2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My media product represents social groups in a few different ways. For example, some of the characters are represented in quite a stereotypical way such as the teacher, while other characters have a unique representation, such as the student.

We decided to present different characters in different ways to give a varied representation, this would give a fresh view for our audience, it would make our horror film  unique so our target audience wouldn't get bored of our film.

The main unique character in our film is the student, because he isn't the stereotypical bad student who always gets in trouble. He is actually a responsible smart student who be wrongly accused of being mischievous, we decided to have a character like this because the audience would see him as innocent, rather than thinking the character deserved to be killed if he was a bad student. I believe that presenting the character in this way would make the audience sympathise with him, but more importantly I think it will enuance the scary factor, because innocent characters will be the victims of the antagonist, the audience may feel that they too may be vulnerable. It would give a more realistic interpretation in my opinion.

The other unique character in our film is the teacher. He is presented as a casual laidback teacher, rather than a teacher in a suit who is dedicated to his job. This teacher also seems to be quite strict, because he makes his student stay in detention, even though the student may seem innocent. We decided to present the teacher in this way because not all teachers in real life are fair, some teachers in school wrongly accuse students of wrongdoings. We thought this was a realistic view on what happens in school classrooms, so our target audience would understand the situation, and how these characters also act in real life.

Evaluation questions - 1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In many ways, our media product is quite typical of the horror genre, and of real horror films. Our product seems to have many typical conventions that are seen in other products out in the market. This was our intention when we were creating our film, we wanted to create a teen horror film that had similar conventions, but to still have an original and unique story.

The product we have created can be compared to quite a few other horror films, such as Scream (which is set in a high school), and a more recent film, The Cabin In The Woods (which is also a horror film aimed at teenage audiences). The plot of our film is more related to the Scream films, because our film is also about a serial killer who is killing school students. The setting and characters therefore are fairly similar to the Scream series.

It is quite typical for a teenage slasher film to be set in locations such as high schools, so we wanted this adapted into our own film so that our audience would obviously feel a relation to the setting, so that they could also relate to the characters in our film. The target audience for our film would be teenagers aged 15+, so we decided to set our film in a high school so the audience could relate with the characters and setting. I think this will enhance the scariness of our film, and this would be good for our horror film. It could even create a sense of paranoia in our audience, due to the realism also incorporated into our film.

The intro of our film is also similar to teen horror films in the past, we were mainly inspired by the intro of Scream, in which a school student is chased by the serial killer. However, in our opening there are many significant differences, because the teacher is also murdered and also because our main antagonist is quite mysterious.

The way our film differs from typical teenage slasher films is that our main villain isn't revealed in our film. The main villain in our film won't be revealed by the audience, so there will be this certain mysterious factor associated with this character, and this emphasises on the audience's fear of the unknown. We believed that the audience would be more scared of a villain that isn't fully revealed to the audience, rather than a serial killer who you can see in the whole camera shot. This character makes our film unique, and changes the views of the audience about serial killers. Our product can now be associated slightly with a psychological horror, because we don't really see the whole villain in camera shot.

Overall, our film tends be quite conventional of the teenage slasher genre, but there are still a few factors that can also challenge the genre. Factors such as our characters and plot will also create twists in our film, making it unique and original.

Soundtrack for our film

We have had another problem with our editing! Our soundtrack no longer exists. The sound in our film has somehow disappeared, and this has made it harder for us to completely finish our production. We think that the music may not be accessible due to it not being saved on our computer's hard drive, but when we transferred the files, the sound still didn't appear on Adobe Premiere Elements.

It is important that we import our music in our production soon, otherwise we will pass the deadline. Music is crucial in our film because it creates the tension and scare factor in our film. it is also important because it will give us the chance to gain more marks in our production. If we can't find a way to import our music into Adobe Premiere elements, then we will have to find music from a copyright free source.

Evaluation audio discussion

Last lesson we had an audio disscusion. This audio discussion was for our evaluation, we asked important questions such as "What do you think a suitable target audience will be for our product?". These questions helped us to understand what people thought about our product and how we could improve it. Soon I will upload the audio discussion in order to go into further detail about how this discussion was useful.

Adobe Premier Elements

In this blog post, I will talk about Adobe Premier Elements, the software we used to edit our film opening. I will also talk about the different effects that we used during our editing.

In my opinion, I believe that Premier Elements is a decent program. There are loads of different effects that we could use to make our product better. Effects such as lighting and video merging made our horror film more conventional, we were able to enhance the creepiness of our film with these effects.

During our editing, we didn't really encounter any problems. The only thing that frustrated me was that we couldn't adjust the brightness so that it looked the same in each individual clip. But this was because the brightness was changed during filming. The thing that also annoyed me was with the audio, we couldn't add our own recorded audio from a recording device because it didn't sound similar to the audio on the camera. We didn't find any option to make the audio levels the same. So this changed the way dialogue was used in our film.

In conclusion, I think Premier Elements was a good editing software, and we were able to use this to our advantage, by making our product better.

Editing

We have almost finished editing our production! It has been almost 2 weeks since we started editing our product. We have encountered many problems such as with our brightness, and with continuity errors. But we have managed to pull through, our product is now looking more professional than when we started our editing. We have used many different effects such as transitions, fade in/out, cropping, merging etc. Originally we believed that our film would be slightly longer than the 2 minute mark, but now that we have cropped down the clips and organised them, the length stands at 1.50. We just need to add our titles and fix the continuity editing, and then our product will be finished.

Deadline on Friday

We have to completely finish our production by this Friday, but we still haven't finished our editing. We still need to rearrange our clips. We also need to adjust the lighting because it needs to be darker for our horror film. We also need to record the voice for the teacher and the killer, to fill in the missing gaps where the dialouge is meant to be.

We also need to create our own music, we haven't started this yet, and the only place to do this is in our music department after school hours. If we don't finish creating our music by Friday, then we will need to find some music from a copyright free source. We want to make our own music for our horror film because we will have the opportunity to gain more marks, but if we don't then we will hyave to find a quicker alternative.