Evaluation Q1

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

My film is a horror/comedy. For the opening convention I used a location that is both dark and mysterious. I needed to make the audience feel curious about what was about to happen so I used mysterious, spooky sound.
During my research I had to think about what kind of an audience I was going to target with my film. My generation (young adults and teenagers) seem to enjoy these types of films.
To get a good idea of what convention I could use, I watched clips from various vampire/horror/romance films. Here are some typical conventions found in vampire films:

• Blood -  it's a key point in vampire films, however some films have more blood in then others. In my film there are a few clips where there is blood but there isn't a huge amount. I wanted the horror to be subtle and not a gorefest.
• Neck Biting & Fangs - Fangs are one of the most important aspects of a vampire film. They are also the most recognizable feature of a vampire and each film does them a bit differently. For example, In my film, I went and bought some rubber fangs for the actor to wear and you don't see them until near the end of the film. As for the biting of the neck, you don't see it happen close up but you see the vampire lunge towards the girl and she screams, then in the next clip you see her with 2 bite marks and blood.
• Costume - In traditional vampire films, vampires are dressed in black capes (Bella Lugosi 1927 Dracula). Where as in modern vampire films the vampire dress in dark clothes (Robert Pattinson, Twilight). Because we didn't have a lot of money to make this film, the actor wore black trousers, a hoodie and a black coat. This still make him look creepy and vampire like.
• Make up/Pale skin - Pretty much in every vampire film, the vampires are very pale skinned, this makes  them more scary and dead looking. Again because we didn't have a lot of money, we couldn't afford to go out and buy professional looking face paints, but luckily the actor(Richard) who played the vampire was tall, dark and pale skinned anyway.
  

Overall I think my final media product pretty much followed the stereotypical teen horror genre. The viewers would expect to see a number of things in the film, those that I listed above all featured plus the woods. In previous vampire films, like Dracula, Blade, any vampire coming outdoors in day light would explode but since the arrival of twilight it is not assumed that vampires can walk among us in daylight. So this shouldn't be a massive plot twist to viewers.