Aice Media Studies (CCR 1# Preperation)

 Time to start CCR preparations.

Not too long ago, my teacher had gone over the different CCR questions and what we should and shouldn't do, I was able to take notes on descriptions of the instructions for each question, so I think I'm fine for the knowledge department. First, let us start off with the first question.

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues

• Overall Idea:

For the first question, I really want to make a TV Broadcast type sequence in order to answer this question. My idea for this was to have two of my fellow group members out of the three act as TV reports or news anchors, whatever the preferred name was to pretend like they had just gotten out of giving analysis on the news for the day. Still recording live in their set they would transition to a popular story. "Surprisingly one of our reporters was able to get their hands on one of the leading directors in the film-making world!" To not make it harder for me to edit photos to the video showcasing my process of answering and my process of making the film and stuff, I'll make the news reports state that I wouldn't be able to answer the questions live so that I'd sent them that video beforehand. I didn't wanna make it seem weird in the context that randomly on live TV they'd have all the pictures ready to show on the news interview. Also on regular news channels, whenever popular actors or figures get added to the shows in order to be interviewed, they're normally just floating characters offering insights on their experiences, ideas, and advice. This is also an excuse to have the interview pre-filmed, I really DON'T want to make the majority of my CCR question just a floating head answering these questions. 

• How to answer the question:

                     - Genre Conventions: I want to answer the question by both implying why and why I followed some genre conventions. In both Horror and Psychological Thrillers they aim to keep their viewers on their toes, but have their own individual ways to express this idea. In horror, these films often rely on the explicit, graphic, and supernatural elements that are used to shock the audiences. I want to use this, including the gore between both deaths of the mother and father dying, making these explicit, unwanting but depictable images of horror, offering elements like zombies. I've been implementing visual techniques like darker lighting, fast-paced shots, and costume designs like blood and darkened silhouette beings to showcase these horrific events. In psychological thrillers, these files dive deeper into the character's mental state, using techniques like trauma, paranoia, confusion, uncertainty, and more subtle displays or elements of horror. I want to use this in my film opening to show how the traumatic experiences of watching his wife's death occur in front of him to pledge him into deeper thoughts, mentally damaging him, causing him to inevitably be caught by the zombie. As well as in the film, I want the witness of both his parent's death to affect Owen in the future by causing him trauma which with the added horror experienced by the barbaric actions of other people causes him to lose his sanity.

I have no idea if this counts as a genre convention, but there is one thing I want to highlight. In regular zombie films, the setting is regularly posted at the very beginning or a bit years into the zombie apocalypse. Still, in my film, I want to set the setting almost 2 decades into the future. The main reason I want to do this is that I want the social structure and civilizations of humankind to still be intact, but barely with some little-known surviving civilizations still alive. Due to these dwindling social structures, after the death of both Owens's mother and father in the film opening, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, I want Owen to experience how people are mainly affected by this apocalypse, causing them to go rabid, crazy, wanting only survival in a destroyed world. I want to resist common zombie norms of making the zombies the biggest threat known to people, but instead make the biggest threat to them, themselves.

                    - Representation: Many zombie movies represent social groups by showcasing their divisions, showing different civilizations by race, gender, and even class. They always depict how these different groups react to these apocalypses, showcasing conflicts and tensions. There are always examples of these different types of reactions like how those of richer and more higher class groups would respond differently to an apocalypse than someone of a different and more adaptable background. Zombie movies always represent different ideas on how things are run, social standards, morals, and ethical reasoning. For example, in The Walking Dead, there are some kinder civilizations with morals of helping and providing other groups with safety, while others only focus on survival, having their little groups to steal and kill other competitors. In my film, I mainly want to focus on the idea that people are always fighting each other, in groups, or individually, having their own ways of stability and survival in a zombie apocalypse. They'll give representation to those who strive for peace, freedom, and structure while representing those who only care for resources, themselves, and/or others. 

Hopefully this blog did well, to give an overall idea of what I imagine within the first question of the CCR post.