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

The first shot of our film displays the logo of the production company which we made in After Effects. We used After Effects as it produces a more sophisticated product than what we could have created using Premiere Pro. We used an animated logo in the hope of it being more interesting to look at and more successful at immediately capturing the audiences attention. We titled our production company 'Paranormal Productions' as it is suitable to the theme of the film and the alliteration of the letter P and the plosive sounds creates a catchy memorable name.

We titled our film 'Arabella' as it immediately introduces the antagonist of the film to the audience. It is an old fashioned Victorian name, and people can associate the Victorian Era with the horror genre due to the dull, eerie environment we see in black and white photographs and videos of the past. We decided to put our film title in an old fashioned font which we found and downloaded ourselves named 'Just Old Fashioned' to comply with the themes of the film. We chose a red colour as red is a typical convention of the horror genre. Due to it connoting evil, blood and danger.
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We filmed our opening in a sleepover setting and used stereotypical items that would be present in the mis-en-scene to highlight the modern time period the film is set. We also included the characters that are conventional in horror films, (naive teenagers that do not understand dangers until things begin to go wrong). With this close up shot, we aimed to lure the audience into a false sense of security as everything appears to be happy and normal and this point in the opening. 

This is a low angle shot that introduces the status of the characters. In our opening Effie (in the top left corner) is the main dominant character who is the catalyst for the bad things that happen within the film. We aimed to show this to the audience by physically raising her higher up and therefore displaying her higher status compared to Georgia (bottom right) who is victim of the film, due to Effie's actions. We aimed our film at a teenage audience and to make our opening appealing to them we tried to include conventions that were relevant to their age group. For example, we used soft lighting and colours in the mis-en-scene had the girls wearing light colours on their pyjama's with conventional hair cuts to emphasise their femininity. As women in horror films are usually conveyed to be very feminine and dainty.

This is a close up shot to display the emotion of the character at the time. At this point in the film, Poppy is scared by the story her friend is threatening to tell. By filming her face close up, the audience can see her expression of fear which is intended to trigger the same emotions within them. 

Here we use a point of view shot of Poppy turning the lights in the bedroom off which is a shot used frequently in horror films such as Cloverfield and other teenage horror films that like you to be put in the footsteps of the protagonist. This was used to create a transition which allowed the two characters sitting on the bed to move onto the floor without us having to physically watch them do so. The point of view shot allows the audience to see the film through one of the characters eyes, making it more interesting. The range of different shots generally create a more interesting atmosphere and allows the video to flow better and not just be continuous chunks of dialogue.

We used a candle as they are a typical convention of the horror genre. With candles come connotations of spiritualism, rituals, churches and religion which ties in with the themes of the opening. Candles are seen frequently within horror films similar to this one when people are summoning the dead to create an eerie atmosphere and because of how conventional they are, they instantly create this atmosphere when we see them. 

Here we used a match on action to highlight the turning point of the opening. This is where the film begins to get more conventional as the atmosphere intensifies, we used stereotypical music to highlight this. Again the main focus of the shot is the candle to force the audience to think of the eerie connotations that come with this. 

We used an over the shoulder shot to convey the expressions of the other characters whilst Effie tells the story of Arabella. Not only was this used to break up the continuous videos and create sound bridges, but to convey the characters emotions and build tension through them. We got the inspiration for this from the film 'Scream' and this technique is conventional of the horror genre. However, we challenged the conventions shown in the 'Scream' series as women are portrayed as weak and the female characters are usually sexualised wearing very little clothes whilst we have gone for the opposite approach in order to sensationalise the characters.

Filming

Before filming we encountered several problems, as the place we originally planned on filming was not available on the day and we had to find another location at the last minute. So instead of filming at Ashleigh's house we had to film at mine, which didn't match the RECCE photo's we had previously taken. So we took new photo's and adapted the previous ones to make them match. Also, due to the change of location, we were not able to get the child actor to participate in the film, due to my house being too far away with no suitable transportation. But we managed to adapt the film to suit the change and in the process actually make the film slightly more mysterious with more conventions of horror due to the ambiguity of not actually seeing 'Arabella'. 

The filming went relatively well and we did not encounter many issues once we got started. We used Ashleigh's DSLR camera due to the heavy demand for the school cameras and Ashleigh did the camera work and I helped the actors with their lines and adapted lighting and just generally directed the actors with the way I wanted the film to look. We managed to get all of the footage we wanted within an hour and a half and were generally happy with the way the film was looking.

However, the next day when Ashleigh brought the memory card into sixth form to begin editing, we could not find the footage on the memory card and discovered that the files had been corrupted when we had plugged the card into the card reader. We tried to recover the files in every way possible and took it to the technicians in the school who informed us that we would have to re-film as they could not get the footage back.

This technical problem set us back a few lessons as everybody else was editing their first cuts whilst we had no footage to edit. So we spent our time making an animated logo so we were not entirely wasting our lessons.

We got one of the school cameras and did several tests with converting the footage from the camera to the computer to make sure the files would not become corrupted and managed to get all of our actresses together again to re film a week later. The filming actually went better then the first time due to them being aware of the script and what they were supposed to be doing, so we didn't have to waste time learning lines and going over the way we wanted them to look. However, an issue we faced was that we were not able to hire a tripod from the library on that particular day so we had to adapt the shooting script to include quite a few hand held shots and find other ways to hold the camera still for the other shots. Fortunately, hand held camera shots are a convention of the horror genre so it was easy to overcome. We managed to import all of the footage onto the computer successfully and the footage was to a good standard that we were happy with.