2. 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products.
3. Using Conventions We used conventions such as stereotypical characters often depicted in comical horror films i.e. our main character is a ‘blonde bimbo’, we decided to use these stereotypes as we wanted to create the same sort of humour and feel that other comedy horror films create. You could also say we stuck to the conventions of comical horror films when it came to our music as we produced very typical horror-like music that you often hear in horror films.
4. Developing Conventions One way we developed some conventions was by allowing the main blonde character to be Asian, this is not something that you usually see on screens and so we thought it would add to the comical feel of our film if our blonde character was Asian. We also found that most of the blonde characters in the comical horror films have a strong American or other accent, however we did not want to focus on this and so we allowed our character to speak standard English.
5. Challenging conventions of comic Horror Although we may have created stereotypical characters typical in a comic horror film, we did however also challenge many conventions. Firstly we did not create a ‘comical feel’ when it came to our music, we decided that we wanted ‘horror-like’ music all through the film to create a sense of continuity. We also challenged conventions by creating more of a horror feel than a comic feel, some scenes are just simply scary for some of our audience and not funny at all, we wanted to play with the audiences mind by not making it fully clear that our film is actually a comedy horror and usually with other films the audience can pretty much tell straight away.
6. Many comical horror films film their ‘scary’ scenes in the dark or at night time, and we decided not to do this. We thought it would create humour if we filmed all the ‘scary’ scenes in broad day light.
7. Costume, Makeup & Props As we wanted to play on the typical stereotypes that are often portrayed in horror movies, i.e. The ‘ditsy blonde’, we needed a costume to create this character. We bought a blonde glamorous wig for Lindsey (our character) to create this ‘bimbo’ stereotype. To add to this glamorous look we made sure Lindsey's makeup and clothes were typical of her character and therefore the character we were trying to recreate. The props were fairly easy to get a hold of as most of the props were things we would use in our everyday life, i.e. Handbags, books, mobiles etc. (add image of me wearing wig)
8. Editing In our research we found that many comical horror films do not use a great deal of techniques such as transitions, slow motion etc., so we challenged this by using various techniques and transitions in our film. We felt that to truly give a comic feel we had to use slow motion for example in certain parts of the film.
9. Camera work How we decided to go about using the camera to create a certain technique or atmosphere was very crucial to our film production. We needed to perfect and essentially work on our camera technique so that we could create the mood we wanted. For example there was no point always zooming in and out for no important reason as this can look very amateur, these were some aspects we had to focus on including many other aspects, such as ,making sure the camera was not too shaky.
10. Music & Sound-clips We produced most of our sound in the Digital editing suite, because of copyright regulations most of our sounds were created on the keyboard and then later imported into our film. Being able to produce our own music meant we were able to portray exactly what we wanted.