Question 5 Evaluation - How did you attract/address your audience? - Dale Horton

With us choosing our target age we used a teenager as our victim to make the audience able to relate to it. We targeted them well by minimizing gore and making it fast paced as teenagers don't want to watch a film which takes a long time to get into. Our questionnaire showed we reached our target audience as the person who answered the questions agreed with our age which we chose before creation. Also with the person who did the questionnaire in our age group showed that we had met the target audience as they liked the story line and the soundtrack. From this I believe we succeeded in matching our film with the target audience.


We used a teenage actor to match the target audience which caused the film to appeal more to a teenage audience. We also used a creepy sound track which attracts our audience. The way we used mise en scene to target audience was to have the girl in a teenage girls room which matches with the actor and in turn can be related to the audience. In the clip in which the victim is going down the stairs, we shot down her from behind going down the stairs which makes her seem small and in turn follows generic conventions. The Exorcist also shows a young female victim which shows insecurity and fragility.

Evaluation Question 6: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? - Sarah Carter

For films such as ours, I think that British production companies such as Film4 and the UK Film Council would be interested in taking a producing role.

By using a British production company to produce, there is a much larger probability of our film being produced than if we were to target our film at much larger companies such as Universal etc. With regards to audiences, British companies tend to target a much more specific and perhaps niche audience that will be interested in a specific type of film - in our case, this would be under the genre of Horror. The film would probably only be shown in specific places and to a certain extent it will recieve a more direct and select audience viewing, unlike global blockbusters which will be aimed at a mainstream audience. This will often lead to a lack in originality, and therefore by pitching our film to a smaller, British production company, the originality will remain, attracting a niche audience. It is likely it would only be exhibited in the UK and that it would be distributed to a lesser extent than if it were to be produced by a large corporation.
Film4 have often produced films that have only been released in Britain. An example of this is in the film "Hunger". This film was released in 2008 and premiered at Cannes film festival. It went on to be released only in the UK and Ireland in October 2008 as opposed to globally.

Evaluation Part Two:After Completion of Film. Sancha

By Sancha O'Donnell

7. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

This screen grab from GarageBand shows how we tried to allow the opening title sequence to grab the audiences attention. It's fast paced flashing images in the nightmare needed a lot of integrated noises to help enhance the intensity of the nightmare. Including church bells, recorded whispering from myself and Sarah, serena swirl, aura bells, orchestral strings, a jazz organ and a creepy little laugh. These clash together but work so well because when the video intensifies with the girl tossing and turning in bed, the sounds emerge more to become more stranger and surreal. With the orchestral strings and the jazz organ echoed slightly so that when she wakes up it's still very strange. The moment when she wakes up it was more intense to have it silent, as the contrast from all the noises in the dream is like a violent awake into reality, with only the genuine creaks of the floor boards she walks on.
Stigmata being our source of inspiration, in the trailer above it shows how they used various different eerie sounds with symbolic chanting, which captures the attention of the viewer with it's mysteriousness. Inspiring us to try and replicate the same depth with the same approach.

As the impact of the shots in the film are quite high, (like the image above a bloody dagger in a sink,) a vast amount of instruments are needed to create the same impact aurally.

The church bell links to the Biblical references that are made throughout the film, yet it creates an eerie feel with the desolate gongs. The technology of GarageBand allowed us to be more creative with the keypad facility as we could make it rhythmical in the scene. This is very realistic to how church bells would be rung in a church and thus more realistic in our film and intense.

The whispering of myself and Sarah is essential to bring us in as the threat at the beginning. Cleverly we are chanting the verse from  the Bible at the time she wakes up at,  which is Acts 10:38, combined with another Bible verse of Deuteronomy 32:17 as the chant needed to be longer and the words fit well with the religion and satanic imagery. We then used our whispering to add to the intensity.

Blogger allowed the group to keep upto date with one another during the planning process, improving our control over the film making process. Imovie helped us to be more creative, we could cut and edit the different shots as we pleased and add effects. The Imovie structured our film and each week it was clear to see what needed re-shooting and what bits of the film needed something more scary to happen.

9. Final Question- What was your contribution to the process during the planning, production and post production stages?

During the planning stages we all made an equal contribution to the sheets and how everything should be done, it was good because as a team we helped and supported one another. We had to change the idea of the film at the beginning and I was inspired by the film Stigmata and told the group about the little ideas that we could use from the movie to create our satanic film, including the crying blood statue and just the subtle satanic images throughout.
During the production I became the person who made sure the group was organised to come together to film. During the filming I used my knowledge as an actress to help give input into how our actress should act, directing her and giving inspiration to the way she reacts on camera. I especially liked working with the camera to capture a shot, whilst trying to capture the essence of the horrorific atmosphere that we had created. I also did the beginning sequence shots capturing the satanic clips, it allowed me to be creative with the chalk on the floor and the angel crying. Myself and Sarah, also did the make up on the actress' body as she has hieroglyphics on her arms, alongside doing our own make up and costume with the shots of us as witches.

 Post production stages myself and Sarah had focused upon the soundtrack for the film, we converged our recorded whispering with various sounds, whilst making sure that it went with the film. However I did give great input into how the film should be edited and what works and doesn't. Overall I believe my significant amount of input into the project really made the film look of an appropriately high standard.

final film

Evaluation - Question 4 - Luke

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our film we used specific social groups or type of people to try and stay with the audience’s dominant ideology, to do this we chose to use a woman as many people in society believe women are more vulnerable than men. The actor is also small so this enhances the vulnerability of the character.

We put loads of writing over the female actors arm to make her look as if she is going crazy and we based this look on our image from the film 23.




We also thought if we use a teenage girl we would attract a wider audience and attract our target audience of 15-18 year olds as they would possibly be able to relate to the victim and be more attached to the film itself.



Coming away from the actor’s appearance but now onto where they are for example at the start of the film she starts of in a very pink bedroom (a typical girl’s bedroom) which represents also a teenage girl. The actual house itself represents a specific social background (middle class).

In the film itselfs we used lots of close ups on the girl actor as we believed this would make the girl seem weaker and frightened, also it built tension for the audience.











We have also used two girls as our threat also to challenge both dominant and recessive ideology by using female empowerment hence the two girls.

Another film that follows the same sort of ideologies as us is 'scream'

Here’s a clip to show the vulnerability of the girl.

This is the trailer of the film 'scream' this emphasizes the dominant ideology of society, women are more vulnerable.

These two screen shots are from the trailer above, they show how the women is represented as weak and helpless, in the first the shot it shows how the women is scared and shocked, whilst in the second shot is shows weakness and the women being over powered by the masked person.




We tried to get the same emotion in the first shot in our film to show the female actor being scared hence making her look weak. Heres a shot to show this.

The person who answered our questionnaire was within our targeted age group, the person is a female and she is 17 years old so this is the type of person we really want to reach.

The person said that the canted angles we used give an interesting effect, this is the look we went for, we tried to attract the audience a bit by making everything seem abnormal to show that the character is confused and keep the audience interested.

In the journey of making the character seem confused we may have lost our audience with it s the person said the narrative was slightly confusing.

She said we represented the gender (girl) in a negative way, we did intentionally do this because we knew that the dominant ideology of society is that the female is more vulnerable hence it may attract a wider audience, we also did challenge this idea as we used females as a threat also.

Review of unfinished movie

Some of the things that we need to improve in our film is we need more close ups, also the outside scenes need re-shooting due to the lighting of the shots and that it doesn't really flow well together. Some scenes such as the one were the door slams behind the girl and she turns around, we may need to re-shoot that as the reaction on the girls face was not really sufficient and she did not look scared.

However we liked many aspects of our film such as how the scenes flow well together at the start of the film, we have some really good shots like when she was coming down the stairs and we got a nice shadow effect, and when the door slams behind her before her reaction looked pretty good and creepy.

Evaluation Question 3 Dale - Who would be the audience for your media product?

Paranormal activity ratings. This shows that the majority of the votes come from people aged between 18 - 29 but received high votes from males aged 18 and younger.

This image from the film '23' gave us the idea to put symbols on the victim.

This is a shot from the film '23'.

This image is from stigmata which we watched for inspiration for some of our scenes in out film.

Following the trend of most psychological horrors we decided to make our film a 15. We believe this is correct as our film doesnt contain any gore or bad language which would cause the rating to go up. It also couldn't be any lower as some of the scenes could disturb younger viewers. The film is aimed mainly towards both males and females of age 15 and above as these vote similar films more highly showing that this age group enjoy the films more than the older population. This is because other psychological films (such as Paranormal Activity) receive similarly high votes from both sexes (see above).  We feel that this is the typical age for people who watch horror films as they like to experience the thrill and excitement of being scared. From this we will make aerie music and many moments which could cause the audience to jump to try and terrify the audience and succeeding in making the film like a horror is. We got a form in which we got someone to fill in and put their dislikes and likes about our film. One of the likes in which they stated was that they liked the soundtrack which was creepy. The bit that the audience especially liked was the whispering chanting. The audience also agreed with our age group that we aimed the film towards despite not actually telling them what age group it was aimed at. We targeted the audience by finding information on imdb.com which helped us judge our target audience for the film.