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

Title Firstly our movie is called ‘Diablo’ which means devil in Spanish. This immediately shows us that this movie is a horror film and starts to attract the audience that we want. This is a common convention of a horror movie because the title is the first indication of what the film is going to be about and if the target audience is going to be interested in the movie. Another reason why we chose to have the one word title is to make it short and snappy, this is a good thing to do because if it is short then the audience will find it easier to remember. Many horror films have done this for example Annabelle, Saw and the exorcist.

Setting Our production contains shots that are quite common in horror movies. The locations that we chose to shoot in were in the forest and in a house, which we used to make it look like they were in a psychiatrist’s office. The forest is common in horror movies because it is easy to make a scene quite scary in there. There are a lot of narrow paths which we used to make it look Jarod (our main character) was being chased. Another examples of movies which have used the forest as their setting could be the Blair witch project. The forest was a good setting for us because when Jarod was running from Diablo it gave us a sense of isolation, which is essential in a horror movie. Isolation helps to build tension and sympathy towards the character in the movie which is very good, this means that the audience will naturally become more attached and find the movie a lot scarier. Another benefit was the fact that during editing we changed the filter on the camera to make it look darker, which would also make the movie a bit scarier.

Opening Scene A common convention of horror movies is having an opening sequence which lures the audience into a false sense of security by making them feel like everything is alright. So when everything begins to go wrong the audience would be more scared by our movie. We show this in our movie opening scene by having Jarod in a room getting treated by a psychiatrist. This all becomes more scary when jarod’s bad memories are triggered and we begin to see how scared the young man is. We are shown a scary flashback which shows everything that he has gone through. And when he comes back around from his flashback he is greeted with the red eyes of Diablo and we are actually introduced to the monster and the main antagonist in our movie.

Editing and sound A very important convention in a good horror movie is good editing and sound. Flowing seamlessly between the scenes is important to keep the audience locked in and not allow them to become distracted. Also good sound is definitely needed because having music, stings and score music to help build the suspense and also add emphasis when the suspense climax’s and there is a jump the music will increase the effect. We use these convention is Diablo to hep build the suspense and keep our audience on trying to guess what is going to happen next in the sequence. We used score music, stings. For editing we used a fuzzy screen to drift between the forest scene and the psychiatrist scene. This is also very good in horror films because it makes it very hard to anticipate what shot is going to come next which helps us to scare our target audience.

Chase Scene and Point of View Shot I believe that a good chase scene is a the key to a good horror film. This is because chase scenes build a massive amount of tension and suspense as we never know if the victim is going to be caught or not. The Point of View shot is very common as well and you see it used in films like predator with the thermal vision that Predators use when they have found their next target. This scares us as the audience because we know that the characters that we want to be safe are not and it helps to foreshadow the bad events that are coming. Which puts the audience on the edge of their seats because they know that the bad thing is coming we just do not know when.

Mise en scene We decided to open our scene with by filming old family pictures and taking long establishing shots of the forest. We chose to do this whilst having some ambient music playing in the background because it would immediately give the audience a sense of uncertainty because they are not quite sure what they are viewing.