As Media Evaluation- Question One

Question 1-

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

My brief for this whole task was to create a two minute opening sequence for a film that fell into the thriller genre. The brief obtained many features and expectations that as a group were to include and meet within the thriller such as, a time span of two minutes, to include sound, a wide range of camera angles and a varied use of conventions that fall into the thriller genre. My group consisted of myself and Sophie who obtained a different role/roles within the production. For example I was the role of both mise en scene co-ordination, and editor, where as Sophie was both editor and director. We also assigned roles to people outside the group whom helped us with our production.

As a group, it was always an essential that we worked well and productively together. We experienced as a group a few issues that we were determined to over come in order to create our thriller to be as effective and good as it could be. Overall, me and Sophie worked really well together and created a really strong team. We listened to each-others ideas and worked together on decisions and crucial editions that needed to be within our work. Together we had the ability and skills to bounce of eachothers ideas and to execute what we feel was a really good take on a thriller film. The key to creating a successful thriller film was to always relate our decisions back to the genre and the conventions associated with it. For example: in the discussion of what characters we should obtain with in our thriller, we concluded it was best to include a blonde female victim in order to keep up with the conventional thriller film. By relating all our decisions and choices back to the thriller conventions we could evaluate and asses just how effective and beneficial they would be, and therefore use it as a tool to know weather or not we were making formed and correct decisions.

The generic conventions of a thriller are, dark lighting, suspense filled soundtrack, unexpected sounds and a series of camera angles, to name a few. These are all presented in successful thriller films which, support I as a group using them as we know that they have made a positive impact prior. As a group we researched past thriller films in order to collect a wide knowledge of conventions, their impact and their success rate. For example: a conventional storyline to a thriller is the use of an unknown caller which, we as a group first indenitifited in scream. As a group we used the use of an unknown caller in the thriller to make sure we were being generic and were displaying to our audience a sense of foreboding. Having we had not taken this research, other aspects we used such as low key lighting which is seen in Prom night, and a suspense filled soundtrack which is seen in The Conjuring, we wouldn't have known how to use them to their full effect. These were used in my thriller at different points. Low key lighting was used throughout, but, I used a relatable setting which too is a convention. I used a train station as the target audience were ranged between 15-18 and would currently be using public transport to get home perhaps late at night. By using this, the audience were relating the events that took place to the characters to themselves. Another way in which I followed thriller conventions is by using non digetic sound of a soundtrack. This covered up the natural sounds of the train well and created a suspense and sense of enigma for the audience who were watching it. It also alowed me to highten certain parts of the thriller; for example, when our female victim falls to the floor the music's pitch is higher to highlight what has just taken place. A final example of myself keeping my thriller within the conventional thriller genre was the use of the handheld camera shot. This allowed a jolty and uneven view for the audience of certain scenes. This was used in my thriller and is used in the genre to give off the perception of the killer's point of view. This makes the audience fear as they feel that they are in the killers control and not that of the victim who they have made a realtionship with.  The opening sequence defines the thriller genre as it obtains many micro elements of the genre throughout the duration of it, if we was to compare our thriller to another film it would be final destination in regards of this. The narrative is slightly simular and the use of transport being used is also evident in ours, other micro elements that are simular are the use of high pitched music which, is used in our thriller. Both the thriller and Final Destination use the use of high pitched music when the main part of the thriller is about to take place, this means we can define to our audience when certain parts are going to happen. My title of my thriller was "The Contiuity" which means, "Continuous". I felt that this was a good title to choose as it stayed with the thriller convention with the title suggesting that the events are always on going. This means that the audience will be drawn towards the film as the title doesnt give very much away and they want to see what this 'continuous' event is going to be. This falls into the thriller genre as thriller titles tend not to give too much away but, obtain an element of fear; the same way in which my chosen title does.