Evaluation: Question 1

Phoebe Thomas

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

Part 1 – Our chosen genre.The genre we chose to use as the theme of our short film was Horror/Thriller. This is because after completing the audience research task, we found that this would be one of the most popular genres for our target audience. The horror/thriller genre itself had codes and conventions associated with it such as for the horror parts, the film to be set in abandoned or isolated locations, for props to include items to disguise identity and weapons, for the characters to include a killer and a victim and there to be a frequent use of non-diagetic sound to set the mood and create tension. For the thriller the conventions are quite similar with the addition of needing to keep the audience on the edge of their seats in suspense and mystery, to leave them begging to find out why. The way we included this in our film is that we left the mystery of why the guy was stalking the girl and what actually would happen to her next after he kidnaps her with the chloroform cloth.

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Part 2 – Inspiration from other opening sequences.We watched many opening sequences for inspiration in making our own short film, we decided to watch horror/thriller film openings and look at films that were similar to what we wanted our final film to be like. Film openings that we watched included; Candyman (1992), Psycho (1960), Openings from shows such as CSI and Criminal Minds.

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Part 3 – How we developed our film to match that of pre existing films in our chosen genre.

Ways in which we developed our sequence to do this is that we made sure the weather on the days we were shooting outdoor scenes was quite bland and miserable, this added the darker edge to our film that we wanted. We also made sure that our location was quite isolated and that we wouldn't have many members of the public in each scene and to add to the effect of our protagonist being helpless and trapped.

9part screen cap of the sequence