Codes and Conventions of a Zombie Film

While researching Zombie Movies I decided to make a presentation on the Codes and Conventions of the Zombie Genre and things I found common in Zombie Movies. Alongside making a concept image for my movie with the current title "The Last Few".

 

From this I can see that I will need to take many things into account when it comes to filming. I will most likely have to recreate all of the audio in my movie from scratch and make a unique modal set for my zombies so every zombie seen in my movie "acts the same" I will take the Ideas of stereotypical characters into account although I want to go for realism rather than making my zombie film like EVERY OTHER zombie film ever.

Exploring Initial Ideas

After completing the two preliminary tasks, we were asked to  Explore the four possible routes we could do for our project. As I already knew what I wanted to do I went into deeper knowledge about the movie I wanted to make. I did delve into the Three other possibilities which are Audio, Print and Website.

For the print, I looked into making a music magazine which is about new songs in the same format as "No Copyright Sounds".. For the magazine, I would have made a campaign for the local area to either get certain shops in our area or even something for charity. I think if I didn't do video, I would have done radio. For radio I wanted to do the news bulletin in a similar format to how the "Chris Moyles Show" used to do as that was the only radio show I ever listened to. I liked the format so I thought that I could take inspiration for my own project.

I ended up going for Movie as I really enjoy movies and could see myself one day getting into either the movie business or even in to making games. Personally, I like horror/dark movies so I thought I would give it a go making a zombie film. I love the Zombie genre and is one of the only things I every really watch having films like "World War Z" being on of my most favorite films and I watched "Walking Dead" and it's companion show right from the start. To start of with the mind map I looked at many features that goes into making a zombie film like the makeup, the story and the audio used to produce one. I wanted the film to be to do with the local area and filmed as if it happened around the time we start filming.

For Audio I separated out between Music and Sound effects. For music I took the theme tune for "World War Z", "28 Days Later" and "Shaun of the Dead". They all have that unique "End of the world" feel to the songs which I would like to replicate in my film if I use a theme tune. For Sound effects I wrote down the sound of gunshots, Slashing of knives cutting zombies and the zombie moans that are made.

Makeup is where I put a lot of time thinking about what would be needed. I took a reference image from "The Walking Dead" and talked about all of the different features found in zombie makeup like the cuts, gore, exposed flesh and grayed, rotting skin.

One more thing I looked into is the story for my movie, I explored some ideas on what I would like to happen, for instance I would like the news of the zombie virus starting out with it being described as acts of cannibalism etc. One thing which is seen in almost every film is that the main characters always do the wrong things which end up getting them killed, for my movie I would like the characters to be smart about what they do so they/he could become a true survivor. In the mind map I put a potential start to two minute introduction with a car pulling up in front of the camera with the driver getting out, the scene would cut to the driver holding his gun and looking over at a body on the floor with a rifle next to him...

I think for exploring initial ideas this is all that was needed and now I have a good understanding of what I need to research to make a good zombie movie.

Preliminary Task: Magazine

Our second task involved making a magazine Cover and Contents page in a school theme, I went for a Teach based Magazine, so I went for a rather formal and factual approach to the magazine. We used Adobe Photoshop to show that we could use the software with ease and to decide if we want to make either a magazine or a movie for the final project.

To start we had to take a photo of either a student or teacher to use for the "Main Feature Article". My group asked a teacher if we could use his photo. Because I went for a  factual magazine I used a teacher as he was dressed up formally, I personally think this is the right approach as it fits the theme of the magazine giving the audience the feeling that it was A: It was made to teach people and B: Just to give that "boring" teacher look to the magazine, Making it look like the type of magazine that would be stereotypical for a teacher to read.

After taking the photo of the teacher, we continued taking some other photos just in case I wanted to go a different route, we took one photo that had a nice brick wall behind it and I wanted to use the background of the image for my front cover. Once we took the photos off of the camera I Photo shopped the image so that It was just a wall then I used the Hue/Saturation Tool to add in the colored tint to the wall. After this I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut the background out of the image of the teacher, once that was done I cleaned up the edges by removing excess background that was left over from the lasso tool. Afterwards I duplicated the image and I made it Black and 50% opaque so that it would resemble a shadow, a theme I used multiple times on my cover. I made the teacher on the Front Cover of my magazine be above the Masthead and a few of the articles on the side of the cover. I made the Bottom line Above the Teacher so that I could put the Strap Line of my Magazine "To Learn | To Teach | To Discover". I also needed a place to put my bar code so I put it on the front of my cover with the line. As you can see I used a puff with the crucial information "Interview with the one and only Mr Quinlan". As this is supposed to be a really important part of the magazine I used a buzz word in full capital letters to draw attention  using the word "EXCLUSIVE". I took inspiration from the magazine "Q" for my masthead. I made a red box in the top left hand corner to put my Magazines logo, Title and a sub heading. I used the shadow idea for my logo as I liked the idea of making stuff "Stand out" from the page, giving them a sense of importance so that the attention of the view is drawn to them. The Sub heading reads "The #1 Magazine for Teachers" This is supposed to be eye-catching and to draw the attention of teachers, one of the targeted audiences for this magazine. I also added A box at the top with an award for my magazine saying "Voted Best Factual News Magazine 2016" because this is supposed to be a satirical piece of work.

I then started working on my Contents page, this was supposed to be very different to the the magazine cover as the cover is supposed to be cheesy and eye-catching compared to my contents page. As the magazine would of been factual I thought it would be best to go for a nice background image with a table of contents in the empty part of the background. I found a really nice Royalty free image of Earth which I then added to the bottom of my page, making the background of my page black to fill the rest of my page. In the black area I added my contents page. As this is only a preliminary task I added the articles that I had on the front cover of my alongside some filler articles to add in my contents. I also added some images to the left of the crucial articles that I added to the Front Cover.

Video Preliminary Task

This is my first attempt at making a video using a range of media skills including  "Shot Reverse Shot", "Match on Action" and enforcing the "180 degree rule". In the video we use examples of each and how they should be used. For a first video I would consider this pretty good.

In Conclusion, I think this task was very useful, allowing me to put the techniques I have learned to the test. It has allowed me to learn the program "Corel Video Studio" which will come in handy for my A-Levels.

Personally I think my group and I need to work on a few things including:

.Not looking at the camera when filming

.Practice using the camera and also practice editing videos.