Evaluation Questions

1) In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media productions?

Our product is a two minute opening/title sequence from the short independent film ‘Doll Face’ released in 2009 directed by Clare Dodkins. The plot is about a women becoming possessed by a china doll (given to her by a stranger) after tragically miscarrying a child. Once becoming possessed she loses all her family and friends and in attempts to escape her problems becomes a violent murderer and in the final sequence the doll is laying next to her when she kills herself.
The target audience for the product would be fifteen plus, although we utilized dominant conventions of Horror Films in our film including; a female victim in vulnerable situations (similar to the opening sequence of Wes Craven’s 1996 Scream, in which a young girl was chased and murdered), violence, fear, possession, death and the use of inanimate objects with strange powers (dolls).The plot at times is quite challenging therefore the target audience needs to be older to understand its complexities, therefore I would suggest a 15 certificate.
The music we chose for our opening sequence also conforms to many horror films as we used orchestral music and discordant notes similar to the opening soundtrack of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist released in 1973 which uses elements of the 1971 Cello Concerto by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, as well as some original music by Jack Nitzsche. Also in our opening sequence we tried to use creative and unusual shots including an interior pan to reveal strange disfigured dolls and a blurred focus pull to create confusion and build suspense.

However not all aspects of our product conformed to stereotypical horror films. The doll we chose was female, pretty and looked innocent with blonde hair, pink rosy cheeks, big eyes and red lips, when in fact it plays the main evil protagonist of the plot. The lighting we chose in our opening sequence was very naturalist (for example for the workshop we only used one point lighting in the direction of the sunlight) compared to other horror films which usually use dark lighting (for example William Friedkin’s The Exorcist released in 1973). We wanted minimalist lighting to increase the reality of our horror film.

Tom Holland’s 1988 American horror film Child’s Play heavily influenced our plot as similar to ‘Doll Face’ the film used a strange inanimate object (doll) to be it’s main protagonist however in Child’s Play, Chucky (the doll) was actually a murderer whereas, in Doll Face the doll is merely a visual reflection of the women’s psychotic state of mind after tragically losing her child. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDV-DVWUvrA)
Overall our media production uses both the stereotypical forms from the horror genre (atmospheric music, victims and death) but also challenges these forms (as our main protagonist was a female doll).