Media Studies – Term 3 Project

The aim of the project is to create a complete ‘pitch’ for a new movie or a comic book, and produce a short film trailer or introductory scene, or, alternately, publish a section of a comic book to show potential clients.

*The preferred GENRE for your project should be either HORROR or COMIC BOOK HERO as per our studies.

You will create and develop two original characters (images and descriptions), develop a basic plot outline and visual theme (250 words), and then produce a script of your proposed scene (4-6 pages), a storyboard (8 frames of quality), and a promotional poster (featuring your main thematic image, colour(s) and a tagline) for your project.

Details of the expectations for each section will be provided… the first step is outlined below. When you’ve completed the conceptual steps individually, you will team up with a partner and choose which ideas you want to develop further. You can use one person’s concepts, or create an amalgamation of both partners’ ideas. Then, you will produce either a SHORT VIDEO (2-3 minutes), or a COMIC EXTRACT (4-6 pages) showcasing your concept.

STEP ONE - Create your characters. There should be a “Hero” and a “Villain” … but they don’t have to be black-or-white, Good-or-Evil (for example, the characters of V, Evey, Borden and Angier all have many layers to their personalities and their actions and are not purely “good” or “bad”)... as long as you have a Protagonist and an Antagonist. The characters should be original and created by you. Come up with creative names, looks, styles, mannerisms, costumes, etc for your characters.

Submit an 8 ½ x 11 sheet for each character. The page should contain a professional drawing/sketch of the character, which showcases their appearance and any special costume or makeup needs. Add some brief notes about the character’s history, personality, skills, hobbies, interests, positive and negative character traits. The written portions should be approx 100 words each. The images should be polished, inked, and coloured.

For this exemplar, I used information from DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004), the opening scene of which we viewed in class.

(Character pictures not included in this electronic version of the handout – they were drawn by hand later by Ms Munro)

Character 1:

ANA CORTEZ - The hero of the film who takes the viewer through her journey of survival, from beginning to end. She is married to Luis who is a few years older than herself. Ana is a nurse at a hospital near her home. She is kind, generous, and gets along well with her colleagues (as shown in the opening scene). Her world is torn apart when her beloved husband is infected and becomes one of the growing zombie army. Ana is forced to use all of her inner strength to survive the zombie invasion. Where once she used to help people in her role as nurse, she now must kill every person she comes across with her beloved shotgun. Ana becomes a strong leader and has to make many tough decisions to ensure the survival of the remaining humans who have taken refuge in a local shopping mall.

Her most distinctive costume are her pyjamas, which resemble nurse’s scrubs and are covered in the blood of her dead husband.

Character 2:

LUIS CORTEZ – the first example of the zombie villain that we see in the film. He exhibits that our loved ones (i.e. husbands, wives, friends, family members, etc.) will all die and become part of the zombie plague. Nobody is immune to the carnage of the zombie infection in this film. When we meet Luis, he is friendly, cute, and loveable – his relationship with wife Ana is clearly genuine and affectionate. His sudden, brutal death and transformation into a bloodthirsty zombie is shocking and disturbing, as the man that Anna was, only moments ago, in love with and sharing a bed with, is now the enemy that she must escape from or kill to survive. In terms of appearance, Luis is in his early 30’s, handsome, and dressed in casual, comfortable pyjamas. When he is killed and turned into a zombie, his eyes turn white/dim and his clothes are covered in blood, completing his transformation from hero to villain. (159 words)

PLOT OVERVIEW:

A young female nurse, named Ana, is caught in the middle of a world-wide chaos as flesh-eating zombies begin rising up and taking over the world and attacking the living. She escapes into the streets and is rescued by a black police officer, named Kenneth. Together they find shelter in a mall along with a group of other survivors. For a while everything is ok, but pretty soon, they start running out of food, the power goes out, and the dead keep finding ways to break through their defenses. Realizing they're sitting ducks, they make a plan to head for an island by using two armoured mall shuttle busses to get across the sea of zombies.

(from IMDB. 116 words)

VISUAL THEMES:

The themes of the UNDEAD, BLOOD, and INFECTION are obviously the key themes of the film since it deals with an uprising of zombies. These themes are reflected in the visuals of the introductory scene we view – in which two innocent characters are INFECTED by the disease. BLOOD and gore abound in their violent deaths. In addition, they look UNDEAD when their eyes turn white to signify visually that they are now a zombie.

On the promotional poster for the film, there is a main image of an army of the UNDEAD zombies advancing towards the viewer. They appear as shadows (i.e. shadows of their former, living selves). Their bodies are also dripping into BLOOD SMEARS to remind the viewer of the BLOOD theme of the film (the disease is passed through the blood). We see dozens of zombies in the image, with many more behind, reminding us of the huge extent of the INFECTION.

The poster features a colour scheme of red, to remind us of BLOOD. The red colour theme fades away from an image of a yellow sun, to remind the viewer of the title, DAWN OF THE DEAD. It reminds us that a new “day” has dawned for humanity – one in which the dead are now ruling over the living.

(Word count: 214).

Additional Notes: The tagline for this poster is also a quote from the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), directed by George Romero.

This 2004 remake was the first feature directed by Zack Snyder, who went on the direct 300 and Watchmen.