Evaluation Q1

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

For our film we used many conventions and ideas similar to that of other films in order to help our film fit into the zombie horror sub-genre.

In the narrative we decided to make the title sequence come at the end of our 2 minute sequence. This is after there has been a short intro to the film, introducing the audience to our 3 main characters. We did this as it leaves a good stand point for the film to carry on from after our small sequence is over.

I feel like we did a good job of creating an atmosphere worthy of the zombie sub genre. We used appropriate settings such as the hospital ward, our characters appear worm down like they had been in the rough for a while and we also had zombies in our sequence which makes it obvious to the audience that this is a horror film of that genre.

We used several point of view shots in our sequence because we let like they would add more of a sense of realism to our film. Point of view shots makes the audience feel like they are right in the thick of all of the action and that is exactly what we wanted. However, it could be argued that we used possibly too many POV shots and maybe should have used some other shots at times, for example an over the shoulder shot as we only had one of those throughout the entire sequence. This is something that we would have to look at improving if we were to do the film again. We also used wide shots to set the scene of the rooms the events were taking place in as well as many long shots. This was to emerge the audience in the action as much as possible.

The continuity in our film was very good on the whole except for one cut to David’s face in which he is looking a slightly different direction. The sequence started off slow and then got faster as it went on. This builds up the tension and then lets it explode on screen.

Again, we were supposed to start off with slow music for when David is just waking up, however after we exported the film we realised that the music had not been saved properly and therefore wasn’t in the scene. However, when we watched it back the group decided that it looked and worked better without the music so we left it out. As silent it added another element of tension to the scene. We then used fast music during the action scene to add more suspense.

For our mise-en-scene, we used a hospital ward for the location as we did a lot of research on 28 days later and used that as inspiration for our setting. The zombies all had make-up on in order to make them look more realistic. I feel like this did go well as the zombies scars and blood all looked very real and professionally done. David had a hospital robe on in order to fit in with the surroundings and i feel like this also worked well as he did look like a hospital patient.

Finally, for the typography on the title sequence we used a white font as it stands out the best to a black and red background. This was good as it meant that there was no chance that anyone wouldn’t be able to read it.