The Running Dead

The Running Dead
Media evaluation
Nathan Bowen

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

Our opening two minute sequence of a thriller is a very simple idea, our idea was to have a girl running away from someone or something that is chasing her, preventing the person or thing perusing her from coming into shot. This was a result of us as a group believing that the scariest horror thriller films, the genre we were entering, are those that hide the identity of the antagonist. The pursuing antagonist of our horror is represented by point of view shots, hand held camera and shots of chasing and looking for the woman. This copies styles like ‘The Blair Witch project’ and ‘Cloverfield’ but still using more common regular shots of the running woman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZu1cTg-xUM Trailer for The Blair Witch Project, an example of handheld camera angles creating tension and mystery.

The women herself is a stereotypical damsel in distress as found in many films with many different genres, she runs away from what is chasing her in a helpless attempt to escape and is killed at the end as many female characters are in these horror thriller style genres. The music helps to build the tension of this chase scene, the music itself Is a very slow eerie music very similar to many other horror thrillers like ‘Frankenstein’, the music helps to create a very dull, scary and tense atmosphere and helped us to get our desired atmosphere of our film across to our audience.

From the beginning when our group was planning our opening sequence and we were still in the pre production stage I was very interested in doing a Jack the Ripper style opening sequence as one of the best thriller films I have seen was ‘From Hell’, This film again hid the identity of the killer ‘Jack the Ripper’ until the very end of the film and this I felt created a good way of keeping the audience guessing and interested also allowing for them to get more involved in the film by trying to solve the mystery. We tried to incorporate some of these ideas and styles of filming an editing into our opening sequence for example the eerie music and dull lighting and colour helps to create a cold and scary atmosphere.


2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our opening thriller sequence only consists of one character, a woman. For a horror genre thriller a young woman fits as a very common damsel in distress and first victim of our film. Films like ‘Scream’ and ‘The Decent’ both use women being chased and tormented by a killer to help their movie appear scarier, as women in many films are portrayed as weak and helpless, sheep to the slaughter. The young woman that is being pursued in our sequence is also a black woman, there is a stereotype that surrounds black people in horror films, that they will be killed before the end of the film, this is taken into comic effect and laughed at in films such as ‘Scary Movie’ but the stereotype can be seen to be true in films like ‘The Hills Have Eyes 2’ and ‘Alien’. Our sequence itself ends with our black female being killed by her pursuer fulfilling this stereotype.

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product, and why?

Our film would be produced by a major Hollywood film studio for widespread distribution, this would be funded by finding private investors to help us raise the necessary funds for filming, advertising and production of DVD’s and other movie related products like shirts and the movie soundtrack.

Paramount would be one film company that I believe would be interested in our style of horror thriller as they do fund these style films with ‘Shutter Island’ that is currently screening in cinemas across the world, ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘The Uninvited’, these all fit our style of film, trying to grip the audience and involve them in the mystery of the film.

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

We are looking to aim our film at young adults and older teenagers between the ages of around 16 – 24. This we believe is the most realistic age group to aim for in our chosen genre. This is because our movie contains images of a horrific nature that will cause for a more mature audience to watch, also swearing causes for barriers as well. The rating for our film would be 15 as there is some strong violence and infrequent but ever present swearing that may be considered in appropriate for the younger generations.

Our movie will be aimed more at males than females, the content of blood and gore will attract the more masculine audience to the cinema also the use of women as the victims in our movie again appeals to the male audience more as there is attraction to the actresses as well as the film itself. Our research that we undertook before our production of our sequence showed us through the use of questionnaires and interviews with the general public that a big attraction for men is an attractive female lead and a gory storyline, but for the women a griping story line with mystery, we tried to incorporate all these aspects into our sequence to attract both sex’s to our film.

5) How did you attract / address your particular audience?

Our audience will be attracted to our film firstly bringing the younger audiences in with the action in the film, the blood and gore of the film and the thrill of the film. Also the use of young actresses will help to lure wide ranging ages of male audiences. Finally the older more towards middle age audiences will be attracted to our film because of the gripping effect that the film has on the audience, the involvement of the audience in the film trying to solve the mystery of the film and the identity of the killer will help us herd in the more mature audiences but still appealing to the interests of the younger audience.

Our opening sequence has been taken well by those that have seen it, it is a very simple chase scene through a cemetery and introduces the genre and action of the film well, also leaving the audience guessing the identity of the killer and the reasons for the killings.


6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

Our group as a whole found the equipment provided to us by the college, the camera, tripod, dolly, sound equipment and editing equipment all very good for our particular sequence. As the cameraman I found the equipment easy to use and found myself working the camera well. The understanding of the camera and equipment helped me a lot to easily perform certain shots like tracking shots, zooms and even pull focuses in our filming on set.

With the editing we found that after instruction from our teachers, the computers themselves and the software we used was quite easy to work with when joining our shots and merging them together. The effect we used most in our editing was the black and white colour as we felt this gave a spookier and more thrilling effect to our sequence.

7) Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

From the end of the preliminary task to now, the end of production, I myself and the group as a whole have learned many new skills not only surrounding the equipment an techniques used for the filming but also the planning an production of the sequence itself.

We had to create the story and the characters and also develop the script, learn the different camera angles and camera shots, the use of diagetic and non-diagetic sound, natural lighting and artificial lighting and so on, the development of the story and the script in particular was a key foundation of the sequence itself as it is the essential part to the entire sequence, their needed to be a good solid story before any sort of filming or production could follow, this helped to work as a group to develop a good solid script and story for our sequence.

We then had to gather actors and give them scripts, practice our different camera angles and shots so that we could achieve the desired effect on our audience from our sequence, as we all group we all gained skills in team work and production of this sequence, we learnt to use various filming equipment like cameras and lighting, we gained skills on the computer through editing and bringing our film together and finally we now have learned to blog our film onto the internet and show people our step by step production of our sequence and the skills we as a group have learned in our production.