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

Stock Themes When developing ideas for our product, we all felt heavily influenced by horror films, particularly films such as The Blair Witch Project and The Woman In Black. The themes of isolation, the unknown, and the idea of omnipresence were all things that we wished to include in our opening 2 minutes. We particularly liked the idea of omnipresence as we aimed our antagonist to be a ghost-like figure, and the idea that they were always around the next tree, or one step ahead of the protagonist supported the stereotype of our ghost, along with aiding the idea of the unknown and the supernatural.

The Woman In Black Hyperlinked is the opening few minutes of one of the main inspirations behind our film.

Stock Characters I found the character creation process one of the least challenging over the course of the production. Stereotypically, the archetype of a horror film character is an innocent girl, isolated, and confused to her surroundings. A key example of this is The Blair Witch Project, where the protagonist – Heather – transforms into a paranoid wreck, being suspicious and fearful of everything around her. I aimed to replicate this with our protagonist, guiding our actor to lead this portrayal through her facial expressions which, as a group, we believe she did so fantastically. Our actor perfectly delivered what we wanted to portray, clearly demonstrating the fear and madness of an isolated teenaged girl in an unfamiliar scenario.

This image is linked to Heather’s monologue from The Blair Witch Project. This clip perfectly emulates the madness and fear that our protagonist would be feeling, despite our clip being significantly more upbeat and having a higher tempo. In terms of a stock protagonist, we believe we have developed the traditional idea successfully.

Antagonist With our antagonist we both used and challenge the stereotypical archetype. We used the archetype by having the ghost-like figure lurking behind trees, with the omnipresence reinforcing the idea of the supernatural. The milky white skin, and dark messy hair similarly highlight the madness of the character, and demonstrating how she is almost unnatural. We challenged the archetype however through the use costumes. We had our protagonist in black and our antagonist in white. We decided to put our antagonist in white as this was the antithesis of the audience’s expectation. White has strong connotations with purity and good; through this, we aimed to make our audience question why this is, deliberately not giving an answer as this will lead to ambiguity and stir confusion amongst the audience; this would therefore reflect the feeling of our protagonist who is, ironically, left in the black.

One of our main influences, The Woman In Black.

Stock Setting The setting was another easy decision to make. We used the conventional setting for our film, of a forest, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. This aided the theme of isolation. Another main influence of ours was Sleepy Hollow which, along with The Woman In Black and The Blair Witch Project, is set in a forest, which is another reason why we chose this stock setting.

A fantastic establishing shot from Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.

Iconography The shooting of our film was incredibly important in fitting both the genre, and the mise-en-scene of the piece. We opted for a huge range of different shots, challenging the general conventions of horror films, as most tend to use fast, choppy ECU (extreme close up) shots to raise the tempo and the tension of the film. However, I decided that a variety of shot lengths and angles would be more involving for the audience. By challenging the conventions in this way, we leave the audience slightly baffled by the significant amount of information that they have to take in, which again reflects the confusion and lack of understanding of the protagonist in the piece. I feel this was successful, as the juxtaposition between the fast shots and longer shots raise the tension incredibly effectively.