Year 13 media assessment

Year 13 media assessment

My year 12 coursework consisted of making the start of a film, everything else was our choice. My group decided to do a horror film opening for teenagers (our age) we thought this would be easier to do purely because we knew what they would like. It was based around a possessed doll and it was called ‘She told me to’.

The research and planning we managed to do was purely for the film e.g. what costumes, makeup, actors and shots. Our first piece of planning was the shot-list, this consisted of what the main actress was going to partake whilst being filmed e.g. our first shot was the girl sitting in a plain office looking down in a hospital gown. We knew this would attract the audience because they would want to know what why and who, the shot-list had many other shots that we would carry out and asked for feedback from a peer to see what they thought. This time when doing our year 13 coursework I want to ask the target audience questions and really nail what they would like to see in the music video, I think last time we just went on what we would like to see so it wasn’t very represented. We then researched other horror film openings e.g. possession, the last house on the left and sinister, we did this because they were our inspiration in the first place we got our initial idea for the film from these types of films. We also looked at what type of costumes would be acceptable for this genre, for this we looked at what other actresses were wearing in films like ours and then looked at makeup by going on YouTube and finding the best makeup for a delusional psychopath which we found, this gave us the idea for my makeup and clothing. I think that we planned this well to make sure we stuck to the conventions of horror movies. However we didn’t look at lighting or props we didn’t do any research about that which I think we should have touched upon because the lighting is a big part of a horror film. We also didn’t really do any research on the music we used, we just sat on YouTube for a long time listening to scary music that we liked the most and used it, if we were to talk about it and disgust the best for our film with the target audience we would of got a better outcome. We did however, research the best text for our title we looked on a website that had a variety of text fonts and we eliminated it down to 5 of our favourites and picked from them, we did ask peers which one they liked best too but it wasn’t formal. This time around we will definitely ask the target audience every question to do with our music video possible and either film it or right down using an interview approach, we will look at music videos constantly to see what they include to give us inspiration and so we know we are sticking with the conventions.

With following with the conventions of a horror opening I think this was our strongest part because we knew what they were we had watched so many of that genre that we knew what the lighting had to be down to the makeup and the plot. We chose to go up to the loft to find this doll because it’s always a mysterious scary place, we also thought of the practical issues with it and thought that it was easy to access that’s why we chose it. We had the doll because in most films they always pop up and seem to be the haunted object. Nowadays the genre of horror films are aimed at over 15 year olds and that is exactly what we tried to aim for, I think that our lighting being natural but low key helped with the genre and to set the feel for our opening to make the target audience feel weary and try to keep them guessing what was going. Every horror film does this and that’s why we feel we kept to the conventions very well. We kept to wearing casual every day to day things in most of our shots because we wanted them to think we were normal but this only happened because of the first shot you see of me in the hospital gown looking crazy is the only word to describe it, this creates confusion for the audience and that's a convention to make them think and keep them on their seats to scare them. We tried to use straight cuts when editing to make it more tense and fast paced to make it more tense. The characters was me and a male peer we were acting as a newly married couple, we struggled to show the audience what the relationship was because we wasn't sure if we wanted it to be a married couple or a father and daughter relationship so we did struggle on that part.

When finally changing the plot to a married couple I thought this was original, the plot that we had in mind was very different to any horror film that I have ever seen unfortunately It didn't come across when people watched it. We decided to do the plot as me having a miscarriage and went mental due to that, this was our twist to the core conventions of other horror films. We also used the camera as the doll to make it look like the doll was looking at us, this was different from anything that I had seen before in horror films that's why I liked the idea so much. other than that I feel like we followed the conventions a lot and I feel like if we did change it up a bit we would of got a better grade, that's what I think we should do this time and mix it up a bit more then following the conventions.