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.

My Foundation Portfolio Evaluation

My Foundation Portfolio Evaluation

As an introduction to creating films, our class was given the instruction to capture and edit correctly a person walking to a door, having a close up of the door opening then the person entering into another room which would then lead onto a conversation between two people then to have a person walk out of the room, this was our preliminary task and it gave us all a sense of confidence which we needed to be able to create our two minute film.

The class were then put into groups; we were instructed to create a two minute film of a genre of our choice.

I was in a group with Georgia Entrican (1234mai.blogspot.com) (mediathriller.blogspot.com), Tom Arch (tomsmediathoughts.blogspot.com), and Danielle Gisbourne (dannigisbounre.blogspot.com) and my own blog is (hellogracesmedia.blogspot.com)

Our group name is ‘Creative Film Productions’ we on this name as it sounds professional and it incorporates the idea of creating films which gives it an organic and unique company rather than a big corporation. The genre of our films was allowed to be anything but previously in class we had been discussing thrillers and everyone from our class decided to create thriller films, our group felt that the thriller genre would be both exciting and enable us to us a huge amount of imagination as the genre has such a huge scope. We wanted to have a chilling ambience which would create suspense for the audience.

Thrillers

Whilst edititng our Media film we brought some new ideas to the table, something i personally felt strongly about was making the film look more like an Arthouse film than a big Blockbuster, and a way of doing this would have been to put the film in black and white, by doing this the film would look more creative, but we collectivly saw that some of the mise en scene that we has specifically created such as the use of red nail vanish on the victim's hand, this dramatic look was lost and therefore the feeling of horror and anticipation in the whole movie was lost.
However as i am a stubborn person i did not want to give up on the idea of using black and white so we disscussed turning it into black and white with some areas where there is a a great deal of fantastic mise en scene still in colour. An example of this is the close up of the victims hand in the bath. the red nails are a huge feature and the viewers eye is quickly drawn to them. This is when we decided that it would be a good idea to have the murderer's perspective in black and white, beaucause his fixation is as clear as black and white, just to kill, and then the victims perspective can be in colour enabling us to keep some fabulous colourful shots and still keeping that edgy arthouse movie feel.

Thrillers

We found it hard deciding on a name for our film that explained the film but made sense as well.
To start with we played around with words in Latin and different languages to see if anything creative and unusual came up, we quickly realised that that was a silly idea as our film was set in England and there was no foreign connection.

AX TO GRIND was the popular choice as we had imagined the killer with an axe and it also would suggest the man has a constant and relentless vendetta.

However, once we began filming and editing our film, we grew to hate AX TO GRIND and changed it to
FIXATION


DVD SYNOPSIS of FIXATION.

London. Darkness. Women are unsafe.Because something is watching. Something is waiting. Something unknown, unhinged and unrelenting. A man with a fixation. A fixation to kill!As newspaper reported Rachel Gellor (Kate Winslet) investigates a series of brutal murders of women in London, little did she know that she was next on the murderers list.

Thrillers

My blog has been neglected recently due to a mountain of media filming work and drama performances, however, now they are safely out the way i can comment on the hard work and effort that has gone into the making of our thriller scene in the past 4 months.
It was not an easy ride, to start with we contemplated and toyed with dark creepy car parks, an anonymous victim and a cold blooded killer. But we soon realised that the location of this would make filming in our free time very difficult.

We then spent the odd few of our lessons researching and watching clips of horror movies online to give us some ideas, What Lies Beneath, The Strangers, Nightmare On Elm Street and Creep we focused on the way these films had been shot especially What Lies Beneath and Creep to see how they created atmospheric tension and suspense. Unfocused and distorted shots form Creep created a spooky uncertainty which would fit well into the horror genre that we strive to achieve. What Lies Beneath heavily relies on the music to create an atmosphere as the scene that we looked at was set in a well lit bathroom.

It was this clip that gave us the basic idea to set our Thriller scene in a bathroom, it was a different idea to many of the other media groups, it also would enable us to film whenever we please as the location was at my house. We played around with the idea of filming in dark woods as well but realised that the amount of natural light would be a problem.

We then created our Storyboard and the plot for the film. I was to be the helpless victim and Tom was to be the unseen mysterious womanising knife bearing killer. Mr Van Straten filmed us speaking to the class about the ideas behind our film and this is on youtube but currently being on a school computer i am unable to get hold of it but weill put it up later.

http://issuu.com/svanstraten/docs/danni_film_plan_final_260109

this is our film plan containing everything that there really is to know about the ideas of our film.

New films.

In Bruges is a film that i watched a long time ago and thought nothing of it whilst i was watching it, then a week ago i watched it again and its comic value shone through, it was hilarious, Colin Farrell is beautiful and plays a hit man called Ray along side with his mentor Ken, Brendon Gleeson. Ray kills a pervy priest but accidentaly kills an innocent little boy in the process, Harry played by Ralph Fiennes is the leader of the Hit man troupes and has the rule if you kill a child you must kill yourself. So Ken and Ray get sent off to Bruges, the worst place in the world, ever,
While Ken enjoys the historic city, Ray, who is in inner conflict due to the death of the boy, feels completely bored and misses his home. Ray meets the small time drug-dealer and crook Chloë, who sells drug to the cast and crew of a movie that is filmed in Bruges, and has an incident with a Canadian tourist and later with Chloë's boyfriend. Meanwhile Harry, who has an stringent code of principles, orders Ken to kill his protégée Ray.

the film contain, cocaine, guns, sex, guns, pregnant women, guns, bald men being blinded, Bruges, fat americans and Midgets.
the film is hugely racist and uneasy to view at times due to this fact, but after a while the comedy comes through and i found it astonishingly funny.

The thing that interested me in the film was that it was only shown in 28 cinemas in england and was mainly shown in art houses. It swiflty became a bit of a cult film. In Bruges is an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning 2008 film directed and written by Martin McDonagh.

The Preliminary Task

This is my media film which starred the beautiful Danni and Lara with help from miss Entrican
the link to my story board is here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/svanstraten/3196400791/in/set-72157612374525304/







and the link to the video is.. currently unavailable due to the fact i am unable to get on YouTube.

We are beginning our filming for our scary movie currently and it is going well, yesterday we began shooting some scenes outside but we had to wait until it got dark which was a bit frustrating.
i am a bit nervous about our bath scenes in our movie as i am the actress. 'Axe to grind' is about a lonely man who prays on women due to him being neglected as a boy. He finds his victims in normal coffee houses and is a typical stranger that you would see everyday, nothing is scary about him, until he follows you home, watches you, waits for the right moment and then brutally kills you. we have decided to film it so you never see the mans face and only his implements he will kill you with, his gloved hands and his feet.

We are hoping to film it in two days, and we may have it all in black and white but are undecided. tom is creating a soundtrack for it which is amazing and will be very odd and ery.
We took some pictures of my bathroom to see how we can film it form different angles. we will be filming it from toms perspective and there will be no sound bar the soundtrack that tom is creating.