Saturday, 9 March 2013

Evaluation Task 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?

We chose to have two characters in our opening,a white male and a white blonde female.

The Blonde Female:
We have chosen to make her a ditsy character, which is fitting with the stereotype of blondes. Her desk is covered with trashy magazines and bright pink stickynotes. This creates a negative representation of female workers who actually have serious jobs. She plays with her hair constantly using it to flirt with the male. She wears a tight short black skirt with a fitted pale pink top. We can assume that most offices around the country will have the fit office girl that everyone fancies. We have drawn on this and heightened it for the purpose of our film. We have stuck with the idea of the stupid blonde dying first, like in a lot of horror/thriller films nowadays.
A classic example is Drew Barrymore in the opening of Scream.

We see our female negatively at the beginning because she is annoying and persistant. As the audience we want to side with the male because he is keeping to himself and trying to 'work'. Once we hear what he is saying in his head, we flip to seeing her positively because she is so unaware of what is going to happen to her.


The White Male:
We have chosen to have an attractive white male as our killer. Unlike the ditsy blonde he is a hard worker and it is clear that he got his job becuase he's smart, not because of his looks. He is clean shaven and wears nice clothes, which is what will attract the female audience. What makes our killer scary is the fact that he is so normal and polite on the outside, but on the inside he is thinking messed up things. It's much more disconcerting knowing that your everyday 'girl or guy next door' could have a stash of bodies in their basement, than a killer that looks different. For example, Dexer uses an attractive male who works at a normal police job fighting crime. They subvert this stereotype of a crazed killer by using his attractive looks and job as a cover. This is what we tried to do.
However films such as Scream, use a killer that obviously looks dangerous. Somehow this sits better with us because we can see the danger head on, and we don't see his face.

Therefore we have subverted the stereotype, just like Dexter and American Psycho, that killers have to look different. Because really, in our world you don't know what a killer looks like - they could be your work collegue.

Thursday, 28 February 2013

Final Day of Editing

Today is the final day of editing and I am feeling confident that our finished product will look great. Today it will hopefully be put into HD and all the titles will be finalised. The voice over is sounding great and really adds a lot to the piece, as well as making it make sense! It was recorded in the studio reasonably quickly but sounds clear and I think it will be very effective. I'm really pleased with how far we have come since the beginning, and how we have miraculously managed to pull it together in time.

Tuesday, 26 February 2013

Updated Voice Over Script

"What is she looking at?"
"Can't she tell I'm not interested"
"Michael...focus."
"Maybe...?"
"No.."
"Oh shit she's coming over."
"Oh...and she's sitting down"

"Why is she telling me this?"
"I really couldn't care less..."
"...She's not even that pretty"
"Average...I don't see the attraction"
"Wait..."
"That ear..."
"(laughs) I could use that"

Wednesday, 6 February 2013

Editing Session - 06/02/13

We are on our 3rd editing session and so far we have created about one minutes worth of footage roughly. In the previous sessions we were putting the shots in order but we realised that we have quiet a lot of long shots that tend to get a bit boring. So today we copied our sequence and put it in a new timeline so we can chop it up without worrying about losing any work. We swapped in some different shots we thought might work better and played around with timing. We muffled Lottie’s voice, which sounds awesome. The next step for us is definitely to decide what voice over we want as this will allow more of a structure to what we edit next.

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

We've finished filming!

Hooray! At last we have had our shoot day and all shots have been taken. Now it's time for us to edit. Today, we logged on and traipsed through the heaps of footage we have. We sorted particular shots into bins to make our editing process easier and more manageable. We also renamed a few shots so that we knew which was which (rather than having 'shot 23, 24, 25. We had 'closeup of ear') This took quite a lot of time so we didn't manage to lay down much on the timeline, but I have high hope for our future editing. Onwards and upwards!