Communicating Narrative

For this task, we were set a scenario of a birthday party where we had to choose from numerous genres and create an image that would contain typical conventions of one or more of those particular genres. As a group we decided to go for the horror theme, believing it would provide loads of options in creating a somehwat creepy and surreal enviroment that would in addition make it clear that it was a horror style shoot. We felt by using maks it would create a secretive nature to the "villains" which is whta usually occurs during a horror and also by having a captured prisioner dressed up as if they were supposed to be having fun, with the birthday had and party clothes but instead being tortured by being taped to a chair, it created a good contrast between normality and the strange. Furthermore, we also wanted to try and show that usual things associated with parties such as balloons and cake candles could be used to intimidate the captured person. A long with the features within the shot, we also tried to experiment with the camera to see what sort of effects we could create by placing objects such as balloons infront of teh camera and altering the focus and zoom functions. Also, we tried to contain all the individuals within one shot so it was like a typical birthday party photo with everyone in it and smiling about the occasion, whilst also having the camera slightly tilted backwards with the villains standing behind teh prisoner to make them look more powerful and in control of teh situation. We paid close attention to the lighting of the shot also as we wanted to ghave a sort of disturbing lighting style but also keep some sort normality to it so it in fact looked as if nothing bad was happening. By considering all of these options, we felt we indeed able to capture a horror like image that is clear of the genre with its use of typical conventions and additional subtle touches.