46, more staff names appear
0:48, another autopsy photograph is shown
0:50, a document with lots of writing on it is turned over
0:53, staff member names
1:00, a small amount of writing is smudged by a finger
1:02, a document is censored by a black marker
1:03, another document is turned over
1:04, staff names
1:07, more censoring on a document
1:10, a photograph is censored by a marker and crew names are shown
1:16, a document is written up by a darkroom pool
1:19, a strip of photographs is held over a document.
1:24, Staff names
1:26, a document is stuck together with more staff names appearing at the bottom.
1:29, a page is turned revealing another document
1:31, an autopsy photo is shown
1:35, a page is turned and more names are shown
1:37, a needle is being pulled out from in between a finger and a thumb
1:39, producer and co producer names
1:42, string is threaded through the eye of a needle
1:43, another autopsy photo is shown with producer names shown
1:47, needle is threaded through two pages of documents
1:51, cast names
1:54, book shelf with cast names
1:58, producer names shown against a dark background
2:01, the word "God" being removed from the bill from 45 seconds in, implying the atmosphere of the film
2:05, "Directed by David Fincher"

From the sheer length of this timeline, you can see without reading that this sequence is packed with information.