{Evaluation

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

My media product doesn’t have any dialogue in it and so a lot of the general theme is shown to the audience through the sound motif as it is very disjointed and eerie, as well as instilling childhood fear because of the nursery rhyme essence of the motif, giving off the feeling that I was attempting to portray. By using this convention of real media products, it allows the audience to predict the theme of my project and also helps the audience to understand it a lot better. The same convention is used in ‘Insidious’, where a small child sings a song just before a major jump scare comes up. It also concentrates on the fact that the film is an introduction to the setting as well as the themes and character. By progressing this way we are also introduced to the idea that the character has done something very sinister. Personally, I think the use of a non-diegetic sound motif is better in this instance than if I were to use any dialogue simply due to the amount of mystery it adds to my project. Although, I think if I added in a few voice over clips that I could of manipulated to sound quite weird and creepy, they would have been also quite effective.

Sound

My project is very washed out, with scenes that were shot in greyscale and others shot with the saturation turned down, because I used these two conventions of real media products, thus connoting horror and danger, I feel that the feelings of eeriness were transcribed quite well. These conventions also give the project a very dreary feel, when added with the aforementioned eeriness, both generate a creepy, dark feeling. I would have liked the colour of the ‘blood’ in the teacup to perhaps have been a darker shade because it’s very obvious to me that it looks quite unrealistic and slightly ruins the whole theme I was trying to represent.

Colour

I used a range of crossfades and jump cuts in my project which are both again used in real media products. I tried to use jump cuts to develop my project – for example, an empty teacup which as the intro progressed, became filled with ‘blood’ and led to more of the “violent” scenes involving the knife. I also tried to almost cross knit the editing of the images and the sound motif that I had used, placing more “violent” scenes, i.e. the knife and flower overlay, where the music became more disjointed. This was quite effective I believe as it raised tension and made the work seem very dark at some points. By varying the lengths of each cut, I attempted to make it as visually exciting, trying to create an atmosphere where the audience doesn’t know what to expect in the upcoming sequence.

Editing

There wasn’t much text used in my opening apart from all of the credits and the film title itself. I placed them strategically around the images where it was a lot less dark, i.e. teacup in the grass, so that they were easy to read and not ignored. I placed most of the text in eye-catching areas so that they did draw some of the audience attention to read them but also keep audience attention on the images themselves. I made sure that the credits were up for a long enough time and also didn’t contain so many words ensuring that the audience could read them without having to struggle immensely. I thought to thicken up my credits that I should use the original author of Alice in Wonderland and also the director that inspired me to create my own twisted version of it.

Text

A lot of the scenes shot in my project were done in natural lighting as a lot of the footage was shot in my back garden and in front of a well lit window. For the majority of the black and white scenes, the lighting was substantially not as good as those with the less saturated colour, but I feel like this added to the horror theme of my work as the black and white scenes were the ones with a lot more graphic images. The darkness of the more graphic scenes was a convention used from real media products so that it gives off an uneasy feeling as not everything is clearly distinguished and makes the whole idea a lot darker and this therefore creates confusion.

Lighting

Again another convention I used from real media products was the variety of props in my project. The props were almost essential in my piece as they are what define my work to be related to Alice in Wonderland rather than just a messed up uncoordinated film opening. The flowers, cards, “potion”, teacup, etc. all relate back to Alice in Wonderland whereas the “blood” and the knife are what tie it in and link it with normal horror conventions. The use of costume also linked my piece back to Alice in Wonderland, but due to the dress being black and white, rather than Alice’s usual blue and white dress, this also helped my work and tied up the link between Alice in Wonderland themes and also horror.

Mis en Scene

My work mainly uses regular conventions of real media products, but there are areas where I believe it to challenge real products. Such as the horror theme, a lot of companies stray away from horror as it doesn’t act as a major income due to the smaller target audience rather than comedy or romance movies where the target audience is a lot higher. Another is the black and white shots, major industries don’t usually use black and white images in their products. Overall my piece really rather used usual conventions rather than challenging them, but I think this could be a good thing as if I completely challenged the norm of the conventions then my piece may have ended up completely nonunderstandable.

General Filming