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

There are many areas within our film that help identify it as a horror film. Our film differs slightly from some horror films for example, horror slasher films are full of blood and gore, and this is what they rely on to make it scary for the audience. We chose to film our ‘hunt’ scene in a forest. We had to find the right place, as some places were to light and open. We needed somewhere dark and eerie, somewhere that would have an impact on the audience. When we found the right place it worked really well, however we decided to change the actual color of the scene. We changed it to a cold blue color and it made a real difference. It made the film more eerie and spooky. Our use of mise en scene added to the ‘horror’ effect as well. Obviously as our film was based upon ‘little red riding’ we needed to include some form of identity for the character. We decided to give her a red beret (hat), red tights and red wellies. We chose these items of clothing because we felt they gave the film a modern edge instead of simply giving her a red cloak. The red also works well with the situation as the wolf is after the girl and only the girl. The red signifies danger so the audience may subconsciously recognize this fact. As the rest of her costume is black the red stands out really well. We chose to have our wolf wear camouflage trousers. This shows that for one he needs to blend in to his surroundings as he ‘hunting’ and cant be seen but also because the army wears combat trousers. They are trained to blend in with their surroundings, and they are trained to kill this is a good characteristic for the wolf to have as he is seen as a humanized monster. We also needed someone quite big and bulky to play are wolf so he would seem stronger and scary. We slowed the ‘hunt’ scene down by about 40%. This worked really well as the film is scene from the wolfs point of view and this made everything look a little less real and human. Horror films are usually quite fast paced when something bad or scary is happening. Although our film is slowed down, we cut from each shot quite quickly. This has a nice effect as it makes the wolf look like he’s running really fast and is actually chasing something that is flitting in different directions. The longest shot is when the wolf sees ‘Little red Cap’ this works well being longer as it’s the first time the wolf sees the object of his desire, so it seems as if his world has short of shifted slightly, he’s not quite sure what to do, like he’s been stopped in his tracks, losing his instincts for just a minute. Then when everything kicks back in, everything feels a lot quicker again. The music we picked works really well. We chose I know by placebo. The lyrics sounded really haunting and the vocalist has a really unique and eerie voice, which gives a good effect when put together with the slow motion images. We thought a rock song would work best as they seem to be rawer than other music and this fits in well with the character of the wolf, as he’s a predator, which has raw animalistic features.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our film represents that social group of the male “predator” or “peeping tom” type of man. The film has a voyeuristic edge as we are seeing everything through the “wolf’s” point of view. As “little Red Cap” appears for the first time, we see her appear through the “wolfs” point of view and because of this we know that he is watching her. Because the shot is so long and slowed down, we feel the intensity of the “wolf’s” feelings as he sees her, we understand as he begins to run after her through the woods that he wants her and is chasing her. Also in one of the end shots, the wolf follows “little Red” through the forest slowly, watching her walk and hearing him breathe deeply. This puts an animalistic and dangerous edge to the scene, we don’t know exactly why he is following her, but we know it’s dangerous. Men that are cast as the “predator” in modern society are men that are to be avoided, as they are dangerous. We conveyed this in our film as the “wolf” character is alone in the woods, far away from civilisation and acts more animal than human as he runs through the forest. This instils fear in the viewer, as there is no axe-wielding maniac to be afraid of, we instead needed the audience to feel unease at the idea of the “wolf’s” voyeuristic enjoyment of watching the girl. The film characterises men and women. Men are shown in our film to be animalistic and dangerous, whereas the girl is shown to be innocent and at home in her surroundings. She is very innocent because of this and it characterises women to be unsuspecting and casts them as “victims”, whereas men are the “hunters”.


What kind of media institute might distribute your media product and why?

Although our film is a horror film, it isn’t a typical slasher horror, so when finding a distribution company that could possibly take on our product, we looked at films shot in a similar way and with a similar storyline, such as the Blair Witch Project. The distribution company for the Blair Witch Project was Artisan Entertainment, which is owned by Lions gate Entertainment. We got the contact information for the company, so if we decided to pursue making the rest of the film and having it distributed, then this company seemed like a good one to contact. We thought that this company may be interested in our film as their biggest release to date has been the Blair Witch Project (1999) and the company is still making money from it, with a plan to show a “Blair Witch” style festival in the summer this year. Because the company had such success with such a low-budget indie film, we think that they could be interested in ours, as the films are shot so similarly and have a similar plotline. The story is that of 3 people alone in the woods chasing a “monster” of sorts. The film has this in connection to our film and we ran the risk of having too much of a comparison. We then analyzed the Blair Witch Project and discovered that the similarities were not too much as the camera was handheld throughout the whole film of the Blair Witch, and we were careful to only use handheld in our film where it could convey certain meanings, such as watching someone or catching someone do something wrong, such as when we see the wolf hunt, or when the wolf first sees Little Red. We thought that our film could be very marketable as it is adapted from a fairytale. By using a fairytale to create our film, we have adapted the use of synergy and therefore have a market for our product. To make clear that the film is an adaption of a fairytale, we added taglines to the DVD box and the teaser poster we made, from the fairytale itself, to tie them together.
Artisan Entertainment Contact Details:
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Who would be the audience for your media product?

From the research that we gathered we think the main audience for our film would obviously be people who are interested in horror films. We posted our film on you tube but only had a few comments are replies. We have also posted links to our film on indie film making sites, horror forums and social networking sites and we have had a test screen within our film studies class. The biggest response was from the film class so we would assume that our audience would have to be interested in the theatrics of films, people who enjoy learning about films and the process of making them. Obviously our film is more likely to appeal to people like this as its not a big budget movie, people who are not overly interested in all aspects of film are not as eager to watch this type of film. However after posting the link to our film on a few random forums a minority of people did say they would like to see the full feature film if it was ever released. Most of the people we targeted are in there teens, as after some research we decided they would be the best audience for a horror. We decided to go and see Friday the 13th and haunting in Connecticut at the cinema, although these films are quite different one is a slasher and one is a ghost film they are both grouped within horror. We looked at the audience to cast a general demographic. What we found was that it was mostly teenagers within in the audience some people in there early 20s. However w had to take in account that Haunting in Connecticut was rated 15 and Friday the 13th was rated 18 so that does limit the audience. After our film was complete we also posted it on you tube and distributed the link to some different websites. We tried to aim this at our target audience as well as other people. We posted our link on http http://www.horrorexpress.com/ as we wanted to find out whether or not we had met our target audiences expectations. These are the people we are aiming our film at so of course their opinions are very important to our project. If the film does not attract them then it is most likely the film will not attract anyone.


How did you attract/address your audience?

To address our audience, in pre-production we made a questionnaire which asked them what they would prefer to see. We had already decided to create a horror adaptation of a fairytale, but we were unsure of what our target audience (young people/students) would want to see. In the questionnaire, asked what the audience would like to see us adapt, they had three choices, little red riding hood, Cinderella and Snow white and the seven dwarfs. After getting the results, we analyzed the Brothers Grimm fairytales ourselves, deciding what would work in a horror film and also looking at cast possibilities and possible locations for each option. After combining this research we decided to make a horror adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood as we had locations, cast and a plot already in mind, and the audience results showed that they would like to see this adaptation. We did run into a problem with the audience however. The story of Little Red Riding Hood is a fairytale aimed at children, and as our film is a horror, it’s obviously not aimed at children. We looked at other fairytale adaptations such as “The Company Of Wolves” (Neil Jordan, 1984) and the upcoming “Alice In Wonderland” (Tim Burton, 2010) we thought that if the film was clearly marketed as a horror then we wouldn’t have issues so we looked to make very clear the theme of horror in the film, using horror codes and conventions such as eerie woods, fake blood, innocent female victim, not seeing the face of the “killer”


Looking back at your preliminary task? What do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When we started with the preliminary task, we really had no idea what we were doing at all. We didn’t plan it very well and we did not research much at all. In our main project we spent time researching different shots and angles that we would use. We looked at other films for inspiration and to see what works well within the films and what does not. We thought about what we wanted our characters to look like, we drew them before we started filming so we knew what we wanted them to wear and what there hair would look like. We didn’t plan were we would film in our preliminary we just jumped straight in to the first place that looked good, this did not work out well as it was hard to find places to put the camera and the lighting wasn’t very good In our main project we thought about this a lot more and we tried to address the problems we encountered in our preliminary. We spent a lot of time looking at different bits of the woods to see which would work best with the lighting and which would be better for the character to run through. We found areas that would be good to set the camera up; space was a big problem in the preliminary so we didn’t want the same issues to crop up again. We also learned a lot about how the camera works while doing out main project, we took a microphone into the woods after shooting to get the sound we thought we would need to re record like footsteps, birds water and heavy breathing. When we edited the preliminary some of the shots didn’t fit together very well, but we just worked with what we had. When it came to the main project we filmed each shot from different angles and with different shot sizes so that when it came to edit it we had a lot more footage to work with which really helped us. It also meant that we had a lot more options if we didn’t like how a scene looked even if the shots worked well together. We also took the camera out for longer than we did in the preliminary because we knew we needed to get as much footage as we could. We also booked our editing time for a lot longer as we felt rushed doing our preliminary. We felt more comfortable than we did in the previous shoot as we could really sit down and think about what we wanted our film to look like and we took the time to make sure every shot was edited at the right moment to fit together with the next one. I think all in all we have learned a lot since our preliminary, practicing with the camera really helped us a lot and the more we edited the better we got and the more we understood which meant we were confident to try different things. We also learned that everything runs a lot smoother if you plan everything out before your going to do so you know exactly what’s happening on the day.


What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

To film both our preliminary and our film, we used the Panasonic DVC 60 camera. Other than the preliminary film, we had never made a film before. At first we were unsure about the camera but after the first few test shots, our confidence began to build. Techniques we used during the shooting processes included focus and exposure, which are tools on the camera we used to get a good shot, making sure each shot was in focus and at the correct lighting exposure, which changed often as the woods we were filming in, on our first location especially, were very dark. We also used tools in the shooting process such as the boom mic and the tri-pop. We used the boom mic to capture sound separately from film, and at a higher quality. We used the tripod to frame our shots more easily and give a professional look, as we didn’t ant the whole film to be handheld. Handheld camera gives a certain feel to the film, and we did want to capture that in some scenes but not all, so the majority of the film is shot using a tripod. When we first came to shooting our film, we worked from the script we had devised and knew we had to start with a shot of the woods, but we only had a 2 minute timeframe and didn’t wasn’t to spend too much time on an establishing shot before introducing the characters. To solve this problem, we put our main character in the establishing shot, creating a feel that he was the film, and it was all about him. By the end of the shooting process, we had a good grasp on the camera techniques and felt comfortable filming, enough so that we took the camera out again after our original shooting dates to film some extra scenes. The editing process, although long, was very educational. Our film used a lot of editing techniques, such as color correction, speed changes, sound edits and then the process of actually cutting the film together. We used a color tool to alter the color of our scenes to have a bluish tint, which gives the film an eerier-horror feel. To do this, we changed the red, blue and green levels to red -51, blue +104 and green +31. This effect gave the scene a tint, which looked eerie and unsettling with a fantasy edge without making it look too unbelievable. The scene needed to keep some believability so that the audience could relate. We slowed the speed down as we wanted to use quick choppy cuts to show the “wolf” running but in actual speed, all our footage was used by the time we got to 5 or 6 seconds. In the end though, the slowed down effect worked really well, as you assumed the “wolf” was running really quickly, too quickly for human eyes, and you had to slow him down to catch him on-screen. This was done with the “time warp” tool on the Avid edit suite. We slowed each clip to the same level, which on the graph was to just below 60% the original speed. When cutting the film together, we used some edit techniques. Some shots used a fade or dissolve transition to cut to other scenes, which we did to make the shots run together more smoothly. Near the end of the film we also used some L/J-cuts, so that the sound from the previous shot carried on playing in the next shot.