The document discusses how the media product of a short film uses conventions of the horror/thriller genre. It describes researching audience preferences and choosing this genre. Common horror elements include isolated settings, disguises/weapons as props, a killer and victim, and sound to create tension. The short film leaves the mystery of why the stalker kidnaps the girl. It also describes watching other film openings like Candyman and Psycho for inspiration and developing the short film to match these genres through gloomy outdoor weather and isolated shooting locations to convey helplessness.

1. Evaluation: Question 1
Phoebe Thomas

2. 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.

3. Continued…
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.

4. Continued...
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.

5. 9part screen cap of the sequence