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

When we started to look at different film genres in preparation for starting our group piece, we looked at different film genres and the conventions of each of those genres. For example there was drama; using fast paced editing and lots of action to keep the audience enticed. Then we looked at thrillers and we focussed deeper on them, realising that this is what we wanted to choose for our own genre, so we did. The thriller shares many common conventions such as a dark environment with a main murderer or anonymous character, and a possible victim. Common themes of thriller are death, victims, as well as the conventions of the production such as worrying music, and editing or creating a story which itself creates and puzzle for the audience: leaving them guessing. An examples of this are thriller movies such as ‘Wanted’ as well as many others, and they hold back information until the end so that the audience are more intrigued and more scared. We fit to these conventions of the thriller genre by having the classic characters of a ‘victim girl’ and an ‘anonymous character ’, as well as using enigmas, by not showing the anonymous character, making audiences question themselves.  

Another way we represented the genre of thriller is that we used the theme of stalking, which has been used is film such as ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ We also used chilling music. Conventions for our opening sequence included an introduction to the key character, sense of danger from the music, symbolic images and titles throughout the opening sequence. We used these convention, we introduced the anonymous character, introduced the young attractive victim, we also had titles and music throughout. The overall style of our piece is very strange, with close up camera work to show expressions of the characters.

Our media product uses developed forms and convention of real media product in many ways. As the genre of our film is a thriller, we considered to use several camerawork such as over the shoulder to raise the suspense of the murderer. Long shot was used as the murderer was stalking the victim. A close up shots was used as the victim was crossing and circling the next victim to convey the person’s appearance. At first we were going to use a black board, with pictures pined on it, with the killer marking of his victim. However, we came across a better idea which was to use the smart board instead. This gave us a flicker effect which added to the tension we were trying to create. In order to make the scenes seem a lot darker and appealing, we considered to use a non-diegetic sound to raise tension. The edited non- diegetic sound also allows the scene to look and sound much more nerve-racking, to achieve the viewers sympathy towards the victim. The diegetic sound of the victim speaking, is purposely set to do connote her vulnerability