Monday, 16 April 2012
final girl theory
The term ‘final girl’ comes from the book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film created by Carol J. Clover. This term simply refers to the last character of a film left alive to challenge the killer, usually used in a slasher/horror film. This female role is usually played by a feminine/ girlie character, who is known to be a sensible and pretty character i.e. won’t drink alcohol or take drugs and in some way is either shown as an intelligent and imaginative Lady. She can be a combination of The Hero or the woman in trouble. The use of a woman as the main narrator allows emotion and horrifying action to flow into the viewer along with the characters. Women display more emotion than men, therefore, having a male narrator would decrease the emotional connection with the audience as they appear more masculine so they don’t show as much fear, whereas the female character would be able to provide deeper detail through her being terrified by her sounding action e.g. screaming and crying. There are 5 female characters in the shining, they are Wendy, the lady in the bathtub, Grady’s daughters and the hotel secretary. The hotel secretary has a small role in the film but she is carrying out a stereotypical female role in organising a man’s work schedule as ladies are organised so are able to organise what a man does. The only representation of sexual objectification in this film is through the lady in the bathtub. When she steps out of the bath and reveals her naked body Jack is drawn in by temptation and begins kissing her, her body then wastes away and she turns into a corpse; a conceivable punishment for Jack’s wrongdoing when her skin wears away this also be a metaphor for the way the male gaze is removed from that scene. Wendy is the most important woman in the film as she is Jack’s wife and also the final girl. She is showed as very domestic and familial, as she does the jobs around the hotel Jack is unable to do and she stays by Jack’s side (her husband) whilst he contests with his unstable mind. She starts to show how she is the final girl by the way she proved that she was an independent and strong woman as she fights against jack to save her and her son Danny’s life.
Sunday, 15 April 2012
Our Group's First Horror Trailer Idea
A women who is traveling on the train home from visiting her family, is sat with an unusual man. She tries to make conversation with the man but he has no response. She has several awkward moments with the man on the plane, which makes her uncomfortable. When she gets off the plane she collects her luggage and heads home. When she gets home she unpacks her suitcase and finds it is not her belongings and that something of real value is inside the suitcase. She then takes the time to decide whether to hand the suitcase in or keep it. After a long think she keeps the suitcase, and thinks that she has had some real good luck. She was sadly mistaken when she was the victim of horrid torture for making the mistake of keeping the suitcase, which belonged to the mysterious man on the plane. The torture began with just a few noises and odd episodes of events in her home. She then realised that she had made a big mistake in keeping the suitcase, and was going to be severally punished. She is chased by the man in her house, and is caught, where she can’t escape.
created by Amelia, Kyle, Ross and Charlotte
A women who is traveling on the train home from visiting her family, is sat with an unusual man. She tries to make conversation with the man but he has no response. She has several awkward moments with the man on the plane, which makes her uncomfortable. When she gets off the plane she collects her luggage and heads home. When she gets home she unpacks her suitcase and finds it is not her belongings and that something of real value is inside the suitcase. She then takes the time to decide whether to hand the suitcase in or keep it. After a long think she keeps the suitcase, and thinks that she has had some real good luck. She was sadly mistaken when she was the victim of horrid torture for making the mistake of keeping the suitcase, which belonged to the mysterious man on the plane. The torture began with just a few noises and odd episodes of events in her home. She then realised that she had made a big mistake in keeping the suitcase, and was going to be severally punished. She is chased by the man in her house, and is caught, where she can’t escape.
created by Amelia, Kyle, Ross and Charlotte
Sunday, 8 April 2012
target audience research
Audience Results
This is a graph showing the results from our target audience, we asked a couple of questions so we were certain about our target audience. The questions were...View more PowerPoint from Scrapod
1. what is your gender?
2. which catagory below includes your age?
3. Please rate how much you enjoy the following horror sub-genres with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst.
4. Who do you most often go to the cinema with?
5. How often do you watch horror films?
6. What is your favorite setting of a horror film?
7. Please rate the following advertising methods on their effectiveness on making you want to see that film. Once again with 1 being useless and 5 making you see the film no matter what.
8. what are the key features you would expect to see in a horror film?
There are also two graphs at the start showing Male preferences of horror sub-gendres in males and the next graph is the same but with Ladies.
Saturday, 7 April 2012
The Role of the Distributor
After a film has been produced you need to distribute it, in order for this to be successful you need to do this to the relevant audience. a good example of this would be the company's 
'columbia pictures' and 'twentieth century-fox' these are the top distribution company's and have been for years. two smaller company's but still successful are 'IFC Films' and 'Summit Entertainment'. for a distribution company to be successful you need to aim for products at the right target audience, to establish this, not only do you need to aim at the target audience, but you need to try target the audiences that doesn't usually fit into the main category. distributors do this by taking the main characters onto chat shows, radio and t.v. interviews and magazine covers to spread the word about the film. This is one of the positive things about having a well known actor in your film because people are automatically interested because they are known to be good actors/actresses. the good thing about chat shows and adverts is that they show the trailer and are able to talk about it, this then shows the audience what you would be watching and what it dislike. the three key points of a marketing plan are publicly, advertising and promotion. 
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
difference between a teaser trailer and and the main theoretical trailer
A teaser trailer is just a shorter version of the real trailer, it is there to 'tease' the audience so they are worked up for the real thing, the teaser can be released months before the trailer comes out, this builds up interest and anticipation from the target audience, they do this by showing snippets of the full trailer and by not revealing too much. in the teaser they also exploited the actors/actresses and directors in the film, if it is as normal a well known actor/actress it drags in the audience straight away as they would be popular due to the wide rang of films they are in. The theoretical trailer is much more in depth, its at least twice as long and is also more descriptive. it also shows more continent of the film which means it shows more of the plot, this also causes tension within the target audience. the teaser trailer also shows at the end of it the exact dates that the trailer would be out to let the audience know.
i will now show an example of a teaser trailer and a final trailer from 127 hours.
this is the teaser trailer that lasts 1 minute and 47 seconds. at the start of this trailer we instantly see names that are recognizable so people are interested and wanting to carry on watching.
this is the full trailer of 127 hours as you can see it doesn't rush as it is 2 minutes and 41 seconds long, in this time it is able to explain much more of the film instead of quick snaps like the teaser trailer.
i will now show an example of a teaser trailer and a final trailer from 127 hours.
this is the teaser trailer that lasts 1 minute and 47 seconds. at the start of this trailer we instantly see names that are recognizable so people are interested and wanting to carry on watching.
this is the full trailer of 127 hours as you can see it doesn't rush as it is 2 minutes and 41 seconds long, in this time it is able to explain much more of the film instead of quick snaps like the teaser trailer.
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge formsand conventions of real media products?
Click the image to be taken to my Flickr page to read my notes. Please be careful to put the cursor right on the lines of the boxes to read the appropriate text for each still.
Click image for my answer.
Monday, 26 March 2012
Friday, 16 March 2012
2 how effective is the combination of your main product and ancillart texts?
In order to create a good successful film, all films need a distribution company behind them for it to work with advertising. This creates a publicity and promotion strategy that reaches the films demographic target as possible. Magazines, potters, chat shows, trailers and websites are all examples of how the media spreads the word in order to get their film out into the public eye.
My film's trailer and poster I created play a big part in the advertising operation. The distribution company has a big say in the products and controls how and where the product is located and what it looks like. Therefore the distribution company have a critical role in their design to ensure that the right demographic target audience has been reached.
The phrase ‘would you open it?’ appears in both products the poster and also the trailer, this re enforces the central marketing message which is the message of the film showing repetition so people will recognise and remember it. This is why we used some rhetorical questions in our trailer because the audience really think about the question and how it relates to the film and want to find out what happens next.
The use of the same character was used on the trailer and the poster so you was able to relate the film to one another, if we didn’t use the same characters the audience misleading as well as confusing visual links are very important to create an overall more solid campaign. So people are able to tell who is the protagonist and villain
What is also essential to a good to a good campaign is publicity. The more chat shows, magazine covers and posters the film is on, the more people that will recognise it and think it is a well talked about film therefore it drags more people into the film. Without a good form of publicity, word of mouth, if they were poor comments the audience wouldn’t be interested and it would cause the film to go downhill.
My film's trailer and poster I created play a big part in the advertising operation. The distribution company has a big say in the products and controls how and where the product is located and what it looks like. Therefore the distribution company have a critical role in their design to ensure that the right demographic target audience has been reached.
The phrase ‘would you open it?’ appears in both products the poster and also the trailer, this re enforces the central marketing message which is the message of the film showing repetition so people will recognise and remember it. This is why we used some rhetorical questions in our trailer because the audience really think about the question and how it relates to the film and want to find out what happens next.
The use of the same character was used on the trailer and the poster so you was able to relate the film to one another, if we didn’t use the same characters the audience misleading as well as confusing visual links are very important to create an overall more solid campaign. So people are able to tell who is the protagonist and villain
What is also essential to a good to a good campaign is publicity. The more chat shows, magazine covers and posters the film is on, the more people that will recognise it and think it is a well talked about film therefore it drags more people into the film. Without a good form of publicity, word of mouth, if they were poor comments the audience wouldn’t be interested and it would cause the film to go downhill.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
analysing 3 horror trailers.
the three horror trailers that i am about to ananlyse are more jumpy horror rther than gory horror films, i prefure a film that your attached to rather than looking away on the gory parts that gives you chills up the spine. I think this because you dont normally expect something to jump out at you where as in a groy film, you watch the slow process of them setting up the gory parts and have to watch the injurys that its creating.
my first horror trailer is called the strangers.
in the first scene of the trailer, it has an establishing shot, showing where the characters are located, this really suits the topic because its and old house in the middle of a forest so the scenery its already scary
my second paranormal activity
this trailer uses no sound throughout this trailer, i think this is really effective because it becomes more real, as if your there with them, because its all diagetic sound so it puts the audiance on edge.
my third is The Orphan
at 1 minute 34 seconds they use a flashing light tecnique, this is really effective because it looks like she just appears out of no where, it also has a negative feel to it as lightning is something seen as bad so it adds to the fact that the orphan is a bad person.
my first horror trailer is called the strangers.
in the first scene of the trailer, it has an establishing shot, showing where the characters are located, this really suits the topic because its and old house in the middle of a forest so the scenery its already scary
my second paranormal activity
this trailer uses no sound throughout this trailer, i think this is really effective because it becomes more real, as if your there with them, because its all diagetic sound so it puts the audiance on edge.
my third is The Orphan
at 1 minute 34 seconds they use a flashing light tecnique, this is really effective because it looks like she just appears out of no where, it also has a negative feel to it as lightning is something seen as bad so it adds to the fact that the orphan is a bad person.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Narrative Theories
The theories of Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov and Bordwell Thompson & Claude Levi-Strauss can all be applied to the narrative structure of films such as Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror favorite; The Shining.
In our previous lessons we have been looking at the 4 marrative Threorists. these are todorov, vladimir propp, claude levi-strauss and bordwell and thompson. we then talked and tried to apply these theory to The Shining, (a 1980 horror)
Firstly I will look at propp, he worked on Russian folk tales and proposed a set of
narrative and character functions. He looked at hundreds of folk tales and identified eight character roles and thirty-one narrative schemes. The eight character roles are the villain(s), the hero, the donor who provides an object with some magic property, the helper who aids the hero, the princess the reward for the hero, her father who rewards the hero, the dispatcher who sends the hero on his way and the false hero. All these different functions and roles that Propp thought of can be realistic in any type of description. This theory is very well examined because in most films especially in the category Horror, you can fit all the characters into one of these categories.In our previous lessons we have been looking at the 4 marrative Threorists. these are todorov, vladimir propp, claude levi-strauss and bordwell and thompson. we then talked and tried to apply these theory to The Shining, (a 1980 horror)
Firstly I will look at propp, he worked on Russian folk tales and proposed a set of
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian Structuralist linguist issuing influential work on narrative from the 1960s onwards. Todorov said that the stories begin with equilibrium or status quo where
