My media project follows the forms and conventions of a typical zombie apocalypse movie, in terms of how it is presented. In many ways I have used and copied some of the forms and conventions of films I researched for my project. One example of how I used them can be seen at the very start of the film with the TV that flicks between different news channels and that each time it changes channel it carries on the same report as before, this was used in the 2004 re-make of “Dawn of The Dead” throughout different points of the first half hour of the film and is also used in the 2004 film “Shaun of the Dead” which features the news adds and uses what we did of the channels changing over, carrying on the story but is used in this film for comedic effect given that it is considered to be a “Romantic, Zombie, Comedy”. Something else that my project uses from forms and conventions in the scene with one of the survivors being chased by zombies, this is a form and convention that is used throughout many zombie movies but the one that bares the most significance here is from the film “28 Days Later” from 2002, another film I did as part of my evidence mainly because I used a few of it’s forms and conventions such as the speed of the zombies in the film, but mainly cause it has a chase scene of zombies pursuing the main character, Jim. I used this chase scene as an influence to put one in my film and also because I wanted this film to be one long chase scene showing the fight for survival of man in a world slowly becoming a wasteland filled with creatures of the un-dead. In this piece I also developed and challenged certain ideas from my research, one prime example can be seen in the look of the zombies. Given that trying to achieve features such as flaky skin and facial injuries would have been time consuming for each shoot and expensive, I decided to opt for the look used in the original “Dawn of the Dead” from 1978, where the majority of the zombies just have pale faces used with either grey or white. I used this form and convention but developed it by using both grey and white on the zombies faces and give them black around their eyes and added certain spots of blood. Something that I challenged in this film was how people defended themselves in this film, in most zombie movies the form and convention of defence is that the humans fend off the un-dead hordes with either fire arms or melee weapons, here I did use melee weapons but also included the use of hand to hand in one scene, something that is rarely or never, seen or used in a zombie film. Another thing I challenged was the speed of the zombies, like I referred to before, I used the idea of the speed of the zombies from “28 Days Later” and their motion, how they can maintain the speed and the perfect physical movements of an average human, but here I combined this speed with the physical movements of typical zombie, slightly rigid arms and not much in the terms of physical movement.
1b. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The main protagonists in our film were teenagers, which was a deliberate move, as it was a different element to a zombie film. Most zombie films stick to the protagonists being of adults age from between 20-50 on average, with teenagers hardly ever being shown in these films, usually when they are they are either already zombies or are just used to be killed off and then turned into zombies. Another reason for using teenagers was because they aren’t featured very widely in film, usually they are seen in just typical teenage movies or in terms of British film, as criminals and thugs. So using teenagers as the main characters allows to show them in a more positive light and gives the audience a look at what teenagers would be like if they had to rise to the occasion and be hero’s. Choosing teenagers also allows the audience a look at what different age groups would do and how they would cope in a zombie apocalypse, rather than just showing the adult side, the audience gets to see teenagers thinking fast and acting to this apocalypse. This also works with the real world element we were trying to achieve with this film. The point of the film was trying to give it a realistic approach to a zombie apocalypse, to try and show what people real would do when having to face a terror like this, rather than just have a bunch of gun crazed protagonists, we wanted to show what people would do in terms of defending themselves and how they would fend off the zombie hordes. Teenagers adds to the real world element we were trying to achieve with this piece, giving that teenagers are a big part of society and play a big role in the world, they fit in with it perfectly as we are able to see what they would do.
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