Final Cut

Here is our final cut of 'Suburban Zombie'

Evaq Q7 Reflection on the Prelim

When I look back at my prelim I see that we have improved, however I feel we still made some of the same mistakes such as cross cutting and shot reverse shot. We learned how not to make these mistakes, but because we didn't get enough coverage and shots our film didn't flow from shot to shot and jumped badly.

We learned to vary up our shots more but we still did struggle with the shot variation and I don't think we included enough if we got the chance to reshoot the film this would be one of the things i would change. If i could also change it I would get more shots and extract the audio from the shots to make our sound seem more fluid, thi was another thing we also struggled to achieve.

Blue filter added on iMovie.

I learned how to edit, and add effects on iMovie since the prelim, such as how to slow down shots, and increase the speed. This was useful as we did speed up our shot of the zombies chasing after Alex to make it look more menacing, just like 28 Days Later, where they sped up the shots of zombies running to make it seem more intense.

Some things I deffinatly improved on from my prelim were ; Shot framing we had some intresting shots such as the shot of the zombie stumbling behind the rusted and bent fence. Our use of sound was better than before and we learned from mistakes that we had made in the prelim with sound e.g the gunshot. The location we used was very good and made the post apocalyptic setting more evident, I had used this before in one of our other filming tasks, this is deffinatly a strength of our film and helped create the atmosphere of the film all the more eerie.

In conclusion I have learned:

1. More shot variation is needed in order to bring variety to our film.
2.Get organised with the shots needed and film more than what we have storyboarded so we have some choice later on in the editing process.
3. record the sound seperatly and ten later add it in.

Eval Q6 Technologies

I have learned many things about the technologies required to create films,idents and evidence of our research. I learned about websites and software such as Scribd and Garage band. These programmes and websites helped make the film making process so much easier.

We learned how to edit using iMovie in the first few weeks of starting the course I had a brief knowledge of Windows Movie Maker before and how to edit. Howvere over the weeks I became used to the stages of editing a film such as cutting the scenes adding transitions and effects. The editing process now is second nature to me and I have used it to edit various films,prelim and a vodcast.

I had used Youtube a lot before and knew the basic skills and some of the more advanced skills such as adding annotations, audio swapping and adding captions over the top of a video. But i had never used Vimeo and learned how to upload videos from there and embbed them onto my own blog. This was usefull as Youtube is blocked in school and if we needed to upload and embbed a video we could easily do so at school seeing as it was not blocked.

The cameras I used were DV cameras they're old and aren't the pinnacle of technology but they did the job. The boom microphone was useful and was easy to use. We learned how to use it as we filmed our first rough cut, it provided great sound quality.

For my soundtrack I used a programme called Kristal this was a program I had previously used to record my bands songs, it's a proffesional recording programme that has a simple UI and is easy to pick up. We used this because we felt it was better than, garageband and would make our soundtrack stand out from others. The people performing in the track are Kyle Meeson (guitar) Conor O'loughlin (drums) and Sam Boyes (Bass). We recorded the real instruments previously, 2 years before the media course and removed the vocals, due to the lyrics not being relevant to the story.

Eval Q5 How Did you Attract/Address your Audience?

Ben -Matt Johnson

Colin - Sam Boyes

We attracted our audiance using intertextual refferances to other films in the genre. As well as making our film scary this is the one key feature horror films need in order to succeed as it could be a making or breaking point of any horror film.

Some ways we attracted our audiance wer the intertextual names we gave our characters like Ben (Matt Johnson) and Colin (Sam Boyes) These are bothrefferances from other films from the genre. (Ben being from Night of the Living Dead and Colin from Colin.) We also looked at Shaun of the Dead and the scene where David gets eaten alive we see our unnamed character being eaten alive by zombies, this also attracts general fans of the horror genre as this scene could be seen as scary because of the graphic behaviour shown in the film.

The film is set in a suburban setting and a modern time period, it is set a few months after a post apocalyptic outbreak of a virus. The setting coul attract younger audiances who want to see a film with youths and familliar types of enviroments That teenagers may be used to. We can also relate our film to the youth culture surrounding the suburban setting such as "hoodies" and "chavs". Our characters also matched the age of the preffered audiance this makes the story seem more personal and targeted towards this group of people.

The zombie genre is primarily watched by a teen male audience, when I looked at sound and the back we worked out that teen males are most likely to like rock/metal music and decided to use it in the film. This decision was first thought of when I heard a song by the band The Devil Wears Prada who have recently made an album called 'Zombie.' which focused on a zombie apocalypse and was metal/metalcore. But we weren't allowed to use the actual song. We looked at other songs as well and found a song called L490 by 30 Seconds To Mars, I felt that this song sounded similar to the main track used in 28 Days Later, we recorded a cover of L490 and used it in a few of our cuts. Later on we felt like it didn't fit with the fight scene so we went away and recorded an original piece of music. These songs could attract an audience who enjoy rock/metal.

Eval Q1In What Ways Does your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

Tobe Hoopers Zombies.

The title of our film started as a 'working title' and then we decided to keep it simply because it works as a title, and instantly tells everyone that the film is a zombie film. The 'Suburban' part of the title also suggest a suburban modern setting. Other zombie films use simple titles like Tobe Hoopers "Zombies". These titles also could be seen as comical, comedy films that use this simple title are Epic Movie, Scary Movie and Disaster Movie.

'Hoodies'

'Hoodie Zombie'

Our characters costumes, suggest working class backgrounds and criminal activity. We made our characters wear hoodies to suggest that before the zombie outbreak they were involved in criminal activity and are teenagers, we based this off the stereotype that the rest of society thinks teenagers from urban and suburban areas are all criminals and that teenagers are lazy and violant. We adressed these key stereotypes, The zombies slouch in a lazy posture and walk with their feet dragging to show the stupidity and laziness of these zombies. And our zombies hunt, kill and eat the flesh of the living these are over the top violant acts of behaviour. When we looked and researched films like Dawn of the Dead we realised that the zombies represented something from our society, in Dawn of the Dead the zombies represented that when in a shopping centre or a mall we look like zombies walking in hordes around shops. We took this idea and changed it so our zombies are behaving like they would in the world before the outbreak happend. Before the outbreak our zombies would have been bullies and would have bullied smarter people, we took it and changed it so that the zombies are "bullying" the living (who are much more intelligent than the undead) into submission. Our protagonists also fit the stereotypical protagonist in a zombie film, strong male characters who are ready to dive straight into the action and can be very practical in a situation like a mass outbreak of a virus that turns people into flesh eating members of the undead. An example of a strong male character in a zombie film would be Ben from Night of the Living Dead, he was practical, ready to fight and a natural leader we hoped to match his character as much as we can. However Ben is black, we changed this because the majority of people in the UK are white british. We felt this best represented the majority of the country.

Our editing is fast paced in the action scenes and slower in the few opening scenes. We chose to do this mainly because it's what we felt looked and felt best for our film and made our film more active and gave it some energy. I used low angles, over the shoulder shots and P.O.V shots to signify versimillitude. These types of shots give our film an edge of realism and can help create a scarier and almost realistic feeling to the film.

Eval Q3 Distributor

Suburban Zombie is a specific sub genre of horror and only a few British films have made it into the mainstream, such as 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead. This is mainly due to them being backed by big production companies such as Working Title. However smaller indie films such as Colin have made it into the mainstream.

The distribution company that we would use would be something like Kaleidoscope due to it being a small indie company. Our film is an underground indie film and most likely wouldn't get mainstream fame. Because of this the film may be web released or released on DVD. If released on the web it would most likely free or only get a small amount of money, but the good thing about this would be that our film can be accessed by the whole world and would help advertise ourselves.If our film was released on DVD the film may not get seen by a wider audience but a positive would be that we would make more money from sales.

 My distribution company is Lore, the type of films we would plan to release under this name would be low budget, british, indie horror films, like our film Suburban Zombie.

Eval Q4 Audience

Suburban Zombie contains scenes of gore and violance such as some of the characters getting killed and eaten. It also contains scenes of horror an example would be one of the unnamed characters gets eaten alive by two zombies. Because of this we think that the BBFC would rate our film a 15. However later on in the film we've planned to have more violance and gore. Our primary audience will be 15 -24 year olds but seeing as there has been a strong following of zombie films since the 60's so the film may be viewed by older aged people.

The zombie genre has an already massive cult following, there are the older followers who have watched the genre grow, since the 60's when it broke the mainstream, the genre was mainly backed by american studios, but in the 90's low budget british zombie films came about and wern't created by companies but by the fans of the genre who had grown up with it and now make the films . There are also the younger followers who have grown up with films such as Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and so on. Because of this we tried to be intertextual to address both older and younger audiances that follow the genre.

Christopher Lee as Dracula

My film may also attract fans of Hammer Horror. Hammer Horror were a large company around the 50's -70's who produced films such as "Dracula" and the "The Curse of Frankenstein" These films introduced actors such as Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, Christoper Lee and Oliver Reed. They didn't focus on zombie films as such but did pave the way for British Horror which focused on a far more gothic and creepy atmosphere compared to the big american companies producing horro films such as Universal. They invented british horror conventions that made British Horror a sub genre of Horror, these included, extreme gore which at the time was almost unheard of in cinema and none of the mainstream companies would use. Content that was of a sexual nature, these films were very sexually explicit and didn't just focus on hetrosexuals, but homosexuality as well. They also were renound for being having a gothic atmosphere and many of their films were shot in a castle. We didn't actually have any sexual content in the film but we did use some gore and had a 'modern gothic' location a burned down house on the outskirts of a housing estate. These features may attract fans of Hammer Horror.