Main Task Evaluation

Our Film has come along way since we first began coming up with ideas. Both changes and compromises have been made, in order to carry our piece further. I believe we have made a successful piece of work and have put considerable effort into its making.

We both did research into different genres, looking at different styles of film within each genre, we also picked out films that best represented the style we wanted for our film. initially we both picked out two completely different genres, i chose an espionage film and Emily chose a comedy, unable to decide between the two we came up with a compromise and chose a psycho-drama instead as we were both fans of that genre. We then took this and did our own personal research looking into films that best represented the style and feel to suit our expectations of our piece, i looked into films such as The Talented Mr Ripley, One Hour Photo and Natural Born Killers to get a further understanding of the genre. i found this very usefull as it displayed the pros and cons of the genre however a major factor which came to my attention is the potential commercial aspect of the film as most of the films i watched of the genre are not hugely mainstream and commercially baised. With this in mind we decided to change to a conventional horror movie as this allowed us to explore traditional media conventions of the genre and it appealed to a much larger audience.

We also decided on a rating for the film and classed it as a 15+ due to the gory and violent nature of the genre. We aimed our film to appeal to the teenage audience, also to men and women in the early to mid-twenties as they represent a significant proportion of population and film-goers, this was done by choosing a well known and commercailised movie genre. Our film would attract this audience by its use of enigmas, violence and gore, all of which are conventions in keeping with horrors. It uses classic conventions that are used throughout typical horror movies, people come for the thrill of being scared. one of the main conventions of horror is projection, this technique leaves certain things unknown to the audience, for example in a monster movie the creature itself is often unseen for the most part as it leaves the viewers imagination to fill in the gaps, and when asked to do this a person will automatically imagine the thing most terrifying to them as an individual, therefore enhancing their cinematic experience and personalising them. This is essentially what is achieved through the use of enigmas, and can often attracts audiences for this reason alone as they know what they are buying into.

The characters represent numerous social groups, the killer represents the recluse loner and relates to the audience as many people are aware of a someone who is very reclusive and of whom they know little about. Also the victims represent the everyday person (usually female) and, through the genre, often plays on the fears of young women walking alone and again establishes a direct connection to the female viewers. The main "hero" (though not seen in our movie as it is only the opening credits) is often played by male in accordance to the classic horror genre, and often represents aspects that men like to think can be seen in each of them, this again relates to the audience and increases the films popularity.

The sort of Media Institutes that would distribute our film would probably be a mid-budget production companies and would either make it to the cinema ideally or be released straight on to DVD this is because there is a lot of horror movies in production and already done as it is a popular genre and finding new stories and new ways to shock the audience can be difficult, so any production companies are skeptical when funding such movies but can still apply to huge audiences.

We also watched horror movies to study their use of camera angles and methods, we decided to use a lot of hand held camera shot, specially with POV shots in order to capture the emotion of the character.



Since the filming of my preliminary task i have learnt more about the process of the shooting of our piece using numerous shots and more efficient editing. also working with another person has been beneficial as it allows us to muse of each other in terms of development. also it teaches compromise, teamwork and organisation and gives an idea of how to work in a full production team.