The genre of our film is horror, and having certain conventions such as blood in it represents this. Blood appears at the end of the opening scene, where Scarlett (the possessed psycho in the film) attacks Kate (the victim) and appears to have gouged a symbol on her shoulder. The fact that we have used the idea of someone being possessed makes our film a psychological horror, which is a sub-genre of the wide spectrum of Horror. We decided to use symbols as a means of how Scarlett has become possessed, with the ideas and connotations of ancient black magic. The use of these conventions are not in exactly as you would imagine in a horror: for example, the blood isn't everywhere and it isn't explicitly graphic. The reason why it is a horror is because of the psychological reasoning behind the act of it; it isn't classed as normal and is intended to scare the audience. Compare to the opening titles of Se7en our film has both similarities and differences. We used inspiration from the film to create shifting, shaky text, and also the idea of having images in the background. The differences are that in Se7en the images are moving. We decided that this may be too complex for our film and the time we had to do it, and so we decided that we would use a still picture of the symbols featured in one of the scenes.
Se7en's opening title
Our Opening title
2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
There are two social groups that our film particularly covers, that can be classed as one: teenage girls. The idea of jealousy and rivalry between two sisters appealed to us, as we thought it could be something that girls of that age could understand and relate to, in a way. Stereotypically, girls teenagers in particular) are assumed to behave rashly when they aren't happy with a situation and strive to change it. This would make our film appeal slightly more to girls, however it's not totally aimed at them and can be watched by anyone. Compared to Se7en, our film is quite the opposite. In Seven, the two main characters have only just met, purely through work. In the the scene the screenshot below taken from (in the film) the two characters are walking down the street. At this point the audience don't know exactly who is the more dominant figure, so as they are walking they change sides, which makes one look bigger than the other at different times. In our film, the two main characters are sisters. In the scene that they are together, to emphasise the dominance that Scarlett has she is stood up, towering over her sister Kate, who is sat down.
3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Our product could be produced by a major Hollywood studio, such as Warner Bros. If the full film was made it would have the potential of being a gripping psychological horror, as things such as make up, set, lighting and props could have much more money spent on them, making them much more believable. Being produced by a company such as TimeWarner, would mean that the film would have access to things like advertising. With it being such a big company and having lots of attributes, there would be opportunities to advertise on DVDs owned by the same company. Our film has similar features to Seven, such as the hate one character feels towards others, which, considering the success of Seven may be a crucial factor in whether a production company would take on a film like this. On the other hand, i believe that our film could also be successful if it was made on a low budget; it may not have the advantages of special effects etc. but it would make the film more gritty and believable. 
As opposed to Hollywood blockbusters, an Independent company from England could take up the film and produce a really chilling and intense film. I think that this would mean that the rating would go up to an 18. Here is a link to the BBFC website, which contains the guidelines for rating films: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ This is our logo for an independent production company: The target audience for our film are between 15 and 25. The film may appeal to girls more than boys because of the lead roles are all female, however I don't think that this would stop a boy from watching it at all. With the themes of jealousy, rivalry and revenge in the film, a girl may understand it more as stereotypically girls could empathise with the stress of such a situation.
This is the logo for a 15 classification.
Our film will definately be a 15, as we didn't intend to show explicit scenes containing violence, we only wanted to create an impression that they would be happening. It should not be shown to anyone younger than 15 as it may be inappropriate to do so because of strong language, reference to violence and distressing psychological issues, which may upset the viewer.
Here is a link to my audience research that I did initially: http://bcasmedia-group26.blogspot.com/2010/04/initial-questionnaire-and-results.html
5) How did you attract/address your audience?
Dialogue was one of the ways we tried to attract our target audience. Being from Barnsley, the actors had strong accents, so they tried hard to tone down the dialect so that it seemed more generic and on a level with what people would call a 'normal' voice, so as not to put them off. We also tried to make Rhiannon and Laura, who played Kate and Scarlett, appear to dress stereotypically girly, for example with flowery dresses, to emphasise the fact that in our film there are underlying femenine issues, like feeling second best to others. The setting, too, reflects this. The opening scene is set in Kate's bedroom - we decided that it would be a good place to shoot because, again, it's a setting that is familiar with a lot of people; the not completely tidy yet not a complete mess that is a teenagers bedroom. We also used the kitchen, which
We decided that we wanted the film to be more from Kates point of view, so the audience would feel sympathy towards her. We did this by doing point of view shots, to make Scarlett seem much more sinister and aggressive, and make Scarlett seem misunderstood.
The camera we used was a Sony HDV 1000. Compared to the quality that we would have got from a JVC, HDVs are a lot better. The focus on the camera was quick and accurate, which meant that we didn't have to reshoot many scenes at all. The only down side to this camera was the sound; if we'd have had a boom microphone and recorded the sound seperately, it would have improved the overall quality. We expierienced a couple of problems while filming; we thought at one point that the tripod had broke, bubut we hadn't, it was just stuck. We also ran out of time one day to film, so we had to go back a week later and shoot an extra scene. The problem we faced then was editing the film to get the lighting to match the other scene right. It was also quite a challenge in places to film exactly the shots we wanted. The camera is quite big and heavy on the tripod, and in a small room it's hard to adjust the tripod and camera to get right where it's needed.
The editing software we used was Final Cut Express on an Apple Mac. I learnt how to use a DV recorder and to import the shots from tape to the Mac. Before I began to edit, I named the shots and then put them in a rough playing order so that it would make assembling the film much easier, and less confusing. This meant that I could move the clips and then cut them into time. Because we didn't have an additional microphone, when we moved the camera the sound of the bacon sizzling changes volume, so to make the shots flow better I used cross fades to make the changing of the sound less obvious. To make the titles, as a group we spent a lot of time trying to choose something suitable. We decided that using lowercase would look good. We also spent a long time picking the right music for our film, although we didn't have a lot of choice for copyright reasons.
7. Looking back to your preliminary tast, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?Now that we have completed the process of creating a film, we learnt quite a few things, especially from our preliminary task. Planning is very important, and research in to genre and other films is the best way to achieve good foundations to create a successful film. We also found that story boarding and listing shots were useful and allowed us to manage out time much better than when we did out preliminary task. In particular, I think my attention to continuity errors in particular has improved a lot and when editing I tried really hard to make sure we didn't have any.
These are screen shots of our shot reverse shots for our preliminary task.
These are screen shots of our shot reverse shots for out Horror film.
Compared to our Horror film, the preliminary shots don't looks very good; the framing is poor as there is too much of the walls and background in the shots. We could have used the zoom button or even moved the camera to re-angle, but at the time it was out first attempt and we were please.
Now our faming is much better; there isnt a lot of wasted space in the frame, so the eye is not drawn to any where else but the person talking. One thing I think we did better on the preliminary task though, was that we framed the shot so that the heads were on the same level, therefore making the cut between the two look even smoother and easier to follow with the eyes.
I feel a lot more confident with using both the editing software and the camera equipment. I think that our film is successfull in most ways, however I think things that were beyond our control (like timing) were factors that reduced the quality more.
Here is a link to our target audience reaction : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHRidOdyMI
These are some of the comments that they made:
"Intriguing music because I linked with the horror genre, but i got a bit confusing at the end untill I realised it was a flashback"
"Camera angles were good, and showed who had the power"
These comments are useful, and are things that we should definately take on board for if we should ever do this again, or improve the film.
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