Question 2 - In which ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

1. The forms and conventions in horror films refer to the traits which can be often seen in the horror films, including different technical aspects. These conventions help make the film more frightening and the supernatural scenes more convincing. The film I have studied is Van Helsin, which is a very typical vampire film. The conventions in this film include characters designed in Gothic style, dark lighting, etc.
2. The result of the research helps us find and learn the forms and conventions in horror films. The conventions and forms can be used as models which we can simulate and reproduce in our own films as these are the conventions in successful and professional films, for example we can learn how the soundtracks in the films are used and apply this to our own soundtrack produce through garage band. This is very important because if we do not carry out the research, we will not have enough experience which makes sure that our work can be effective and close to professional level.
3.  We did not challenge the conventions. Even though we have done a lot of research and learned a lot of relative knowledge on lesson, our experience of practice is still not sufficient enough for us to challenge or  break the conventions in an obvious way. The challenge will be reasonable and necessary only after we have comprehensive understanding of film making and practiced a lot. If we want to break conventions, a lot of unexpected situations will happen, which increases the time we will spend.

IMDB Research

Update 24/01/11

Today we have put the soundtrack with the opening titles as shown below. We had some technical difficulties when trying to import the GarageBand soundtrack into iMovie but after a few attempts we managed to sort it out and get the track imported. We are not sure if the soundtrack accompanies the title sequence so we will probably change it at a later date.
We are still planning to film on Wednesday and will upload the footage as soon as we can.

Improvements on soundtrack

After listening to the soundtrack that we made last week we thought that the 'foot steps' sound should start off quiet and get louder and louder as the soundtrack progressed. To achieve this effect we had to split the clips up and ended up with a separate tracks for each section. We are very pleased now with how it sounds.

Copyright issues found and resolved

We thought that we might have copyright issues with using a photo from 'PhotoBucket', we looked into the terms and conditions of the website and found that any photo uploaded is copyright free as shown in the highlighted section of the print screen above.