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

Seona Carolan - Porcelain

Porcelain • Our creation of Porcelain has a very formulaic structure

and uses many adaptions from other films to create what I think is a stereotypical horror film. I believe that in Porcelain you can see inspiration from many other famous horror films. Because we have played on common stereotypes and used the typical conventions of the horror genre we haven’t challenged any of these but instead have found other ways of making our piece different.

Cinematography• Porcelain has a strong theme of family life meeting

destruction which is displayed in our sequence through out. Some clips that I think reflect the typical horror them of child is the close up images of the doll. The inspiration for this was from The Woman in Black – 2012 James Watkins – heavily because I found it evokes the feeling of fear from an object that should be seen as innocent.

Inspiration Porcelain Woman in Black

Woman in Black • This film uses dolls in a very simplistic way yet creates a huge

change in atmosphere for the audience watching because of the use camera angles. The close up images on the doll make the viewer feel that this toy is different. The editing of the colour pallet then aids the shot to gain a feeling of darkness and expectation of evil. The use of close up images is typical of a horror film and it is used to show emotion and hide the view of the audience. We used it to build emphasis on the doll being the key source of turmoil for our protagonist.

Cinematography refers to movement.

In my piece we used movements of the camera to lead the audiences eye point to what we wanted them to see. We found creating good quality tracking shots particularly hard to get right but I believe I managed to shoot a couple of shots well. We wanted the audience to have different parts of the doll revealed to them through movement and focus.

Focus Before my group started we had little knowledge of how the DSLR worked and how we could change settings such as the focus to completely alter the shots we were taking. I had watched Insidious were they used the change in focus to reveal that the image they thought they were looking at was in fact something else completely. This can create a small roller-coaster effect for the audience as we build suspense and then drop it again.

Location • We used two locations. A house and the woodland area. The woods in

particularly conforms to the conventions of the horror genre. There are many films based in woods and I think this is because they create a dark lit area, covered with trees which form creepy shadows and normally the woodland is very cut off from technology and other people. This is why we chose to use the woods. We wanted to make it clear that the protagonist was so desperate that he felt this dark place was the safest place to put the doll whom had caused so much peril. The film that helped us decide on a location was for me The Blair Witch Project – I think this is an iconic horror film that uses the location to create a feeling of uncertainty and anticipation for the viewer.

LocationPorcelain Blair Witch Project

Editing • A typical convention of editing in horror is fast cuts and

change of the colour pallet. I think this is most visible in the montage at the start of the sequence. My favourite title sequences are Se7en and Durham County. This is an iconic montage that influenced my group into draining the colour of the shots and adding a higher contrast of the black and white. We made fast cuts between each image because we thought it would build tension for the audience similar to that of Se7en and Durham County.

Colour Porcelain Durham County

Fast pace cutting Porcelain Se7en

Characters: Paul Wood

I think this is one of the main areas that our piece could differ from the conventions of horror films and gender in general. Our character Paul Wood is the weakest character despite being a grown man, a father and successful man. He feels the effects of the doll the most even though it is his daughters toy. He gets so desperate he runs and hides the doll which isn't something you expect of men in horror film because it's normally them who defeat the evil. A film in which the male is also appearing as the weakest is Insidious, where the husband falls under the influence of the demon.