Evaluation 1

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

The plot for “The Remembering” is the haunting of Piper against her lifelong friends as she blames them for her death and holds a grudge as her life was taken away from her by her so-called boyfriend Carter. The three friends; Elias, Bree and Carter, have to reach out to Piper’s ghost and seek her forgiveness and escape the haunting. For our opening sequence we wanted to present both the sub-genre and allude the audience to the plot. Our opening sequence contains jump scares, creepy music, unnatural, swift movement and paranormal actions to convey the supernatural sub-genre as well as an eerie flashback which conveys the plot of the film. The ghostly movement and frightening flashback matched with the uncomfortable horror music entices horror fans to see what this begrudging girl has in store for her friends and what more is to come in this creepy storyline. The cast names are painted as a fade over the sequence, this mirrors many modern horror films- and most genres style, and allows to pack more into our opening sequence and make the 2 minutes as enticing as possible. 

The movie The Conjuring 2 also uses a flashback at the beginning of their film to create the movie's setting and plot. Because of this we used our flashback to convey the plot of The Remembering early in the film and to ultimately create an eerie and uncomfortable horror sequence. By comparing The Remembering to other horror films we were able to make our horror film as scary as possible and equally successful.





Furthermore, our title sequence was short but effective, the title faded in through a black screen and flickers like a ghostly silhouette adding mystery and spooks the audience. The opening sequence is non-chronological, and the full movie itself is also, and crosses from the present to the past through the flashbacks giving extra information to the plot and plenty of opportunities to frighten and entice the viewer. Instead of using dark and dim lighting like stereotypical horror films we instead focused on the creepy, horror music to convey the supernatural genre of the film- the music is present throughout the sequence and certain clips such as the burning pamphlet further evidence the sub-genre. 

The movie Insidious also uses a fade for its title sequence so we therefore copied this idea as Insidious is a supernatural horror film and we wanted The Remembering to be as spooky and realistic as possible so by comparing styles to successful horror films we were able to achieve this and make it successful too.






The music and paranormal scenes were intended to frighten the audience but to additionally entice and thrill horror loving audiences (our desired audience). A certain, and uncommon, style of shot we used was the use of hand-holding the camera, we did this for the flashback scenes and to allude the audience that the image is coming from Piper’s perspective.  

The movie Sinister 2 revolves around the use of handheld cameras and includes a lot of their shots through handheld filming. Because of Sinister 2 being a successful and frightening horror film following the same sub-genre we used similar techniques and included handheld filming to create the idea of the shots coming from Piper the ghost's perspective and to make the film more scary and dynamic. The closer attention to the styles and traits used by popular horror films the more likely our film was at being successful.