Question 1

1. Question One: In what ways
does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media
products?
By Sophie Butler

2. Typical Thriller Conventions
▪ Slow, tense soundtrack
▪ Attractive, heroic male lead
▪ Fast pace camera shots
▪ Innocent, female victim
▪ Protagonist faces a dilemma
▪ Busy city setting
▪ Dramatic irony

3. Using Conventions
▪ We thought it was especially important to follow the rules of some typical thriller/crime conventions in order to gain
the audiences trust and engagement in the film.
▪ We knew we wanted to stick to a familiar thriller soundtrack which tends to be very tense and eerie to create an
atmospheric and daunting mood.To help us identify our soundtrack we watched a series of movies of the same genre
to pick out key aspects that we liked and disliked. Eventually we looked into the filmTaken which has some excellent
music that’s very rigid which was exactly the effect we were going for!
▪ In terms of camerawork we wanted to include a range of diverse shots.This is typical in a thriller film in order to show
all the different action shots and emotions from the characters. We found that the movie ‘Eye For An Eye’ (1966) used
this technique when initiating the main scene where the problem occurs.This convention helped us to portray the
thriller genre.
▪ Like a typical thriller, our product introduces the main protagonist in the first 2 minutes.This was important to us as
we wanted the audience to feel connected and sympathetic for her after the tragedy first happens.

4. Developing Conventions
▪ Our media product develops typical themes of mystery and
suspense.We wanted to develop these conventions because then our
audience would engage more with the film. Our development with
suspense causes the audience to question what will happen next and
helps them develop their own theories and predictions for the films
resolution. A film that we based this theme on wasThe Shawshank
Redemption, which conveys mystery

5. Challenging Conventions
▪ A typical thriller/crime film has a male as the lead protagonist (Taken – Liam
Neeson). We decided we wanted to have a female play the lead role to
challenge conventions and make our film more unique.We also wanted to
make our victim a teenage boy which is unusual because this role is normally
female.
▪ The camerawork in our film is quite slow which challenges typical fast-paced
thriller scenes.
▪ Our location isn’t very typical as many thriller/crime films are located in big
(often famous) cities. We decided to shoot in the middle of Cambridge to
give off the impression that the characters are very normal and relatable.