2. How does your film reflect or challenge the
conventions of the genre you are working in?
Our film The Forgotten Truth is of the genre of a
psychological thriller. The types of conventions you can find
in a psychological thriller would be things that have a
medical/clinical look to them. For example, in our film we used
a real medical room where students practise these skills.
Also, like in the film Memento we use a grey scale effect with
a contrast effect over all the memory scenes to make the
audience see that there has been a passage of time.
It has been challenging to try and fit lots of conventions and
iconographies of a psychological thriller into our short film as
there are many more well know conventions of thrillers and
horrors than psychological films and this means that even if
symbols were placed in amongst the film the audience still
might not be able to pick up on them.
3. Does it fulfil the nature of film genre or
will it subvert expectations
deliberately?
In The Forgotten Truth we have many stereotypes that conform to that of
the expectations of the target audience but, also some that subvert the
norm.
For example, the couple in our short film are heterosexual this in todays
society is seen as the norm. We choose to stick with this stereotype as we
believed that this would increase our target audience as we wanted this to
be a mainstream film. Another, stereotype that we conformed to during
our film was that Damian the main protagonist kills Lily. As men are often
shown as being superior to a female, we thought that we would also show
this as, it shows Domains strength and yet also his weakness.
A stereotype that we subverted was the fact that our doctor character is
female and not male. Many people think as doctors being male and nurses as
being female. Another, stereotype that ties in with the one before is the
fact that it is a man who has the illness and not a female. We decided to
do this as it allowed us to be able to show the audience that the main
character had a weakness just like everybody else, and this allowed us to
play around with how the audience would interpret the character.
4. What kinds of audience pleasure are you
trying to provide, and how confident are you
that you have achieved this?
There definitely is emotional pleasure within our film The
Forgotten Truth, as the audience gets attacked to the love
between Lily and Damian and yet when they find out that
Damian was the one who took her life, they don’t only feel
sympathy for him, as he obviously didn’t mean to kill her but,
couldn’t help himself but, they also feel the love get severed
and this is what drives Damian to take his own life.
I believe that we as a group achieved this as even when I
watch it myself I feel the raw emotion in the voice over and
also feel her pain when he kills her. We believe that as we
have targeted the right audience for our film (15+) that they
have the right filters to be able to see the truth message
behind the film. Sometimes love is not enough.
5. How is our film similar to other media
texts? Shutter Island- storyline
The Forgotten Truth’s storyline has similarities to the film
Shutter Island. In the film shutter island Teddy Daniels goes on a
mission to find a missing person (as he is a police officer) who
escaped from a mental institute. In the end the audience finds
out that it is actually Teddy who is the missing person and he is
not a police officer. Teddy was the one who killed his wife by
shooting her as she drowned their children.
This is similar to our film as Damian is the one who killed Lily and
the audience finds out that he is the one who has the mental
illness.
6. Memento-flashbacks
Our film also relates to the film Memento.
We used the idea in Memento to have black
and white flashbacks, so that the audience
would be able to see that there was a
passage in time. Also, we believed that
using a grey scale effect would help bring
the emotions of the scene to life, as rather
than focusing on the images the audience is
seeing they would be focused on the voice
over.
7. Fight Club-Voice over
We used a voice over similar to the one in fight club
performed by Edward Norton. We did this as we wanted
our main character to be the narrator (which is the
same as in fight club). We decided to do this because,
we thought that if it was the main character who was
not just telling the story but, part of the journey that
takes audience to the conclusion at the end of the film,
then this would add more emotion and depth to The
Forgotten Truth.
This allows the audience to go into Damian's mind and
really know and understand what he is thinking.
8. Conventions-mise-en-scene
• In our film The Forgotten Truth there are many different ways of portraying the
psychological thriller conventions of costume. We took a lot of ideas from the film Shutter
Island. As you can see we made our Doctors costume similar to that of the costume for the
doctor in shutter island. The white lab coat was used to help imply to the audience the
doctors innocence and professionalism.
• The main protagonist (Damian) costumes (especially his coat) symbolizes like in Shutter
Island the fact that he is trying to figure out what has happened to his wife. Some of his
other costumes, like the one Damian is first seen in, is plain and simple to represent the fact
that he doesn't know much about what happened to his wife.
• The convention that is symbolized in Lily's costume in the restaurant scene is her innocence.
We did this by dressing her in a simple white dress to bring out her femininity as well as, her
vulnerability.
• These are part of psychological thriller conventions as, doctors in documentaries or soaps
will wear the normal blue coat or normal everyday clothes.
9. Conventions-props
We didn’t use many props that portray conventions
from psychological thrillers, but, we did use some.
For example, in many psychological thrillers there will
be at least one death. In our film there are two. The
fact that this relates to a psychological thriller is
because, many of the deaths are suicides.
Damian in our film takes his life by hanging himself with
some bed sheets which is similar, to films like the
conjuring where a women gets hung from a tree.
We did use fake blood in our film to help influence the
audience into thinking that Lily was killed by Damian
without us having to show the audience her dead
body.
