Evaluation 1

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

Through watching a range of horror films (including Saw, Circle, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Insidious) I compiled a list of conventions that were common in all or most of them. These conventions, which are the things that typically arise in a genre, included gore, isolated settings, a villain, a lone survivor, a lack of consequences for the villain and weapons. Technical elements that were common throughout the films were dim lighting, long shots to show isolated settings, close ups of the villains so that they are only partially revealed and a lot of jump cuts in the editing. Research also included asking a cross section of audience about the expectations of a horror. The people I asked expected to see similar things to each other and to the conventions I had found. The most common responses were gore and jump scares, a lot of the responses to our questionnaire showed that audiences also wanted to see children as part of the narrative. There was a clear pattern of how we needed to encode our production piece so that the audience would be able to recognise it as a stereotypical horror. I wanted to create an opening that captured the stereotypical aspects of a horror film; this is reflected within our main character. 
The next step was to create a storyboard. 

I conducted research of the typical elements of a horror film and presented the information in a prezi format.