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1. 1) IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR
MEDIA PRODUCT USE,
DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE
FORMS AND CONVENTIONS
OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS

2. We found out through our research
process and through the creation of our
opening that for this film to fit the genre
and engage an audience something has to
happen to make it exciting within the first
couple of minutes.
Films that started with an exciting interesting opening
scene were more successful and kept the audience
watching and wanting to see what happened next. Films
such as Pulp Fiction, The Purge, Escape Plan etc.
inspired us to want to make our opening scene
something to remember.

3. Our opening isn’t one of the most obvious
thriller openings as we failed to include
many conventions into the sequence.
However this was what we planned to do to
make our film stand out from the rest.
If we were to make it a cliché thriller film
we would include more conventions and
forms that the audience would relate to a
thriller film, such as, include a big male
hero-like character, a suspicious death

4. However, eventually we did decide to include a
few thriller conventions into our opening such
as; we conformed to the convention that girls
are vulnerable and the ones to always be
attacked, they are helpless and weak and can’t
protect themselves which is why there is a
female not a male tied up in the back of the car.
This stereotype can be seen in films such as in
the film ‘Taken’ where the girl gets abducted
and is seen as a weak sexual object.
To help support this stereotype and
cliché in these types of films we had
the character continue to look behind
her in a panic as if someone was
following her. This idea is quite
overused in thriller films but we felt
that it fit in perfectly with our plot and
our plan for our opening.

5. We mostly included close ups and over the shoulder shots to
amplify the emotions of the characters and also focus on certain
parts of the opening that may be more relevant later on in the
film. The film psycho uses many close ups throughout the film as
they want the audience to not only focus on certain objects but
also not know what's going on in the rest of the scene so this
emphasises the fear of the unknown.
The over the shoulder shots create mystery as you never see the
face of the attacker or most of their body which makes you relate to
the character and sympathise for them, where as the close ups show
the emotions we want the audience to see through the facial
expressions. We took inspiration from the film ‘Halloween’ as for
the opening you never know who the killer is which creates
suspense. This was effective amongst audiences as it was a shock at
the end of the scene when the killer was eventually revealed. We
decided to use an over the shoulder shot instead of a point of view
shot like in ‘Halloween’ as we wanted the audience to be unaware of
when the attack is taking place. As you can’t see where the attacker
comes from we feel that this has been accomplished.

6. We took a lot of inspiration from the film P2 for our opening sequence, to
start with we liked the idea that there was a person tied up in a car and
that the audience doesn’t find out what happens to them until further on
in the film. We used the same type of location, however we made some
changes so that it wasn’t exactly the same and also gave the audience a
backstory so the had an idea of what is going on.
For P2 they started off the opening in a car park showing the setting and
theme of the film. We found that when we tried this approach the opening
didn’t look complete and so we decided that we would use parallel editing
to give a back story as to how the person appeared in the car.

7. After the second filming session we realised that the opening
was quite short and to recreate it would mean that it
wouldn’t be long enough. We also found that our footage
was too dark and we would have to re-shoot to get the right
lighting, which might mean changing the location, this would
be fine as we wanted to include our parallel editing idea
anyway. Due to the fact we knew we wouldn’t be using this
footage we didn’t add sounds or titles as we were going to
re-shoot using a slightly different storyline.
After the main titles appear in P2, the setting
suddenly changes and it’s now before the car
park scene. There’s a woman in an office like
environment, we decided that we would film the
character getting ready for the day so that you
could tell that it was the same day as the
clothing was the same as the previous scene.

8. We looked at the ratings of films on the
website IMDb to see which thriller films
were popular among our target audience.
This helped our decision process in
making our film as we had a better idea
of what people liked to watch.

9. We created a survey that people answered
anonymously online, this helped us understand
what would be most effective in our opening.
We took great inspiration from this as this is
what our audience was telling us they wanted
to see within a thriller film. We found the most
popular thriller films amongst our target
audience which helped us prepare to make our
own based on what has previously been
successful.

10. For our titles we changed them quite a
few times throughout our editing
process. We first started off with quite a
basic font for the first draft that we
thought looked quite mysterious but took
over the screen. We found from our
audience feedback that our target
audience thought they were too big and
didn’t fit with the genre well enough.When we next looked at titles we chose
titles that we thought would stand out and
would appeal to our audience. They no
longer covered important parts of the story
we were trying to create and fitted more
with our genre. The main title however
didn’t fit the genre and we realised this was
something we would have to change for our
next draft as it reminded us too much of a
romantic film.

11. As we shot more footage we looked over
our titles again and decided we wanted to
find titles that appealed more to people
and didn’t look as boring. We finally
decided on a font that we agreed fitted
our genre and theme of the film.
We chose to use a font called ‘Waste of
time’ for our main titles as we thought
that the slash on the letters implies
distortion and that not everything will
be ok. It is inspired by the gift which is
another stalker themed film that fitted
our genre.

12. We spent a lot of time thinking about our music and
continuously changed it throughout our editing
process. We wanted a soundtrack that created
mystery but also suspense and this was hard to find
within just one piece of music. We then decided to
include two pieces of music and switch between them
at one point of the clip, this created the change of
atmosphere we wanted as this was now a different
time frame.
Including the extra piece of music did improve the
opening as a whole but we felt there was still something
missing. We then added a different piece of music for the
scene where the girl starts to realise she is being
followed as this changed the mood completely from the
calm atmosphere from before and built tension. We
based some of our music choice on ‘The purge’ as this
film starts of with calm soothing music that puts the
audience off the fact that violence is taking place.