Evaluation of the Final Project (QUESTION 1)

Q.1 In what ways does you media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media

products ?

There are indeed many forms and conventions used in our final project, which are also seen in real media products. For example: in many movies of the slasher/horror genre the "action" is not fast paced and is more moderate paced. Some scenes indeed lack action and it is the skill of the filmmaker that is

put to use in these kind of shots(to build up enigma in such shots).

Firstly, in most slasher movies enigma builds up when the "victim" (which in my case is a male)

has no clue of what will happen to him. He is going on with his everyday life when the viewers are

shown "Semiotics" or signs which help them identify that something will happen to the victim.

There are many examples of such films for example House of Wax, Glass House: The Good Mother,

Saw 2 and Saw 3. But the movie which most closely resembles ours is Glass House: The Good Mother.

The opening scene begins with the Victim (male) going about his everyday life with his wife. The use of

Semiotics can easily be identified for example: the first shot begins with the wife cleaning the sink and we can clearly see

 blood which develops tension in audience's mind(they are sure that something is just not correct about the woman) / gives the impression of a sociopath.

(when the victim is about to put fresh fish for his wife to cut in the same sink we saw earlier, the wife does not approve. This indirectly tells the audience that the woman may be disagreeing because of a number of reasons.Some strings are left unattached so that the audience can make up their own story(on a number of occasions).

This gives the audience a sense that the "killer" is either mentally disabled or is

a "sociopath". The killer is of course the woman , as semiotics have been used to "display" her as a unique character.

We have also used various semiotics in our movie to create enigma so that the audience

Won’t be able to take their eyes off the screen, for example: when the victim of our movie returns home, his

television set is already running and also the signal has been disrupted. This alerts the audience to ask themselves whether someone

 is hiding in the house waiting to strike. This results in enigma and a sense of horror and anticipation. (also the disrupted signal on the TV has been used in a number of movies before so that in itself is a code for the audience and when they see it they know something is wrong- and it symbolizes the isolation of the victim.)

Above: A screenshot of the television signal disruption from our movie. When the victim enters the house, the

television is already on and the signal is disrupted. A sign that somebody may have already intruded into the

house before the victim.

Secondly, sound is an extremely important component in horror films. Thus we took plenty of time

deciding on the sound. I have followed the conventions of real media products with my sound effects/tune which is similar to Glass House:

Good Mother and the Saw series. The sound treatment of these films starts off with a soothing tune and slowly develops

into a more deep and menacing track which increases anticipation of the audience in the film.

Thirdly, most of our time was spent in deciding on treatment of the shots of our film. The shots have a major impact in affecting

what the audience will think of our film. Many shots closely resemble the shots in real media films, for

example: this is a comparison of the opening shot from our video and of the movie "House of Wax".

Above: The opening shot from Glass House: The Good Mother and a similar shot which we used in our

film.

Shots like these usually have a slow accompanying soundtrack. This is the shot which gives the audience a

rough idea of "WHERE" the scene is taking place, the surroundings, day or night etc. Shots like these are

usually set at night but we broke this convention because we wanted to make the audience think of early

dawn when we shot this. (The victim of our film is back from partying probably at a nightclub or bar).

We have shown high class society and thus we have shown a south asian whose nickname is Henry ,  his age has been shown roughly in his early 20’s. 

We also focused greatly on the logo of the other production companies. We observed that although the logo of the production company is shown usually in the very beginning of the film , the names of the team appear a while later. We decided to follow that convention. The first image you see below is the logo of our media team , while the second shot of a widely recognized institution "Twisted Pictures".

Codes and conventions challenged: 
One of the very main conventions of the horror/slasher film genre which we broke was that we did not show the male as the killer. Although this has already been done in Glass House : Good Mother (shown the female as the killer) , it is common to show the male as the killer in the genre. We did this because we thought that this would attract females to watch our film , most females may not watch the film from the slasher genre because most movies show the victims of the plot to be females. We , on the other hand , chose to make the female gender "stronger" and more influencing in  our movie as compared to the male victim. We thought that females would enjoy watching "their" gender in power which is rarely seen in the genre.


Another convention which we broke was that mostly these films represent white people as the actors etc. We decided to represent and chose South Asian actors as we belong to a South Asian Country and we wanted to represent our people in the film.