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Hello my name is Rhys and this is my Year 12 AS Media Studies blog

Thursday, 20 November 2014

Research Essay : Codes and Conventions in Existing Teen Horror Film Openings

Please find below the title of the essay you need to complete by 3pm on XXX. This essay will be valuable for your planning and evaluation.


  • This essay should be done as a post to your blog. You can, if you wish, punctuate your essay with screen shots from the openings.
  • The word count should be targeted at 750 words
  • You should select appropriate examples from the openings to illustrate the points that you make. You do not have to write about everything that you see and hear

These are my Notes for the film opening of Dead Wood
















Notes for Wrong Turn
















Notes for Dead Mary


Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Dead Wood)

This is one of the film openings we looked at which was Dead Wood

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Dead Mary)

This is the opening for Dead Mary

Research : Codes and Conventions of Existing Teen Horror Film Openings (Wrong Turn)

This is the opening for Wrong Turn

Thursday, 13 November 2014

Research: Conventions Commonly Found In Horror Films

Shortcut
One convention that are common in horror films are the shortcuts, this is where somebody is walking home at night and they choose to take the alley way that is barely lit instead of taking the safer option. this image is an example you cannot really see a lot beyond the lights making it look dangerous.

Secluded location and stormy night
This next convention is of a secluded location. this is where people are normally trapped and vulnerable because they cannot get any help and they have no one or nothing to turn to. this can also link in with the convention of the stormy nights. the sound effect of the storm can also lead to a false jump another convention as well.  


Phone calls
Another convention would be when phone lines are not working or the person on the phone is making the victim uncomfortable and they cannot make that all important call which is possibly going to save them. as you can see by her facial expression that she doesn't look happy, instead she is vulnerable and scared and she can't put the phone down because she has been threatened.

Jump scare/fake jump  and victim in front of window/door
One more convention would be when a character is standing in front of a window of door where he killer can easily just take a hit at them. This also links in with a jump because in the film she turns around at the window and the killer is there as you can see and then in the film he breaks the glass and attacks her. There are normally fake jumps in horror movies such as something is moving behind a door for example but turns out to be a cat or something but then these often lead to proper jumps.



Characters forget about threat and warnings go unheeded
Another convention is when the characters forget about any threat that may be occurring. an example would be when a character forgets about death and danger such as when people are camping in a forest where a lot of people have been killed and they don't care and still explore it anyway.

Power cuts
The killer in horror films always cut the power so there is no help for the victim and this makes the victims more scared because in a house it is pitch black and they are very vulnerable therefore they cannot do anything because they cant call anyone because power has been cut and since there are no light on in the house people may think that they have gone bed or in a secluded location then it will just look like an abandoned house.

Victims fall over inexplicably and go to the wrong places
Another thing in horror films is that the victims always fall over at stupid times and instead of getting back up they instead just crawl away meaning the killer can easily kill them. But victims do more stupid decisions such as they always run upstairs and hide instead of just running outside to try and escape the killer.

Cant find keys for vehicle/wont start
Another thing that happens quite a lot is that the victim cant find their car keys or the car doesn't start, this happens a lot in horror films or doesn't even happen in cars other things like bikes vans etc. even when they find their keys the vehicle doesn't start or normally it is too late for them.

First 5 minutes
Within the first 5 minutes of a horror film, there is somebody that always dies and the audience knows that this that it is a horror just by the first 5 minutes and an example of of one of these films would be scream and this makes the film worth watching just by the first 5 minutes.

X years before or after
Another convention would be X years before or after. This is where something may have happened to a house in the past such as people got killed and in the future people move in and find out it is haunted by the people that got killed in there such as the spirits of them are haunting the people that have moved in.

Strange noises
No matter how scared the character is, they still investigate the strange noises that can possibly hurt them even more. Instead of staying in the place to find the weird noise, you would rather escape. By investigating the noise, this makes them even more vulnerable because the noise could be bait and then get them killed.




Monday, 10 November 2014

Research: Thinking About Fear



3 of us were asked to write 3 things. these 3 things were titled what are you scared of, why are you scared of that fear and how has that fear affected you. Ryan wrote in orange, I wrote in green and Lewis wrote in purple.

Ryan was scared of ghosts and he was scared of them because he said they are not normal and freaky meaning there could be one around him and he wouldn't know about it therefore feeling wrong. This fear has affected him because he saw ghosts when he was a child.

I put that I was scared of jumps, this is because they are just very unexpected because you could just be studying with your earphones in and someone could tap you on the shoulder and you would freak out, also when playing scary games there are many jumps in them. Jumps have affected me because when playing games there have been jumps in there which have got to me.

Lewis said he was scared of hospitals, he was scared of hospitals because hospitals link to pain and that something is wrong with you or others. This has affected Lewis because when he goes into a hospital or when anyone else goes in hospitals it shows that there is something wrong with him or other people.

We did this because we had to find out what fears other people have and for our main task we are asked to create an opening 2 minute scene to a horror movie and using some of these techniques could really help us when it comes to it.

Sunday, 9 November 2014

Research: History Of Horror Films In The 1980s

1980s
A lot of good films in the 80s such as

The shining
Evil dead
The thing
Nightmare on elm street
The hitcher
Child's play
Aliens

Horror movies of the 1980s exist at the glorious watershed when special visual effects finally caught up with the gory imaginings of horror fans and movie makers. Technical advances in the field of animatronics, and liquid and foam latex meant that the human frame could be distorted to an entirely new dimension, onscreen, in realistic close up.



Nightmare on elm street

 Wes Craven, the former college professor responsible for two of the darkest and most deranged movies of the 1970s (Last House on The Left and The Hills Have Eyes) unveiled a brash, commercial franchise in 1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monster, a hideously scarred Freddy (named after a kid who bullied Wes Craven at school) Krueger represents a successful blend of humour and horror, a deranged killer who doesn't lurk silently behind a hockey mask but menaces in full view, spitting one-liners as he sharpens his trademark glove. In terms of Jungian archetypes he is the ultimate Shadow Trickster, the shape changer who relishes sick jokes. Freddy was a merchandising dream, an icon for a generation whose distinctive striped jersey, battered hat and scarred visage have sold many a t-shirt, board-game, coffee cup, lunch box and snow globe.

cost 1.8million pounds, made 26 million in a year.






The Shining


Although it's based on Stephen King's 1977 bestseller about a haunted hotel, Stanley Kubrick's movie is substantially different to the book. Rather than being about a family, it's about a location. The Overlook, as imagined by Kubrick, is a series of nightmare-inducing spaces that simultaneously cause claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Kubrick eschews King's supernatural explanation that the hotel is an evil entity which manifests via a spectral corpse in the bathtub or topiary creatures that come to life. Instead he suggests it's an extreme case of sick building syndrome: something rotten in the architecture and the patterns in the carpet burrows into Jack's brain and sends him over the edge.

cost 19 million pounds, made 44 million by December after coming out in may.


The Thing 


Little-seen on its release but now hailed as a classic, John Carpenter's masterpiece is actually a remake. He took the Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi thriller (based on a short story by pulp author John W Campbell called Who Goes There?The Thing From Another World and turned it into a gorefest that has never been equalled. Retrospectively, The Thing has proved itself to be one of the most important horror movies of the 1980s, despite not being a box office success at the time. It is now seen by many as visionary, from a technical (the special effects far outstripped anything previously seen and certain scenes are horrifying to watch even today, nearly three decades on), and from a philosophical perspective. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers it offers a discourse on what it is that makes us human, by examining what happens when our humanity is engulfed by alien biology

cost 15 million, made 19 million by December.



Aliens

Whereas Alien was a horror film set in space, Aliens is a Vietnam war movie thus transplanted. And, while it lacks the claustrophobic complexities of its predecessors, it's also probably one of the best action films ever made. Cameron, ever conscious of his B-movie Roger Corman roots, cranks up the tension to a near-unbearable level and keeps it there. This movie has everything - a love story, comrades-in-arms a little girl lost, a very haunted house, serious weaponry and MORE aliens.

cost 18.5 million made a huge 85 million


There are many more films and more about them if you click the link it will link you to IMDB. a place where you can view a variety of films program's etc. IMDB


 However films have advanced a lot since the 80s. there are now more special effects to make the movies more scary.

Directors for some of these horror movies

Stanley Kubrick- the shining
Wes craven- nightmare on elm street
john carpenter- the thing
james cameron-aliens















Thursday, 6 November 2014

Main Task Set Brief

The titles and opening of a new teen horror film, to last a maximum of two minutes.
All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.


Monday, 3 November 2014

Preliminary Task Evaluation


The Task

The task me and my group had to do was create a  continuity film and this took place between two characters. We had to title this "The Joke". We had one character who was sitting in a classroom waiting for another person to enter and tell the joke. We used a range of different camera angles and shots. Some of these included continuity editing, shot/reverse shot, the 180 degree rule, match on action.

The terms and their meaning 

Continuity Editing- This is a piece of editing where the scene is continuous and prevent disorientating viewers.

Shot/Reverse shot- This is where two characters are speaking to one another and the camera angle keeps on changing between them.

Match on action- This is also know as cutting on action. This is an editing technique for the Continuity editing which one shot cuts to another showing the action of the subject in the first shot.

180 Degree rule- A basic guideline of the on-screen relationship between two characters or objects in the scene. it is also called an imaginary line called the axis which connects the characters by keeping the character on one side so it doesn't look like they are talking to themselves

Pre-Production


We started planning our piece of film by using storyboards. These storyboards included subheadings so we knew what we were going to do such as the shot,the angle, movement and other things so we had a better idea of what we were doing.  i found the storyboards very useful to use because by doing this we didn't waste a lot of time because we had it all planned and we also had time to get different angles and other shots because if we didn't plan we may have struggled and the process would've been much slower and more time consuming, meaning we would've struggled to get different variations.  The images to the right represents how we used the storyboard. as you can see on the storyboard there is an over the shoulder shot and in the actual image it has been copied.



Production

The way we started the film making was when we were allowed to leave the classroom to get all of our clips that we were going to use. We got our shots in order of the location instead of the actual shot number because we found it easier because this meant that we wouldn't be wasting time trying to find a good location to get that certain shot. But when we were filming there was a lot of times we had to do a particular shot again because people were in the way and we did the shot more than once so that we had something worthy of using that didn't have all those errors in.

Post-Production

Before we did the editing, we had to make sure that we chose the right clips that we were going to be using/importing. this image is me doing that, as you can see i clicked on the folder that had the clips in then i highlighted the ones i needed then imported them into imovie.





This picture shows what clips have been imported and the collection of clips at the top are the ones that i imported and then the timeline is where i can drag and drop those clips which is where i can start the editing.











The  image shown is what i included in the making of the film. the purple box at the end is a ending credits screen where i included all 4 of us that were involved with making the film. the green bar at the bottom is the music i chose and i did this because since there would be no dialogue and no noise it would be quite boring just to watch and to make it more entertaining i included the music which the viewers would find better. also in this image you can see how small some of the clips are, this is because i had to trim some of them so the film was continuous and that it flowed fine from clip to clip.I also used a couple of transitions but not too many because it just wouldn't look very good. I also faded out the music because if i didn't the music would stop dead and it wouldn't go very well therefore i faded it so it works better when you are viewing it because instead of it stopping dead it slows down quite nicely and works better.

Evaluation


This is my finished product. i would say we did a good job considering we thought it would be easier because you have to make sure you get the right shots at the right times and make sure there isn't anything that will make the shot a bit dodgy. But we could've improved a lot and in terms of my editing i went a bit wrong and had to try and do something quickly about it and i am happy with my editing but felt like i could've improved a lot.

One improvement that we could've done was the opening scene where you can our shadows at the bottom of the screen and it looks really odd and silly because people watching it will be saying things about the shadows because they are easy to see and it looks very unprofessional. To stop this happening we could move the camera at a different angle or tilt it a bit more so you don't see our shadows.

Another improvement we could've made was as soon as the joke took place the exchange in dialogue was very quick and there should've been a pause in between the lines because the character that was getting told the joke was meant to have no idea and it was really quick so he knew the joke and wasn't meant to so when editing it was very difficult because the clips had to be cropped quite a lot so the joke could actually fit in. next time we will take note and remember to leave a second or two so the character knows what to say instead of him saying it really fast.

I have one improvement regarding my editing. when i first did it i forgot to include the shot reverse shot, so i had one over the shoulder joke of the actual joke taking place so i had to change that. But i had little time to change it so i think i cut the clips a bit too short and when i did that it looked a bit odd. Another thing was that the character getting told the joke was very quiet and i forgot to turn the audio up so he is pretty quiet in in. Finally i found that the credits at the end were pretty fast so it may be quite hard for viewers to see.Next time i think i could do much better editing and i shall take more time with it and keep watching it back.