Evaluation Q1 - Conventions

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

Our group decided that certain aspects of our slasher opening would have to be similar to previous successful slasher films so that we could target a specific audience.  

TITLES
The first titles displayed are 'Fireline presents', like in the slasher film Madhouse (William Butler, 2004) except in Madhouse's case it was 'Lions Gate Productions'. This is a commonly used convention. Also in our production we  used a convention shown in slashers such as Urban Legend. We displayed 'A cupkate Production', similar to Urban Legend saying 'a Gina Matthews Production'. As shown in Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000), the title of the film is shown after the first killing. We did this in our slasher opening after the scream queens death and similarly to Scary Movie we centered the title and it fades to black.

IDENTS
A good example of idents from a slasher film are An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981). The idents from this film look fairly outdated but the the simple animated letters are still effective, and they continue to be used commonly in modern slasher films. All 4 of our company idents involved this same technique and also some other animation and effects. This helped our idents look effective yet they were simple to make.

OPENING SHOTS
The first shot we show in our film opening is an establishing shot. This instantly anchors the mood, genre and location of the film. Our establishing shot is of the wooden cabins where the main part of our film is set. An establishing shot also helps get the audience into the film and the action. This same technique is used in many slasher openings, an example of this is Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2009).

GROUP SHOT:
After the establishing shots in our production we thought it was vital to include a group shot to anchor the main characters. Also the dialogue that is used along side this will add to the exposition revealed in the early parts of the opening. It also introduces possible protagonist and antagonists to the audience.


FINAL GIRL AND SCREAM QUEEN
Carole Clover's theory of the final girl applies to the majority of films across the slasher genre, including our production. 'Charley' our final girl character follows this concept in a number of ways. Her name is unisex and she dresses very covered up and comes across a positive an very morally right person. She also has masculine attributes. The binary opposite of Charley is our scream queen Ashley. Ashley dresses more provocatively and has a lazy and negative attitude. She also comes across less immoral by ringing her dad to pick her up because she's bored instead of commemorating her dead friend. Both these characters are common stereotypes of the slasher genre. A good example of a final girl is Sydney Prescott from Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). An extremely famous example of a scream queen is Janet Leigh from Psycho.


NARRATIVE ENIGMA:
In our slasher opening we show narrative enigma whenever the killer is shown. By dressing the killer in a black hoodie the audience are never able to identify him, this along with the shots of only the killers feet gradually being cut into the action helps create narrative enigma. This same concept is used in lots of slasher films. A well known example is the Friday the 13th franchise where Jason is always seen wearing a mask to hide his identity.

SOUND
The sound we used in the killing sequence of our production is inspired from slashers such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). We added string instruments that created drama and tensions and helped replicate the screams that would be heard. Psycho is a very famous example of this technique. Throughout our opening we used a mixture of diegetic and non diegetic sound to create tension as well as keeping it realistic.

CONCLUSION
Our audience feedback was positive and came across as getting our preferred reading. We were most worried about our killing scene not coming across convincingly, but our audience feedback didn't bring up any concern about this. Using conventions from past examples has helped us to achieve better verisimilatude.