Runner Evaluation question 1

1. Evaluation
1 In what ways does your media product use, develop
or challenge forms and conventionsof real media
products?
Before starting our Thriller opening we did research into a variety of areas relating to thrillers.
Specifically we looked into aspects of Conspiracy and political thrillers as this was the specific thriller
genre we were wanting our thriller to be.
Conspiracy thriller - Protagonist must confront a large, powerful
organization whose threat only he sees. The protagonist usually must
do this alone.
Political Thriller - Political relation or the whole government is at stake.
The protagonist is employedby the government to stop the decline.
Protagonist – Usually has a problem or is sent on a mission to solve a
mystery.
Antagonist – Enemyof the protagonist and responsible for the danger
of the protagonist.
Iconography - The usual icons of thrillers are guns and other types of
weaponry. In later years of thrillers blood and screams also plays a
part in the iconography.
Setting – Most common thriller settings are shady inner city areas with a variety of background
sounds suchas cars, shouting and rainfall and scenesoften include violence.
1.1 Research impacting ideas
Before the production of our film we
researchedfamous thriller films and past
students films. We looked at two film in detail:
Gone girl and
Se7en. The
main influence
out of the two
was Gone girl
due to the way
it presents its titling as it’s so simple and yet has sucha chilling effect
on the viewer. From this we thendecided to use this in our thriller
My Gone girl research
Runner Title sequence

2. to cause similar effects. From se7en although we liked the montage aspects of the title sequence we
decidedit would not fit with the style of our film and so stuck
with Gone Girl. In class we looked at past students work.
Particularly we liked an aspect from this students thriller titled
PENUMBRA. At the end of their thriller they show a flashback of
a girl being murdered to fill in a gap of information. Although we
didn’t end up directly using the flashback feature we did give use
the clip at the beginning of our thriller of the passing of a memory
stick to give the audience more information. We also like the
Thriller titled TORN as it
used its score to narrate the actions with in the scene,for
example the music quietening as he finishes cutting the doll.
Our music emphasized certain aspects of our thriller for
example the begging of the chase scene and the build up
towards the fight and final shot.
1.2 Conforming to conventions
In a fewways our thriller did conform to conventions of both types of thriller. In terms of a political
thriller our protagonist was employed by the government to stop hackers from leaking information
which would destroy it. This is supported due to a
‘shifty’ phone call to a mystery person at the
beginning of our opening which is quite common in
the political thriller genre. Howeverit also plays to
the conventions of a conspiracy thriller as the
protagonist faces the large organization (in this
case the organization of hackers) and although
does not in the beginning fight them alone, once
his friend is attacked he faces them on his own on
the last shot.
1.3 Rejecting conventions
Although we have conformed to some of the thriller conventions we’ve also rejectedsome. One key
factor would be things such as Drugs, Weapons and Cars which is quite often associated with the
thriller genre.We chose to reject these aspects from our thriller as we feel they did not fit well.
Weapons wouldn’t have fit well as the characters are teenagers which would not have had easy
accessto such equipment,Drugs played no part in the storyline and in terms of cars we wanted our
characters to play more of a city grown, street wise character which wouldn’t needa car plus none
of us could drive or owned a car which limited our option on that part.

3. 1.4 Narrative theory
Narrative theory can very muchbe applied to our product in several aspects. Narrative theory looks
at the basics of a film in terms of codesto portray different meanings to the audience and binary
oppositions which is the basic format of most films. Our film opening uses binary oppositions
betweenthe main protagonist Benand the Government hired teenagers, Ashley and Dalton.
Howeverin whole plan of the film the binary
oppositions would shift. The story would follow the
lead protagonist of Ashley and his perspective and
to begin with it would be him and the government
(The good) vs The group of hackers (The bad)
Although after the point in the film in which Ashley
actually changesperspective and joins the hackers
it would be the hackers who are actually good and
seeking freedomfor the country vs the government
who are the bad and want to hide stories in order
for themto stay in charge and keep control.
We also used a few different codes within our thriller especially the main film plan. The main code we
used was cultural knowledge. As the Thriller is based in Britain involving the British government the
story relies on the audience to know at least how the governmentis run and some of the main
conspiracy theories surrounding it such as the Hilda Murrell story.