Evaluation - Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The plot of our media product is around psychological tendencies of the main character, Lucy. Lucy is a teenager that is experiencing things ever since she killed one of her 'old school friends'.Our media product has a non-linear plot, this means the film is not in chronological order and if often used to recall a humans memory. The film starts where the main character Lucy is on the top of a building reflecting over previous events, it then cuts to Lucy walking to the bathroom and seeing someone in the mirror. Then a flashback occurs to the event that has been haunting Lucy.

The genre of our film is psychological horror. The definition of this genre is Psychological horror is a sub-genre of horror and psychological fiction, which relies on the mental, emotional and psychological status of characters to frighten or unsettle readers, viewers, or players.The film looks like our chosen genre as the main character Lucy is being haunted by someone. Lucy doesn’t understand why she is being haunted and who she is being haunted by.

In the film we use a range of different shot types such as medium and close up shots (the most common) as well as low level shots and a whip pan. The medium shots were used to assess the situation and close ups were used to show the facial expressions of the characters. Furthermore, the whip pan was used to imitate the movements of Lucy.

In our film we had two locations, one was a roof top and the other was a bathroom. The costumes were outfits that people would wear everyday as the characters are normal people. We used fake blood and a knife as the props for our film. These props were used in the last scene of the film when Lucy stabs Joe.

The editing in our film is quite slow paced but as the film gets towards the end the pace of the editing begins to increase and get faster as it is a very tense scene of Lucy and Joe arguing and eventually leads to the stabbing of Joe. This also helps to engage the audience as well as supporting the psychological horror aspects of our film. The sound used in the consists of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The diegetic sound mainly comes from Lucy as she talks to the person that is haunting her and the non-diegetic sound comes from the whispers. Non-diegetic music is also used to support the genre of our film, psychological horror.

The titles in our media product are placed throughout a range of shots in our film. Our logo for our film company is shown on a black background while the actual writing is in white, it fades out of one scene and into the logo so it is continuous. The film company logo and the name of the film are the larges to ensure they stand out whereas the name of the production company and the actors are in smaller black writing that appears on top of the scenes.