Evaluation question NR. 1 !

How does your Media product :
a.) use, devellop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?
b.) represent particular social groups ?


So for the following comparison between our films forms and conventions and a real media products  I`m using the well known film "Shaun of the dead" because this film is a british film and furthermore its actually the best example for a zom-com.

We USED the same atmosphere kind of feeling for the audience as in Shaun of the dead. In SOD (shortcut) there are two main Characters which fight there way thorugh the film with sometimes kind of stupid behaviors as you can see loads of times in our film. I think there should be a ratio like difference between comedy and actual horror. I watched the film Shaun of the dead again and its like approximately 30:70 horror to comedy which we used as well round about ! What both SOD have and our film is that before the funny parts start there is a scary part first where the audience thinks that something scary is going to happen right now but then something funny happens like in our film the part in the toilet where we at the beginning can hear mysterios sounds out of one of this toilets and we have no Idea which one it is so we discover all the single doors to find the "maybe Zombie" but then we realise that its just a person who has diarreah. (hopefully funny joke).

What else we looked up is that our Characters are as simple as possible like not a long and hard understanding story behind them apart from that their parents died because that typicall in zom coms like here agaimn Shaun of the dead. Shaun , Ed and all the Characters all usual people without anything special, therefore its easier for the audience to get in  there position THEREFORE the film gets more realistic and better for the audience.

What we did which no other zom coms have done is that we broke some of the most important representations and stereotypes like for example that blonde persons are dumb and stupid but in our film the blonde person is the leader of the group or that asian coming people are violente, agrresive and angry which we broke again because my character is the scared one who cant defend himself and needs help of the blonde girl. Other stuff like the taller, bigger zombie is weaker then the small girl Zombie is a representation  break again , because usually the stronger persons are above the small person while in ours not. We also but in various points of the film irony in to make it all worse.

We tried to develop the cliff hanger kind of ending because there is like no film maybe one or two which have this featured. In our opinion a cliff hnager in this kind of style like in ours makes the audience wants to watch more and the point were suddenly an eye appears is like in the film `inception` where the film makers decided to confuse the audience in a way that leave a cliff hanger.

Shaun of the dead analysis !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZmjsWAfn14 


In the opening scene of ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ there are hidden bits of horror, but its mainly comedy.
The target audience for ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ are person above 16 because as we all know the film it's kind of violente and the characters sewar a lot as well, it also contains some scene’s that should only be shown to a mature audience +18.
In the first few minutes of the film you can see how good the comedy is standing out; an example of this is where Shaun walks down the corridor half asleep like a zombie. This should trick the audience who is watching it because they're gonna think that he is a zombie although he is not obviously.
Comedy in the opening scene comes across as more important than horror ike 60:40 in my opinion. I think the reason for this is so it catches its audience’s attention more. The part for example where Lise and Shaun are discussing this kind of scenes make the film watchable because the audience is entertained by stuff like that and they want to find out if there relationship is going to get better or its stays so!
The two main Characters of this film are: Shaun and Ed, both characters are successful for the comedy side of the film and are ok for the horror in there own special way.
Shaun is the hero of the film as he gets himself and Lise through the problems and they stay alive through the film, although he is the unlikely hero because he has a few flaws, he is not a typical good looking main Character, intelligent hero, he is gutless and a pushover. Ede can also be classed as an unexpected hero as he sacrifices his life to save Shaun and Lise. Both characters are the wanna be's that become hero’s by saving the day, all be it in the end. ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ doesn’t have a bad gu, the only enemies in ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ are the zombies.
The directors of ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ used camera techniques to draw in the audience, for example in the very first shot, Shaun is in a day dream and Lise is trying to talk to him and he is ignoring her, this is comical as she becomes stressed out with him.
Another example is a both shot, you can see Shaun and Lise talking and in the background Ede is playing on the slot machine, this establishes the scene and shows one of the main sets used in the film.
It also shows Lise going on about her relationship with Shaun whilst Ede is swearing at the machine; this is very funny as it seems to Lise that he is swearing about what she is saying.
Sound is pretty important in this film as they add tension and mystery, ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ has two people talking and then they pause, this adds tension and mystery because you want to know what happens next and how they react to the comments 

Audience of Forsaken !

first a generell definition of horrorfilms:
Horror films are a movie genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus they may overlap with thefantasy and supernatural genre. Horrors frequently overlap with the thriller genre. - Wikipedia

And now the definition of a comedy horror film:
In comedy horror film, gallows humor is a common element. While comedy horror films provide scares for audiences, they also provide something that dramatic horror films do not: "the permission to laugh at your fears, to whistle past the cinematic graveyard and feel secure in the knowledge that the monsters can't get you - Wikipedia


As you can obviously see, comedy horror is kind of an extension of JUST horror and thats why we have choosen comedy horror and not just horror because its a challenge to give the audience a fear feeling and laugh permission at the same time but if a filmmaker achieves this "effect" the reaction will be imense because thats what the audience is looking for ... comedy and horror at the same time and a horror comedy film's goal is not only the +18 age area they look specificly to persons under 18 as well so as you can see the end gross is way higher then just a horror film but as I said in the beginning, the producer needs to achieve either laugh and fear.


Lets take the ilm "Tacker & Dale vs Evil" in my opinion a perfect example because as a huge fan of this film I can honestly say that this film scared at the beginning the shit out of me because the film location was ecellently choosen which gave the whole film this noir feeling in the beginning and later on and on it went more and more funny instead of scary. If I now compare "Zombieland" with this film i notice that zombieland is from the beginning constantly armed with jokes but tacker & dale vs evil is building the jokes up and that is probably also the reason why it just made 4.000.000 dollars while Zombieland made over 100.000.000  dollar because its just a perfect example of horror comedy while Tacker & Dale vs Evil is something new and needs more attention ! 


So now to the audience, most zom coms or horror films look in the dark humor in depth because thats what makes a good zombie comedy film/ horror film and thats  why so many people like it. The only way a filmdirector can find out why and what people like on a film is ... just to ask them so I researched and found this website --> http://bradwestwoodasmediafoundationportfolio.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/audience-expectations-analysis-research-through-questionnaire/

In this questionnaire the people who were asked were 5 females and 5 males so fair survey. I noticed that every point in this questions was exactly related to our ideology, e.g. what sort of character ? stupid (my character)
what would you expect the caracters to be ? simple like in our film
and so on ...

I think people like to see in a horror-comedy film how the main characters getting on with their adventure and that the audience can see themself in the position of the characters so for example difficult characters could ruin this feeling because the audiece just cant get in the position of the actor and thats an important fact to look at . Furthermore the timing must be right so the audience is'nt ready for the fun moment therefore they laugh more because unexpected things are funny (proofen) and the age range is therefore 14- 50 because some jokes are a bit to hard to understand for children under 13 and some others are just to unfunny for people over 50.

but the MAIN MAIN audience is 16-19 because I thing they just really celebrate good zom coms and talk about them the whole day with friends and share them on social website and they are the main part of the zom com audience not just because they like the mix of dirty jokes and brutal violence they have something to think about and they're gonna show other people like family members the film and so on the film. Furthermore
16 - 19 years old persons go the most to the cinemas and they dont just watch a film ones like normal people they watch it 3 to 4 times if its a really good one because they just cant get enough and thats what a good zom com needs to have.

And its not just for males its for females as well because its just in most zom coms (apart from dead snow) not that realistic and they are not scared, they are happy because its funny. Ok some girls just watch films because they are scary but thats soemthing else.

FINAL FILM !! FORSAKEN !! finally ....

OH MY GOD, believe it or not but we have finnished this punnishment called "opening project" after really hard 2 weeks. I was not sure if its even possible to finnish it til today but I sat yesterday the whole day and today til now on the work and edited the Sh** out of our footage !

So before you ask some things I need to tell you :

- In the toilet scene this noise sound in the background is FROM the toilet not from us or so !
- there might be some sense gaps because its just insanly hard to organise EVERYTHING in 3 days with people who just have limited time so dont expect a blockbuster.
- As you might heared out the sound was re-recorded because we thought it makes it better ... but thats wrong next time I use the audio in the footage.

here again click on HD in the bottom box below to watch it in HD with better quali 

(re-) shooting day 3

FANTASTIC !!! Just fantastic ... everything went fantastic in the last few days for Charlotte and me related to the filming and the fact that we had no problem with the ugly weather or the actors :) We both are now really happy because we were the only ones who were not finnished ... we even did not started so actualy its fair to say that we used the last days possible to make the film. Well done to charlotte who planned every single day we are filming and thought about the poster and of course to the people who helped us : Greg, Carley, Anthony, Flossi ! Thanks a lot

Here is a footage we did today like in the last minutes of filming because we had not much time of the fact that me and charlotte have both courseworks and we cant concentrate the whole day on media although that would be quite good. Ok that footage is like on of the first establishing kind shoots which we did to get some shots done so we dont need to concentrate later too  much on that shot because we still dont have it or on that one because now we have a sortiment of awesomenes !
  Unfortunatly not in HD because you just can post once a week HD videos on Vimeo ...

However, I need to say that I found some tiny tiny tiny continuity mistakes which are not that bad (if you are blind) no seriously, they are just some stuff like the sun is brighter on that shot then on that one but its not that obvious so we dont need to reshoot it I thing. The other thing is that we went to the shop today ... AGAIN and we asked for the permission of the manager to film in the shop but with our epic luck the manager did go like 5 minutes after we came so we asked one employer if we possible could get the number so we can call the manager which they gave us and Charlotte and me are going to call the manager tomorrow so we can finally do the 15 second scene !

The last thing I want to talk about is the issue we have with the voices and music because from my experience of previous films the editing of music and voices is damn the hardest part of the film. The voice line must be exactly the same, no echo, the music must fit to the situation, just by the way ... our film is probabyl going to be longer than 8 minutes so I needed for deception 3 days just for the audio stuff (voices, Music) and it was 3 min long so times 3 days by 3 to get 9 days of editing audio and we just have 4 left ... so I necessariely need charlottes help with that huge problem !

(re-) editing Day 1

Well, I was wrong as I said I need a few days til I can release the first real film footage .... because I've got it and I thing I've done quite a good job. So as we said in previous posts, we are going to make a film where the opening titles are like mixed up with the area so a bit like this french horrorfilm Mr. Earl showed us the opening of. I tried to get the best Match with the enviroment so no shaky text or bad masking.

Obiously, there is no music yet and the voices needs to be re-done seperately because it sounds bad in the footage. So what have I done to make the opening so as it is now:

• First of I made a cut for the parts I needed
• Then I took the footage tracked it in a seperate program called "Boujou" so I get the effect that the text IS actually in the enviroment without shakyness.
• make the text
• change fonts ( I went to the website  http://www.dafont.com/ to get my fonts for free)
• Change color so it has this cinematic zombie survival look ( a bit)
• Render ! thats it :)

So before you watch the clip press the HD button in the right corner to get the best quality ! Its important so you can see the details which you cant see with non-HD 

(re-) shooting Day 2

First up ... RAIN WHY IS IT RAINING SO RANDOMLY IN ENGLAND .... WHYY ???
With that introducing sentence I want to start this post. So we finnished 50% of the film yesterday I edited my ass of and the result looks quite good. Charlotte worked really hard on the script and time and organisation to make the film as good as possible.

Actually we planned to film at 2pm but unfortunatly its started to rain !?! Great, I just thought for a moment that our Film is totally riuned and there is no chance to be finnished til friday so I did the last possible thing a media student could do in a situation like that ! I preyed to the media god and he heared us. It stopped raining at 3pm and the sun dryed the ground so we had perfect conditions to film. Excited I messaged Charlotte to meet at 3:30 at the planned location which we did but charlotte came a bit late so I used the time to go to a shop were we once went because we tried to ask them wheather we can use the shop for a scene but they said no ... but as a motivated filmmaker I tried it again and they said we could come on monday again and ask the manager :D I was really happy about this because I knew this time it would be better then the last time.

At least Charlotte came and she told us she was waiting on the other side of the street but we just did not see her and she did not see us ... anyway we started to film the really beginning and the zombie scene ! In my opinion we have some epic awesome super special mega footage which is really good to color correct. We have now like 90% of the film we just need now some tiny little things and we are finnished.