Creative Critical Reflection Prep: Question #1

 I am trying to work on my CCRs piece by piece so I can be sure to incorporate everything I need to in a short and concise way. For the first question in my CCR, I wanted to make sure to look at both genre characteristics to reflect on my openings use of them and the representation choices we made. 

I created some notes on things I want to discuss in my CCR which I will be putting together into my script later on. 

Horror

The horror genre has very specific conventions that we knew we wanted to incorporate as well as stay away from like content and production techniques. 

In our opening we wanted to use the element of the unknown which is one of the major conventions of horror. We did this because we wanted to have the freedom to create any storyline without having to actually worry about physically creating what we were talking about. The element of the unknown helps us achieve this. It also helps with another convention, fear. 

The element of fear is developed through the suspense created by the unknown piece of our story. This is then enhanced by the different production techniques that give the audience the visual and auditory cue that there is something to be afraid of. 

The Production techniques we primarily relied on were lighting and sound, which are the biggest conventions in any horror film. In our film we used flashlights and filmed in the dark to have better control of the lighting. This helped us create a focus on what we wanted and hide the rest of the scene creating the shadow and, as a result, more of the element of the unknown. 

The final push towards all of these conventions is our sound. We wanted to use a very specific monster sound effect and incorporate it with the dark of the rest of the scene to now generate mystery with the unknown as well. This will leave the audience wondering, but also afraid of what is out there. 

A convention we didn't incorporate was a plot twist because we decided to rely more on suspense, the plot twist would've, in our opinion, overdone it and maybe been confusing with our plot. 

Representation

We chose to portray children in our opening because stereotypically, children are often called out on lying or making things up. We felt like if we made the primary "targets" of our monster children, it would be pushing these stereotypes. 

Our main protagonist in the scene, Benjamin, doesn't speak throughout the opening. The obvious is because he is alone, but it is also because of the idea that most protagonists in horror are really dumb and tend to just speak or make unnecessary noise, leading to their death. We thought if we made sure to limit the sound he made it would be like showing how his death would be inevitable. 

We also put thought into Benjamin's costume. He wore a white t shirt, but the rest of his outfit was a pair of black jeans and black jacket. This is showing how even he, an innocent child, is never fully separated from death or evil. 

(I don't have a very clear picture but you get the idea)

These are some of the points I want to cover in my CCR and I'll probably add on to it in the final thing, but I wanted to give myself time to think about it and figure out exactly what I was going to discuss. The points on representation doesn't exactly go together, but they are all things I want to mention, so that is something I will work on.