Evaluation Part 4

Evaluation Part 4: Conventions

My film is a Horror/Thriller. We tried to make our title sequence conform to the codes and conventions of this genre to some extent to make it appeal to our target audience.

The narrative involves a teacher investigating the disappearances of children that are caused by a paranormal force. This contains a common convention of thrillers being the detective part. Thriller films are often about detectives or spies etc. because they contain an element of mystery. Our narrative also contains conventions of horror films because of the mystery/enigma element, it makes people anticipate what will happen and build suspense, which is used a lot in horror films.

The soundtrack for our film is a somewhat conventional for our horror title sequence. The actual sound is really gritty and abrasive as reflects the style of static effects we used in the sequence as well as contributing to make our film reflect the genre because horror and thriller films are often made to seem gritty and real to make audience think whatever happens in the film could happen in real life. The soundtrack also contains a build up which is used a lot in these genres to build up tension and then to frighten the viewer. This allowed us to make the videos clips match to the parallel soundtrack and use faster cuts to build up to make our sequence more exciting and frightening.

The setting challenges the convention of horror to some extent because it is in a school.  School settings would usually be seen in a teen movie, comedy or drama film, the films might also be aimed at a younger audience. Some examples of films with scenes in a school are ‘St. Trinians’, ‘Superbad’ and ‘High School Musical’ which are all teen movies and/or comedy films aimed at a young audience. However the setting can be used as a horror setting because we filmed with the lights off and added effects to make the school seem creepy and dark.

The camerawork was inspired by ‘Insidious’ and we used worms eye view and close angle shots to obscure the full view of the main character and to make it seem like he is being watched. We also used a pan for a similar effect that we tried to make seem like it was shot from a surveillance camera. We were also inspired by the dark shots that are almost just silhouettes of the light/dark so we purposely filmed very dark shots.

Insidious

In editing we made some of the shots that appear as found footage darker and more obscured by using a high contrast and heavy static effects. This is makes the audience wonder what is not in view and creates an enigma. We also wanted the cuts to be generally medium length but used match on action to make the scene appear to merge and seem slow paced, later on during the build up we used slightly faster cuts and no match on action to make the video seem to get more erratic and build up just like the soundtrack. We wanted the editing slow at first to build suspense and them get faster to build up to a scare which are commonly used in horrors and thrillers.