CF: Evaluation; Question 1

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

• Our final film opening both challenged and supported the traditional attributes of other media products in the same genre and format (horror/thriller movie), we decided to use some traditional aspects to ensure the audience knew what the genre of our media product was, while we challenged some in order to almost shock the audience, in that they may have just started to believe that our product was simply a horror/thriller hybrid, but then the use of enigma codes make the audience question their thoughts so far, as they may start begin to think that it may be a phycological horror or a noir thriller.
• A typical characteristic of a horror/thriller movie that we incorporated into our film was that way in which the culprit of the crimes was very discrete, in that almost nothing concerning his personal appearance was given away, this was done through specific use of mise-en-scene which was researched through a survey. This was useful as at times, we were unsure whether or not to use this concept, but we used surveymonkey.com to create the survey, and sent it to our peers, friends and family to find what they thought concerning this. A vast majority voted for us to not convey much at all when it came to the appearance of the antagonist.
• An attribute of our film opening that we felt challenged the traditional features of horror and thriller movies, is that specifically, in other movies where the plot is based around the planned murders of a sociopath, very little is given away about the motive of the murders or the way that they are planned, which we felt was a crucial part of the narrative of our film opening. Our opening clearly shows that the motive for the murders is that people who have broken the ten commandments are being murdered, this also gives an insight into the antagonists thoughts, as it implies that he may be mentally unstable, which we felt would have been a major aspect of the film if we were to make the entire motion picture. 
• This creates a juxtaposition, between “Damnation” and “Seven” (Fincher, 1995) in that, “Seven” does not show the motive for the murders until a substantial amount of time into the movie, while we decided to show the motive for the murders within the first 3 minutes.
• Another major attribute of our film opening that contradicts the traditional concepts of a horror/thriller movie, is that the murderer appears to be very calm and collected, this contrasts with the murderers in other films that we researched such as “The Amityville Horror” (Douglas, 2005) which shows the murderer to be in a distressed mood, also in this movie, the murders are shown to be committed out of instinct, while in our media product, the murders are shown to be well planned, this creates suspense, as it makes the audience wonder “Why does he feel the need to kill those who disobeyed God?”.



• This picture is from "The Amityville Horror" (Douglas, 2005) and shows the antagonist to be very upset which is conveyed by the tears from his eyes, this is in a scene where he is killing his loved ones, but seems very distressed, and conveys the situation in a way that would suggest he has no choice but to commit these murders. This reinforces my point of murderers often coming across as distressed and agonizing.

• This picture displayed above from our opening to "Damnation" is from the scene where the murderer is approaching the victim before committing the murder, he is shown to be very collected and harmonious. The idea that the murderer would be so calm was an aspect we wanted to convey strongly, and after watching our production to the opening a number of times, it would be fair to say that perhaps we did not convey this as strongly as we had wanted to, which is something that we have learnt, and could use in any future productions.
• A traditional attribute of a horror movie that is common in horror movies, but not neccessarily essential, is the use of a fast-paced montage, specifically, these are sometimes used in films featuring a murder, and are used to somtime show the planning and motives behind the murders. A key example of this is in "Seven" (Fincher, 1995), where the audience were shown the murderer preparing to commit the murders, this scene had a very discordant and 'scratchy' feel to it, which we decided to use as inspiration. We felt that this complied with our resultant theme which had a noir-type feel, because naturally, the audience felt like a detective, as in their minds they were attempting to conclude why the murders were taking place?
• Another traditional aspect that we incorporated when designing the appearance of our antagonist is that we decided to predominantly only show the character's silhouette and only really show the character in  a dark environmnent. Concerning camera techniques, we thought we would avoid showing the antagonist's face on the camera, and so we only used long-shots when showing the antagonists full appearnece In order ensure that their identity remained concealed, which we decided to do after recieving the feedback from our online survey which was part of the audience research process, in which many people said that the antagonist's identity should not be revealed. The original idea to conceal the antagonist's identity came from "The Usual suspects" (Singer, 1995), where the mysterious character's face was not shown. They also concealed his identity by the use of dark environments (due to dim lighting) and  a dark colour based costume, his full body was covered up by the use of a long coat and a larger hat. This acted as inspiration for "Damnation".