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

- The first thing the audience see in our film is our production company credits: "Dinodow Productions"; the outline of a dinosaur in white with orange writing, with fog moving across the screen. We didn't want our production company to be or look like a typical name; therefore we came up with this unique and professional sort of name. Even though the company credits are only shown for approximately 8-10 seconds, we didn't want to bore our audience, so we put a lot of thought in to it. Most company credits have their own distinct element, so to finalize ours, we added in the sound of a dinosaur roaring. For example in "MGMs" company credits they have the sound of a lion roaring, this distincts them from other film companies:

- With the rest of our credits we used a font that we downloaded called: 'you murderer'. We chose this font because it suited the genre of the film. And to add to this feeling of horror we wrote our credits in the colour red. This gave a sense of blood and death for the audience. We saw some films use this sort of font and we felt that it really portrayed the genre of the film, so we decided to take the idea and make it our own. For example in "The Grudge 3":

- The first part of our opening sequence is a flashforward. In this flashforward we used some shots inside a car, we filmed it from the back seat. This gave us a really interesting view of the two characters in the front seat and the road ahead of them. During planning our film, we looked at some influences. One of them was "Eden Lake", which is where we found the idea of these shots inside the car. This first image is the shot from our film and the second image is the shot from "Eden Lake":

- In the flashforward we have flashes of a young girl lying on the side of the road with blood on her top. We came up with this idea ourselves. We wanted to create tension so we had these flashes come up for just half a second, this lead the audience to wondering what it is and whats happened. We had a challenge as we were worried that the flashes wouldn't fit in properly with the scene as it's difficult to make something like this effective, but we were successful. In order to make the young girl look like she had been hurt and dumped there by someone, we positioned her laying on the floor with half of her body up against a tree. We got this idea from an advert about speeding, made by a company called: "Think". The first image is the shot from our film and the second image is the shot from the "Think" advert:

- Another influence that we looked at during planning our film was a horror film called: "The Last House On The Left". We found this very useful because it gave us ideas for our location and it helped us find out different ways that horror films build tension for the audience. We felt that the location in "The Last House On The Left" had a really good effect because it made things seem creepy and eerie. Therefore we searched for a similar place where we thought that we could create this effect for our film. We chose a narrow lane by our school surrounded by fields and trees, this made the shots look dark and scary which added to the suspense rising. And we also discovered that in "The Last House On The Left" they built tension by using a frightening, non-diegetic sound getting louder and louder. So we created our own non-diegetic sound for the first half of our opening sequence which built suspense for the audience by getting loud
er and louder. Here is the trailer of "The Last House On The Left" and some screen grabs from our film where we used our non-diegetic sound to build suspense:

- At the end of our opening sequence, we have a scene where the two main characters are relaxing and watching tv at home. We wanted to give the audience a bit of information and whats happening in the film to keep them interested and to keep them watching. Therefore we decided to make our own police report of a news reporter reading out some breaking news about a young girl who has been brutally murdered, this relates to the body that they previously found. This scene is 4 weeks earlier from the scene where they found the body, as that was a flashforward. We wanted to include this scene of the news so that the audience would know that the rest of the film is going to be leading up to the flashforward and finding out who is the murderer. So we made this police report and then put it on to a disc and played it on the tv with the two characters watching it. We felt that this made it look more realistic and didn't make Justin look as suspicious, so the audience can see both sides of his character. To see what police reports look like we watched a few news reports on tv, this gave us an idea of how it should look. Here is an example of a news report that is similar to our police report and then some screen grabs of the two main characters watching tv and the police report that we created: