In what ways does your media product use/develop or

challenge forms and conventions for real media

products?

• When the media produces meaning by using conventions the audiences learn to understand the meaning from the interaction of the conventional material in the text, and their understanding of conventions. In media there is a history of the use of conventions. Conventions are something that had been learnt naturally but they are cultural not universal.

• Firstly I started to look at the range of film genres to start constructing our film opening. Our film opening was based in the Thriller genre but it was also connected to urban drama this usually includes crime but we had also included paranormal, because the female character is warned by her dead fiancé that she is in danger. We don't know this because we don't make this obvious that it is linked to these genres as our film opening went over the time limit to have a hold on one certain genre, so we felt that this will add to the mysterious air.

The media construct reality. Our Film opening follows the tradition conventions of the female being weak as she is crying over her fiancé. Women are often presented to be fragile and victim-like. This caused Bryan to ask if she wanted him to come in (to comfort her.) This suggests that a female may not handle being alone.

The technical codes, which include camera techniques, framing to help develop forms and conventions. We started off with a black screen and our male and female characters had a conversation and we use this convention because it is used in films in the thriller genre and also the title sequence order shows the importance of each character.

We made our production title and film title larger then the other titles to empathise that it is obviously more important.

We also used the tracking shot to take in the surroundings as Josh left his house, it then Pans to keep that character in the frame.

• A Point of view shot is used when Josh gets attacked because we wanted the audience to see the events through the (attacking) actor's eyes, as if they were experiencing the events themselves. and also to focuses on Josh and his wound.

Often films in the thriller genre use high angle shots because it conveys the significance of certain characters, and who empowers who so when the attacker stabbed Josh we made sure that Josh had looked smaller then the attacker by using the camera to film a low angle shot.

We filmed in the style of social realism but our genre tilted toward thriller, how we done this is by focussing on the backgrounds and characters. We filmed in a estate, this helped our media product use forms and conventions to imply that our film will be relating to social realism to first but will change. This is similar to Eddy Murphy’s film ‘Trading places’ because you can't tell what genre it is from because of the montage shots, a montage shot is numerous short shots with special optical effects such as (fades). This is also what we used in our film opening.

Our first symbolic shot consists of both male characters in the shot, the attacker is looking at Josh from a distant but Josh is more dominant in this shot because it signifies that he is the more important character. The attacker shouts out 'Oi' to josh and this is symbolic because its British slang. Stairs are a convention of thriller movies , so we had our character run away from the attacker on a few flights of stairs.

Other props of importance is the characters clothing. Both male characters are dressed in black to forewarn what is going to happen, also wearing a black big jacket or hoodies with jeans while being a male teenager is rather intimidating. Wearing a hoodie meant you were keeping a low profile, and perhaps up to something illegal it is also claimed that black teens often wear hoodies for two reasons: to remain obscure and undetected, or to project a “don’t mess with me” image. Our female character wears a cream jacket with a black dress and a brown side bag and a black scarf. Her boyfriends bag is in the background of the shot to show how she wants to feel close to him still.

The sound started as the black screen had showed up and it stopped while the couple were saying bye to each other and we added dialogue in our film because we wanted to show a relationship through a conversation as most films do. The other sound we had was through the attacking scene, we had tension building music to slowly make the audience realise that something bad is going to happen and lastly when the female is crying at the grave yard and then when she enters her house slow sad music is played to portray her feelings.