1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convention of real media products (i.e. of film openings.) What’s in our film that’s different from other thriller films? What characters?

Before making our media product we did a lot of research to see what were the typical conventions used to make our film opening successful as we wanted our media product to look as realistic and professional as possible. We watched and analyzed a lot of opening scenes which linked to our genre of psychological horrors e.g. red dragon. We also watched some jack the ripper documentaries to have more knowledge about the character so the role would be played well because our film was based on the historic jack the ripper story.

My media product used conventions of real media products by the location we did our main filming shots which was in a alley way this is a typical place where main scenes in horror films are set as it is in a darkened and closed  which area which builds suspense all through because anything could happen at any time. Our filming location was in Rochester as we made our film presented in the Victorian era and Rochester was the area which presented the Victorian times well so we decided Rochester was the best location to use. Our characters represented the type of people who would live in those times. In this generation psychological horror films are modern so us setting our film in the Victorian era was different and not like normal psychological horrors. It being different meant as well as using the typical conventions in a psychological horror film we were able to add our own ideas which shows originality.

My groups opening film challenges the form of real media products as we didn't just show a normal opening scene which normally leaves with a cliff hanger, we showed all our main scenes in one just not in detail to give a short preview of the main scenes. This is different from other psychological horrors or any film opening which is good as it shows our ability to watch other real media products but not emulate it but make our own idea and make it better than real media products.

The costumes we used were typical costumes that fitted the role of the character. There were only two main characters in our film opening and these two characters had costumes which presented typical people who lived in the Victorian era. Our costumes were very stereotypical ways of presenting males and females of that time.

My media product followed the conventions of other film openings by including some of the main titles and credits in the scenes. This included who edited, produced and directed the film.

Another typical convection we used was the mise en scene around our main characters, there was no daylight throughout our film opening so it gave the psychological horrors film effect because these type of horrors normally have a dark, dull atmosphere to create jump scares and to make the audience intrigued to what’s going to happen next, which gives reasons to why psychological horrors are really popular because people always don’t want to miss something so they carry on watching, we took this into consideration and we made sure we added it to our film opening and tried to make sure we had the same effect.

In our media product we created our own music this was to create the atmosphere of tension and suspense. The tempo of our music fluctuated as it went louder and faster to build the suspense that something extreme was about to happen which is a typical way of building tension and suspense in a psychological horror. We used garage band to create our music and first wanted to copy a track we heard which linked well with our film, however we found this difficult so we decided to improvise and create our music.

When filming we used a selection of both cameras and our iPhone's. We started using cameras as we found the quality of the cameras were could and easier to film with however the battery life wasn't very could so we all had iPhone's to use as a back up just in case the camera died,  we found that the quality was much better than cameras this worked well as we were all able to film loads of different shots with our phones and put them all together.

In my media product we also used a slow motion effect this is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down, normally seen in horror films to give the audience a feel of suspense, which also keeps viewers watching, so in one of our scene we used this to also give a psychological horror effect. Another thing my group used for our media product that other horror/thriller conventions use was similar camera shots, panning shots, close ups and view shots are used in most psychological horrors which were the most common camera shots we used in our film opening, the view shots are really good shots which are used in psychological shots as it really gives the characters point of view we used this in our media product when our copycat jack the ripper was approaching the prostitute this adds suspense and also pulls the audience in, we also used close ups which shows facial expressions and feelings of the characters, it makes you feel like you’re the character it is an effective shot as it shows true emotion.