Question 1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

 Characters:

In our film, there are only two characters; the protagonist and the antagonist.  You can only see the antagonists hand in our film, which would create tension as it leaves the audience wondering who it is. A convention of horror is .Our film challenges the horror conventions as Amelia is alone and doesn’t have a male to protect her.

Fears:

We used specific shots to show the main conventions of horror. The close-up and point of view shot shows the fear. In our film, there is a teenage girl walking through the woods by herself. She then starts to hear noises such as rustling. She then starts to fear the woods and she thinks that someone is following her. Our film covers some of the main characteristics of fear because Amelia seems vulnerable when she is walking through the woods by herself. Also, the unknown is when Amelia gets a call from and unknown caller. And we left death open for interpretation, no one known whether Amelia was killed or not.

The title of my film and font:

The title of our film is ‘Amelia’. We decided to call it Amelia as that is the name of the main character. Even though it looks as though Amelia is about to be killer, this gets the audience wondering whether she was actually killed or whether she comes back from the dead. The title is shown at the end of the two minutes and we put the title just as Amelia turns around and gasps. We did this purposely to create tensions and suspense. In our film, all of the titles are the same font. We did this because we wanted to continue with the whole theme but we also wanted to keep with the flow of the titles appealing to the audience. This was also done because we wanted to keep it professional. The title of ‘Amelia’ appears just as Amelia gasps and it fades into the centre of the screen because it grabs the audience’s attention but is also focuses that the film is purely based on Amelia. Even though the font is the same throughout the whole film, the credits at the start of the film are in white which shows Amelia’s innocence, but at the end of the two minutes, ‘Amelia’ is in red which suggests danger and blood which suggests that she is either in danger or no longer innocent.

Setting/location:

Our film is set in the school and in the woods outside of the school. We chose these locations as they were fairly isolated at the time which is a convention of horror. We also wanted Amelia to be portrayed as vulnerable and this was easily done as she was alone in an isolated classroom and woods. In a lot of horror films, they seem to use small, compact spaces such as cupboards/small rooms to make them feel trapped.  We wanted to go against this by having a wider space which stops her from being trapped and the impression that anything could be out there.

Costume and props:

In all horror films, the costume and props create the atmosphere and tells the audience a lot about the film. The costume we used was a long-sleeved blue shirt and black trousers. We decided to have this as the costume to show that Amelia has been at sixth form all day. Amelia is fairly covered up which suggests that she is innocent and not hypersexual. In our film, we didn’t use many props but the main prop we did use was the cracked phone. This suggests that Amelia is careless which could also suggest that Amelia is vulnerable. To begin with, our main character was brunette which went along with the conventions. But now we go against the conventions as the main character is blonde.