For our media product to be successful, we did a number of things. The first was through the use of Reception Theory; this could be seen through our use of mise-en-scene. The character was dirty smeared with mud and blood. From this the audience could automatically make their own perceptions of the character, such as him being homeless, violent and trouble. To add to this, the bleak forest backgrounds added another layer for the audience to converse with others; the environment and desolate atmosphere give clear indications as to what type of narrative and genre this film will be. The character being alienated from society in this way sets up the generic formula for a zombie movie. The reason reception theory was helpful here was down to the timing in which we created it, at the time both television series such as The Walking Dead and films such as World War Z were being shown and in production, which were both large successes; so this showed us that our genre was a guaranteed to be successful.

 

The syntactic and semantic ideas that were placed into the product were all generic conventions of the film style. The zombies in the opening we deliberately set to appear from behind and out of focus to the audience to create the element of an enigmatic outcome, in traditional zombie films, the character in the opening shots would normally play an opening victim to which are slaughtered. But we decided that we should surprise the audience and make the opening character a hunter of the dead to add new originality and engaging plot. The semantic props that were used were things such as an bow and arrow set which we have learnt from other zombie products, is the silent weapon of choice to use in this scenario.