1. Question One

2. Q1~ In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our opening sequence is
supernatural horror. We deliberately
formed to the conventions of this horror
so that it would be evident and
understandable to the audience.
We conformed to the conventions
through our use of:
> STOCK CHARACTERS
The protagonist is a young girl that we decided
would be American.
We took inspiration
from films such as Mr.
Boogie from Sinister
(Scott Derrickson,
2012) and the old lady
in Insidious (James
Wan, 2010)
When we were deciding on
how the film narrative would
continue after the opening,
we decided the plot would
make more sense being set
in America. This meant that
the character would have to
be American
The protagonist is a seemingly normal girl without any
significant individual differences about her appearance. Her
appearance conforms to the societal perception of normality
amongst feminine beauty and therefore uses the character to
represent and relate to all audiences, thus broadening their
target market and revenue from large audiences.
The antagonist is a spirit of a mentally
disturbed young girl who is given the
appearance of a hollowed out face, much
like that of a skull’s, so that it is bringing
forth the visual acknowledgment that she
is dead and separates her from the other
characters in the film.

3. > PLOT
The iconography of a photo album left behind by the
spirit to imbed the idea to research who it belongs to
into the mind of the main character. The actions leading
up to the protagonist gaining more knowledge and
understanding of the owner of the music box and photo
album would increase in intensity as the antagonist
tries to torment them.
I have written about
this briefly on the
blog before.
> LOCATION
The house is isolated and the protagonist is
completely alone. Although the house in
which the opening takes place isn’t
completely isolated – because of
accessibility of locations causing limitations –
the suggestion of isolation is connoted
through her solitude and barren furnishings
within the set. The normality of the house
creates verisimilitude which is important in
our sub-genre because the action would be
too unrelatable without it and would break
the audience away from the plotline as they
focus on the film’s unrealistic nature.
An isolated house is
used in The Others
(Alejandro
Amenabar, 2001)
as well.
We were inspired
specifically by the
plotline of Sinister
(Scott Derrickson,
2012)

4. > TYPOGRAPHY
The credits are written in a scrawled, hand
written style appearing to be sinister and
relevant to the genre. The title is similar except
that it is written out slowly to reveal itself creating
tension and suspense.
> SOUND
A song from the music box is played to hypnotize the
protagonist and used to anchor the sound to the image
of the music box. It creates tension because the pace
of it begins to slow down as the song progresses
slowing down the pace of the sequence and creating
an ominous atmosphere as the pitch becomes deeper
with its loss of pace.
The sound mix of the screeching, scratchy, sharp and
high pitched non-diegetic sounds are conventional in a
supernatural horror film because they are sounds that
make the audience uncomfortable from their unnatural
presence.
Have a listen to
some of the
background sound
we used in our clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWTZ
MClick on this link to see how
we used sound to create
tension in specific situations.
CLICK to watch the
title clip.

5. > MISE-EN-SCENE
Costume ~
Neutral coloured, plain clothing was conventional
because it connotes a neutral or drained emotion
thus creating an ominous atmosphere. Hannah’s
clothes are casual and her make-up is simple
because it adds verisimilitude to an otherwise
unrealistic situation. Jane’s black cape makes her
look like the grim reaper adding to her fear factor.
Lighting ~
We used the convention of low-key lighting that
created shadows from the characters movement. By
lighting the behind the doorway when Hannah was
entering the garage it created a silhouette that made
Hannah look increasingly foreboding.
Camera ~
The reveal swish pan bringing Jane into view when
the audience wouldn’t have expected her to appear
is conventional because it is creating tension
through the anxiety, unknown nature of the film and
awkward positioning they are put in.
We got inspiration
for the rotational
camera shot from
Donnie Darko
(Richard Kelly,
2001)

6. > MISE-EN-SCENE cnt.
Editing ~
A montage of shots presenting the action juxtaposed with filler
shots is ideal because it allows us to present the credits on a
screen with minimal distraction from the credited individual
whilst simultaneously introducing the narrative for our film – this
is vital and a convention we followed when creating our opening
sequence.
The flickering images of the spirit is conventional because it
gives the appearance that everything is not as it seems and
differentiates the antagonist from the protagonist.
An example of one
of our filler shots
with a credit on.
Although supernatural horror films contain some vivid and
gruesome violence it isn’t usually to the extreme level that we
took it in our opening sequence. We challenged this
convention because we thought the blood would have the
appropriate and elevated effect on the audience from the
sinister action that is being inflicted upon the protagonist in the
sequence.
The Mothman
Prophecies (Mark
Pellington, 2002)
used fillers as well.
We challenged conventions by:

7. Question Two

8. Q2~How does your media product represent particular social
groups?
The stereotypical conventional
characters in a horror film would
involve: an athletic, brave male, who
is seen as the 'Hero' character and
his companion who is a female in
need of his protection and timid, who
provides a constant supply of shrill
screams of fear and panic.
The male character
being all macho
and protective in
The Cabin in the
Woods (Drew
Goddard, 2012).
The residual ideology between the genders has
created a binary opposition between the hero
and the victim to so that there is an unconscious
association that masculinity = hero and
femininity = victim.
A conventional character is often a female who is made
weak through her indecisiveness and has an inability to
control herself or help other characters when in a stressful
and terrifying situation. This leads to the audience viewing
her in a negatively stereotypical way. We barely conform to
the stereotype of an over-emotional female role but we do
conform to the passive and weak residual ideology towards
women. We did this because we thought that it would suit
the narrative and that it would be an easily achievable
representation for us to portray in the shots. Part of the brief
we were given stated that we needed to research and
imitate conventions of a Horror genre and these ideologies
and stereotypes are the most common stock characters.
This concept was
developed by Lévi-
Strauss, a French
anthropologist.
Binary oppositions are used
frequently in films, especially in
the horror genre – particularly in
the form of good and evil, sane
and insane, rational and irrational
and human and supernatural.
CONVENTIONS

9. In the ECU from our sequence there is
a shot of a tear rolling down Hannah’s
face. The purpose of this was to show
that her consciousness was trying to
fight the possession and that she was
desperately trying not to kill herself.
However, it comes across as though
she is completely helpless and weak
and as though she has given up. It
looks as know she is not trying to fight
back and has instead given in to the
spirit. The tear makes her seem over-
emotional falling into the conventional
residual ideology constantly portrayed
in horror films.
We were inspired to
do this shot from the
ECU of the victim’s
face in Amityville
Horror (Andrew
Douglas, 2005)
DECONSTRUCTION OF A SHOT

10. Due to that fact that there is no speech from
Hannah throughout the opening sequence the
audience feel a lack of sympathy for her and the
horror she is facing. She is distanced from the
audience and the human quality of speech is
taken away from her. This effect acts as another
way of creating fear and tension because there
are no characters for the audience to feel secure
with.
We made the spirit female with the intention
that her character will subversively challenge
patriarchy by proving she can successfully
control and achieve in a position of power
without the aid of a man.
During the opening sequence the ghost becomes
an enigma, meaning that no information about her
gender, age or ethnicity are made apparent.
However, when we were coming up with the
concept of how the film would continue we
established that the protagonist would find out
about the identity of the spirit’ and information
about when she was alive.As a group of women it was
important to us that, although
we needed to conform to
typical horror film conventions,
we challenged the dominant
patriarchy that pervades the
media industry to try and
conquer the inequalities
between the genders.
LACK OF SPEECH
THE ENIGMA OF THE SPIRIT

11. Young people are the only people that are
represented in our opening sequence. This is
constructed by the character’s age in the sequence.
This is very similar to the majority of horror films
because the main age demographic that the film is
aimed towards is the 18-24 range and by providing
characters at the same age, the audience can relate
to the characters more.
We bring forth the binary opposition between
different cultures by exploring the idea of sane
vs insane. The Japanese mythology
(represented with the paper cranes) is
presented as a dangerous, unsafe and
associated with the protagonist’s insanity. The
Western culture, in our opening sequence,
is seen as the safe haven and presented as if
the character would have stayed sane and
impervious had she not been associated with
the foreign culture.
The main social group that is represented is
White American – an ideologically loaded choice
of ethnicity and one that is used consistently in
Hollywood films because they want to appeal to
their largest target audience and therefore have
created a white-centric convention for their films. A very white-centric
Hollywood.
Horror Film Age
Demographics

12. Question Six

13. Q6~ What have you learnt about technologies from the
process of constructing this product?
We were able to create professional looking
presentations using Prezi. We used Prezi specifically
for expressing our concept development. It’s clear
presentation made it easy for us to communicate our
ideas to anyone following the progress of our film
production on the blog but also to each other. The
format of Prezi meant that it was easy to link it to
the blog.
We started off with using blogger - to document our progression
in understanding the task given to us and enabling us to
develop it into our own concept that transformed into the
opening sequence. We could create text posts to discuss the
things that we’d discovered; add inspirational video clips and
our clips of our own creations from YouTube; post pictures; and
link to other websites such as: Prezi and Slide Share.
The blog allows us to reach out to various media forms because
not only can it be accessed on the internet but there is also a
free app that people can purchase in the App store.You can click on this links to go to our
Blog
~http://twgsbmedia14asgroup4.blogspot.c
o.uk

14. When we were completing our audience research we used
https://www.surveymonkey.com/home/
to come up with questions we wanted to ask people. We could send
it to a selected number of people electronically (saving paper and
further costs) and it was easy and quick for them to reply.
Social Networking sites allowed us to reach out to our target
audience and a much wider audience. It is free which makes it easy
for us to use. We created an official twitter page and posted the
sequence on Facebook to increase
Posting online meant that we could get feedback on how to improve
it and their opinions on the finishing project.
You can click on this links
to go to our
Twitter Page ~
https://twitter.com/possess
eduk

15. YouTube was a very important part in progressing through
all stages of production in our opening sequence.
We used it to put up small clips that we had taken on our
location reccies on the blog as documentation of our
progression. We have put the rough cuts and final pieces
of all our completed projects thanks to YouTube (The Juice
Slamdown, The Sound of the Wind and Possessed).
Once the clips were on YouTube we could export them to
various other forms of media:
- We could post a link to the video on numerous forms of
social media such as Facebook, the official Possessed
twitter site and any future social media networking sites
that we branch out to.
- YouTube was incredibly important when it came to
researching the horror genre and opening sequences.
Without it we would have struggled to view so many
examples and taken inspiration from them. We could
post the inspirational clips onto the blog so that we
could communicate concept development to each other
in the beginning stages of pre-production.
We attempted to create an interesting
Blog through multiple media forms, much
like The Hobbit’s (Peter Jackson, 2012)
Blog that documents the progression of
each movie to involve the audience in
every aspect of production and
distribution. Here is a link to the blog ~
http://www.thehobbitblog.com

16. We used Alex’s Cannon 60D camera to film the whole of our
opening sequence because it was the highest quality camera that
we had available to us and we thought that it would enable use to
create a better looking product.
We used a Tri-Pod to make sure all of the shots we wanted
remained completely steady. The tri-pod was easily adjustable
and, because I’d never used one before AS Media Studies, it was
a fantastic learning experience. The adjustability also enabled us
to achieve a huge variety of shots we were inspired to recreate
and thought would be visually impeccable.
We used a steadicam frame for the shot of Hannah in the
doorway. Using it meant that the turning movement from
angled to straight would be smooth. The smoothness would
mean that the audience would concentrate on the action
within the shot rather than be drawn to the fact that it isn’t
real.
We used lamps to make sure that the lighting was bright
enough to avoid blurring or an unintended grainy appearance
of the footage, keeping it at a high quality for us to edit with.
We knew that we could edit the lighting and colouring
afterwards so we didn’t worry about the atmosphere that the
bright lighting created. We focused on creating the perfectly
crisp shadows that gave an extra quality of sinister to the
sequence.
Hard at
work.
Alex is using the Tri-
Pod to film Hannah
folding the
newspaper article.

17. In Premier we stretched the time frame of
Hannah dropping the knife because we thought
the action was too quick for the audience to pick
up on its significance. We did this by slowing
down the pace of the shot so that the knife would
be released and fall in slow motion.
In the preliminary task we were introduced to the 180º
rule meaning that the camera stays on one side of the
action to ensure the creation of verisimilitude.
Original:
After we had finished and screened the rough cut to our
classmates, we were informed that we had failed to
abide by the 180º rule and it retracted their interest in the
action. Thankfully we had taken the mid-shot from a
different angle that we could use to successfully abide
by the rule.
In Final Sequence:

18. AFTER EFFECTS~
We wanted to create a more obvious look that the
protagonist in the opening sequence was possessed
because we didn’t think that we made it clear enough in
the narrative. We decided that we would be able to
achieve this by blackening out her eyes.
I took on the challenge to learn how to create this effect in
AfterEffects. It was very time consuming because the
eyes had to be edited frame by frame. Instead of just
placing a customised blackened-out shape on top of the
eye, I added a layer over the top of the original film and
darkened her eyes so that there was an element of her
humanity visible on screen. We are all very happy with the
outcome and have been given positive feedback .In the TV series
Supernatural they use a
similar technique to
distinguish between the
humans and demons.

19. Me and Alex discoloured the shots because the orange-yellow light that was created by the lamps didn’t
create the kind of atmosphere that we were trying to portray.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
After researching different films and their colour grading, I got inspiration from The Road (John Hillcoat,
2009) and it’s complete desaturation and removal of almost all of its colour; and the extreme deep
shadows shown in Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton, 2007). We tried to
imitate these combined colour gradings in our opening sequence.
We used the image
adjustment in Premier to
achieve the colour grading
that we desired .

20. CONTINUITY EDITING
We made a significant effort to achieve fluid continuity
throughout our opening sequence because we hadn’t
been as successful in our previous attempts, for
example there were some continuity errors in our
Preliminary task.
We achieved this by cutting on action and checking that
the action within the shots synced-up frame by frame.
An example of when we cut on action can be seen when
Hannah places the photo album on the bed. The shot
quickly cuts from a LS of her putting it down to a CU of
her hands placing it fully on the bed.
OVERLAYING
It took a relatively long time and many shots for
Hannah to fold the newspaper into a perfect crane. The
actions were quite boring on screen as well because
they were very repetitious. To conquer this we decided
to use a select few clips and overlay them on top of
each other to create the sense of time passing whilst
keeping the audience with the knowledge of what
Hannah is doing over the period of elapsed time.
We changed the opacity of
the clips so that you could
see each shot more or less
depending on the other
shot over the top of it.

21. SOUND
We used sound to anchor the visuals in our opening
sequence. When Hannah is slitting her throat a cutting
sound is heard that we added on during the editing stage of
production in Premier. We made sure that the sound lined
up perfectly with the action portrayed on the screen so that
we could maintain verisimilitude and maintain the audiences
perception of the constructed reality of the narrative.
TITLES
We edited on the individual titles using Premier. We
imported the font, Suicide Draft, from DaFont because
we thought that it’s scrawled, hand-written qualities
would continue well with our theme of insanity.
We where inspired by the titles in the opening
sequences from Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez, 2013) and
Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010).
Our originally idea was to have blood red titles but, after
applying the effect, it didn’t match the theme and colour
grading of our sequence and looked out of place and
unprofessional. We changed it to more of a rusty
coloured red so that it could blend whilst being
noticeable.