Evaluation - Question 1

In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real Media products?

Our product, Dead Reckoning (2009), directed by Alex Kohnert is an example of a contemporary zombie film, a genre which has seen a resurgence in popularity during the last decade as a result of several high profile remakes and adaptations of popular zombie stories. Our product utilises many genre conventions such as camerawork and makeup artistry, but attempted to enrich the form. My biggest influences while coming up with the concept of the product were from two recent zombie films: Zak Snyder’s 2003 Dawn of the Dead remake and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002).

In zombie movies, there are many underlying and overtly obvious themes, the ones that we utilised in our product were: the use of female victims in vulnerable situations, isolated locations and individuals against the mass. In zombie films females are usually portrayed as weak and helpless compared to men, as in our product. In zombie movies, zombies usually travel in hordes, and very rarely are alone for extended periods of time. Many zombie movies are also set in isolated locations, as it amplifies the sense of helplessness that the victims feel.

The look and appearance of the zombies in our product actually heralded more from zombie films of old. We used pale white makeup as the main feature of the zombies, as we didn’t have the means to create complex prosthetic facemasks and injuries. We also just left our zombies wearing normal, unsoiled clothes to suggest that the transformation into zombies was quick and unexpected.

We utilised zombie choreography much like examples from contemporary zombie films. In recent times, zombies have been portrayed as creatures that can run and have basic intelligence, unlike in old zombie films like George A. Romero’s 1968 genre-creating Night of the Living Dead. We also expanded on this, by giving the zombies more humanistic qualities, like being able to plan and execute more complex strategies and manoeuvres.

The camerawork also borrowed many tried and tested techniques from modern zombie filmmaking. None of our shots used a tripod throughout the whole day of filming, so all our footage was shot using handcam techniques. Handcam footage makes a sequence feel fast-paced and action-packed, as a result of the shaky on-screen image. This technique was used extensively in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, significantly when the humans were being chased by the zombies, as in our product.

Many zombie films start out slowly, with very little action and sometimes show what life was like before whatever caused the zombie infestation. We however, decided not to do this as we wanted to grab the audience’s attention from the start. Another convention we challenged was the use of slow motion. This is not used often in zombie films, as it usually makes the zombies look silly, however it is used in León Klimovsky’s Vengeance of the Zombies (1973). But, as our zombies were stationary when slow motion was used, the technique is effective in heightening the atmosphere of the sequence.