WEEK 1 – w/c 13/09/10

(pre-production: mock-ups & storyboarding)

For our A2 Media Project me and my partners decided to create a Teaser Trailer for our film. However during this week i was on work experience for my IT Course so they were working together without me. Despite this i have been doing research on my own time at home because i know the basic background of our trailer from the storyboards that we created.

Because of this conflict of timeing I decided to note down my research and ideas for the teaser trailer and inform my partners about it when I got back.

The genre that we chose was an Urban Horror so i researched some over the internet e.g. http://www.horror-movies.ca/horror_14174.html into the aspects and conventions that are associated with the genre and this is what i realized:

• Isolation: this is a convention that is commonly used in horror movies which is essentially the killer keeping their prospective victims within a certain vicinity, basically isolation = no escape.

Other conventions that i gathered from actually watching films e.g. Scream, was the reasons for people being killed which sort of gives off ideas to the viewers that the people who do the wrong things often have their wrongdoings catch up with them, the reasons i identified are:

• Partacking in sexual activity (victims do not notice the killers presence)
• Drinking or doing drugs (makes the victims easier to take care of)
• Leaving the group e.g. to go to the toilet
• Being arrogant or selfish (Often left till later on in the film, usually having the most gruesome death)
• I also believe that in the past being black also affected your survival rate in horror films, this is not so apparent these days however (this was mostly due to society being less civilized then it is today)

The most prominent conventions that i picked up from watchin urban hood films like Gang Tapes & Menace II Society are as follows:

• These films are predominantly centred around young black men 18 and under without father figures in their lives leading to gangs
• Poverty is another factor that icreases their reasons to commit crimes
• They usually involve acts of violence via gun and knife crime (e.g.the scene below)
• They are often looked down upon by the rest of society due to the way they have been represented as a group as well as being mistreated by the police and therefor adopted it seeing as if someone tells you are no-good after some time you will believe it too (these views are also seen below).
• Reasons for killing are often trivial because of ignorance however this often leads to deserving retaliation through a serving of street justice.

These genres meld together & challenge the conventions of the individual genres, here are some of the ways:

• Sexual activity, drinking and doing drugs are commonplace within urban hood films.
• Usually when you watch a horror movie like Friday the 13th or My Soul to take the number of white people out number the number of black (showing the minority), this however is contrasted in urban hood films with the some exceptions.
• The main common factor that i discovered between the two genres is the bloodshed, however it is the motives that differ; in a horror movie the motive comes down to the killer while in a hood movie you dont really need a good reason to kill someone or at least try to hamr them.