question one of evaluation

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

2. Understanding of thriller
genre and research we did.
These are some screen-grabs from my blog showing some
of the research I did into thriller conventions, and thriller
films.
Firstly I looked into Tzvetan Todorov’s Narrative Theory
and linked it to our thriller by showing the difference
between the usual structure of a thriller film and ours.
I also looked in detail at the conventions of a thriller film
and what types of things you can expect to see in a typical
thriller film. And then I looked into a thriller film (‘Catch
me if you can’). I analysed it and showed how it can be
located within the Thriller genre.

3. What impact did research have
on our ideas and final film?
After doing research into the conventions of a thriller film
it impacted some of the decisions we had while making our
thriller opening.
The conventions of a thriller presentation I did gave us the
idea to add aspects such as quick cuts, low key lighting and
montages most of which were in the title sequence at the
end of our opening. We also had tension music, especially
at the climax when she found the mysterious document,
and we used sound effects such as gun shots. We used these
to create a dramatic effect and to foreshadow what’s going
to happen in the film.
The textual analysis of ‘Catch me if you can’ gave me the
idea to make our film a less conventional thriller film for
example a horror so instead we made a crime/war thriller.

4. How does our work adhere
to conventions?
These screen grabs show some of the conventions of a
thriller that we adhered to.
Firstly for our logo we used low-key lighting and fog to
emphasise that it is going to be a thriller film and not a
comedy for example, otherwise we might have made it
more colourful.
Throughout the opening we used more low-key lighting
shown in the second screen grab of when the girl is
walking down the street. We shot this when it was
darker to represent the mood we were trying to convey.
The girl was angry and sad, so a sunny atmosphere
wouldn’t have portrayed the mood correctly.
Also in the main opening we used a slow-motion shot
(shown in the third screen grab) along with some
tension-building music.
And lastly in the title sequence we used some black and
white quick cut shots in a few different montages (shown
in forth screen grab). The one in the picture shows a war
graveyard, which shows that the film will be about war,
and a crow which represents death (another convention
of a thriller film).

5. Have we been
unconventional?
Although our film has many aspects that conform to
stereotypical thriller conventions it also has aspects that
are unconventional. For example we show different family
relationships that you might find in any type of film genre,
with a stereotypical grandma and dad which might suggest
that it isn’t a thriller. However, the grandma turns out to
be not so stereotypical when the girl finds the document
suggesting she helped her ‘not-so war hero’ husband.
Another thing that might be unconventional in our thriller
is the high key lighting we use showing the sky. In this clip
we also used diegetic sound of birds outside. This isn’t
conventional because birds singing usually represents
happiness. However after this clip I used a similar image
but instead of birds singing I used tension-building music
to change the mood back to match thriller conventions.

6. Narrative theory used
I used Tzvetan Todorov’s Narrative Theory to research the structure of a
thriller. As the theory sates it should start with an equilibrium, then
there should be a disruption is this equilibrium that leads to the climax
and it usually ends with the equilibrium being restored.
However because we only made the opening to our thriller this theory’s
structure isn’t the same, instead it starts with a disruption caused by an
argument between the girl and her father, then there is an equilibrium
when she visits her grandma’s house and it seems to be a happy family,
but it ends with a climax when the girl finds the document showing her
granddad as a murderer which shows the mystery of the thriller we
tried to convey.
But I think that if we were to carry on to make the whole film it would
reflect the structure of Todorov’s theory more as the disruption and the
climax in the opening sequence will look like the equilibrium compared
to the war and death that would be shown in the main film which would
be the real climax.