In what way does your Media Production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In what way does your Media Production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

As a group we felt it was essential to research existing films relating to the horror, thriller, and scary movie genre. This would spark some inspiration and also enable us to step away from the cliché thriller scenes. Certain films that caught our attention were ‘Saw’, ‘Hostel’, ‘Them’, ‘The Grudge’, however the three films which we focused mostly on and felt captured the horror ambience perfectly were ‘Psycho’, ‘What Lies Beneath’ and ‘Creep’. We used the internet site ‘YouTube’ to watch clips of the films, ‘the making of’ the films and the film trailers so see how suspense is created in a short space of time. Looking back now to this stage I feel that the films we researched were defiantly the correct ones as ‘Fixation’ the film that we created has incorporated many themes from these particular three. We then in dept studied how the mise en scene, cinematography, editing and sound in the three films captured the perfect ambience and atmosphere. By studying the textual analysis we developed a fantastic setting and script for our film.

The film that inspired our setting was ‘What Lies Beneath’. We felt it was important through the setting to create something that is visually exciting as well as misleading the audience into a false sense of security. ‘What Lies Beneath’ is a film directed by Robert Zemeckis and it contains a number of bathroom scenes in a normal looking home, we looked in detail at how the cinematography and mise en scene was vital to the bathroom scenes as the setting is not horrifying but the way the camera is directed and the mise en scene that the director created made spine tingling dramatic suspense. The setting for ‘Fixation’ is my house which is a basic town house in Berkhamsted. The bathroom is an average bathroom which you would find in any household, a clip from ‘What Lies Beneath’ was the inspiration for our setting, and we created a similar scene in our film. In ‘What Lies Beneath’ they use extreme close ups of body parts such as hands, and feet, this creates a suspense of an unknown victim which is what we created in our short film.

‘Creep’ directed by Christopher Smith was the film that inspired us to have the film from the murderer’s perspective as well as from the victim’s. We watched the trailer for creep on ‘YouTube’ and the cinematography from the murderer’s perspective was unstable and shaky, this created an unnerving atmosphere for the audience and when the murderer was walking or running you could hear loud footsteps and heavy breathing, we decided that in our film the cinematography from the murderer’s perspective would be as if we the audience were looking through his eyes. A prime example of this is when our murder is walking up the stairs.

Another idea we got from ‘Creep’ is quick and swift cuts, reaction shots and flashing images. This creates a sense of tension and unsettling chaos.

Finally ‘Psycho’ the classic horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock gave us a brilliant insight into how to create a legendary scene. The bathroom scene in ‘Psycho’ is a scene which is famous worldwide and will forever be known from generation to generation. ‘Psycho’ is filmed in black and white which is due to the era in which it was mad, however we felt that the use of black and white film created an art house non corporate film feel. After capturing all the footage we needed we played around with what should be in black and white, we created a copy of our edited footage and put it all in black and white and compared the copy with the colour version, we felt that when all in black and white we lost some of the creative mise en scene which we worked so hard to create, but the black and white version did have a vintage spooky feel to it which I personally did not want to lose.

So we decided to create a compromise which I feel is the best decision we collectively made as a group, we kept the colour footage for the victims perspective which would then morph into black and white scenes from the murderer’s perspective. This not only created a visual contrast to the murderer and his victims, but it shows how to the murderer everything is black and white, life and death is in black and white. It also develops a clever link to the name of the film, the murderer has a ‘Fixation’ which is black and white to him, but to his victims is a lot more complex.