Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our Film:

Our project is called Hurting and we chose to make a psychological horror film because we all had a mutual interest in the genre. 

Genre:

Main Genre: Horror
Sub-genre: Psychological Horror

(Movie Posters of other Psychological Horror Films.)

Conventions of the Genre:

• Female protagonist often seemingly innocent at first or genuinely innocent then gradually becomes more abstruse as the film progresses

This is displayed in the film The Others where the main female protagonist is a seemingly innocent and over-protective mother but throughout the films there are hints that she is not as guileless as we first assumed. In fact we find out that she actually murdered her children and that the whole family is in fact dead.

• Protagonist has other people in her life (e.g. family or close friends) to help them cope with whatever if happening

Violet is phoning her dad to come home and help her.

Violet's dad is the main person who tries to come to her aid however, in the end she must face her demons on her own and conquer them once and for all.

In Scream 4, the main protagonist Sydney calls the police to
guard her and relies on their help. Unfortunately, they prove
to not be of much use and Sydney has to confront the killer.

• An overall eerie atmosphere to the film and relies on suspense
• Conquers whatever the "psychological problem" is by the end of the film
• Often follow Todorov's narrative theory:

How that applies to our film/opening:

Opening Sequence Conventions:

• Use of many enigma codes that will put many questions in the audience's head therefore making them want to watch the whole movie. Some questions we raised through our sequence were: What are all the drawings on the girl's bedroom wall? Who is knocking? Why is she so terrified?
• In her bedroom, the master shot acts as the establishing shot, giving the audience a feel of where she is and what time it is. However, we did not have a shot of the house in its entirety which could have been added to give a full view of the setting to the audience.
• There are titles all through out the film which credits the crew and cast according to importance and fits in with what would be the legal requirements for the titling of a film

We wanted our colour scheme to be lots of blues/purples/whites/blacks, especially in the opening because it happens at night. One of our inspirations was from The Woman in Black which made use of a lot of these colours and successfully created a disturbing atmosphere. The Paranormal Activity series had a similar colour scheme except it was more prominently blue. But, it was filmed purposely in a "found footage" style which is not what we wanted in our opening.

The grading for Paranormal Actvity.

The grading for The Woman in Black.

The grading for Hurting. (Example 1)

The grading for Hurting. (Example 2)

By using these colours as soon as the opening started, the audience are put into the mood instantly which is one key job of an opening sequence- to set up the atmosphere.