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

One thriller convention I identified through research was themes such as suspense. For example I incorporated this convention in my own piece by adding jumpy shots and creepy music. If you look at the first picture its shows the stalker character moving quickly along the screen. In our opening sequence we also included silences in order to add suspense, the sound clip below shows the suspense music and sound effects in which we used. I followed this convention as when looking back at my research I discovered that the most successful thriller films added suspense, for example the film ‘The Dark Knight’. I feel that this was successful as when we showed our opening sequence a number of people jumped where the character moves fast along the screen.

Themes

Characters Having a stalker as one of the characters is convention of a thriller film. I incorporated this into our opening sequence as making one of the main characters a stalker. For example in our opening sequence you can clearly see that one of the characters is being stalked by a unidentified person. If you look at the picture below it shows the unidentified stalker. This also adds suspense to our opening sequence. I followed this convention as I didn’t think it was as common as most thriller films, for example most thriller films tend to use police and detectives like in the film ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. I tried to be different but still follow the conventions of a thriller. I feel that is worked well as it was different and looking at our audience feedback it showed that they thought it made the film more tension.

Iconography The use of the urban area in which was used for our location, this is conventional according to my research. I incorporated it into my opening sequence piece by filming around my housing estate. For example if you look at the first picture it shows the main character walking down a dark street which only gets a few cars come down it at a time. This shows that it is isolated although it is a urban area. I decided to follow this convention as I thought it would look better than being in the middle of nowhere and it looks verisimilitude. I feel that this worked well as the darkness and the use of the urban area add tension to the opening sequence.