In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our media product was set in the family home of the protagonist. Used in mainstream horrors like The Strangers, (Bertino, 2008). This leaves the audience with a residual feeling of fear and anxiety, as it evokes a reaction of empathy. Classic horror film often use a melee weapon to put emphasis on the proximity and physical difference between the protagonist and the antagonist i.e. Halloween (Carpenter, 1978). However, they are usually bladed, dramatic and for killing, as our film is teen based, we decided to bludgeon rather than kill the victim, using an unconventional spade handle. This also leaves verisimilitude as, statistically, most murders are domestic.

Our opening sequence begins with a montage edit of the two characters preparing for the day ahead, with the protagonist holding the most prevalence in the narrative. The montage is an often used convention in the teen entertainment genre i.e Skins S1E1 (Gay, 2007). We decided to keep the antagonist's face covered until the last shots in the sequence. We did this to keep an enigma surrounding the character of the antagonist until the last minute to allow the audience to think ahead and ponder the rest of the plot, and consider the film as a whole, not just an opening sequence. Other films with a ‘reveal’ are Splice, (Natali, 2009) Noir We found GOGOZombie to be the most effective font when researching fonts to use. We found that it had a suitable distressed look and amateur finish which are used in real media products, that we could emulate. Such films as The Warriors (Hill, 1979)

How does your media product represent particular social groups? Our characters are both male which challenges conventions of character selection in the writing process where the protagonist is regularly female in the horror, and other genres. Although both male, young and white, they represent very different social classes which is represented by the use of costume, Harry, the protagonist wears a plain or normal set of clothing for a middle class person. Where, Joe wears a tracksuit. The use of a tracksuit, for the violent antagonist’s costume, presents an ideological representation that reinforces the social construct, or the fear that tracksuit wearers or ‘Chavs’ are in fact violent thugs, this is reinforced in the press where they are often demonised. Harry’s costume can be seen as a metaphor for regular society, that is effected by violence and crime on a daily basis by these people. This may be relevant to the audience because of the recent London Riots which lead to the death of 5 people. So, the character represents the majority metaphorically. The fact that the antagonist is already in the house may also be metaphor for the volatile nature of society and that there are mentally insane people among us and all you have to do is be in the wrong place at the wrong time i.e 7/7 London Bombings and the 2011 Norway attacks.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? An independent film company would be suited to produce our film as it is our film is a teen-horror, which is a currently popular genre in the film industry such as Final Destination (Wong, 2000), Scream (Williamson 1996), Friday the 13th (Cummingham, 1980). We would aim to gain a distribution deal with an independent company, mainly because a huge budget would be unnecessary for our film, and many of the films of the genre are made independently. The names in titles of our sequence are the names of real producers, directors and actors who are involved with similar projects in the film industry. Hammer Films would be an ideal choice as they often invest in medium-low budget horror films. Such as the highest grossing UK horror film of the last 20 years - The Woman in Black, (Watkins 2012) and, Let Me In (Reeves, 2010), the remake of the popular Swedish; Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2008.) Hammer Films are going through a revival stage for their film development team with the company foreseeing their future spending at $50 million.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening? To film our work we used a Panasonic HDC-SD10 Camera and Jessops tripod. They were both easy to use and we were able to do what we wanted to do with the equipment in a few easy steps. However there were some drawbacks such as. Although the display indicated there was a full battery, it would randomly cut out. So we were unable to continue filming on that day. To overcome this we brought another battery to the shoot and kept in charge just in case this happened again. Although we were filming in the basement of a house we did still need additional light to for the camera to capture the shots in any detail. The built-in camera light did the job we wanted it to do but because of it’s low power and area it wasn’t necessarily ideal. To furthermore combat the lack of light the candles in the shrine also played a practical part as well as an aesthetic part as they let a dim glow to create a low key atmosphere.

Our editing and production process has similarities between real production, for example we both carefully considered; story, shot composition, costume and many more things. They, however generally have much more money to work with, more people to do very specific jobs and much more powerful hardware. But stripped to the task we are both trying to achieve, the processes are very similar.