Question 1

Question 1

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

Research into codes and conventions

• During our first few lessons studying thriller opening, we looked at the common narrative and filming techniques used in thriller films, like:

• Flash backs• Deadlines• Plot twists• Tense music• Silence• Chiaroscuro lighting• Making the audience think

Research into codes and conventions

• Before we started planning our thriller opening, we researched into typical sub-genres of thriller films by watching a variety of thriller films.

• We looked at the opening of films like The Third Man, Casino, Sin City, Memento, Shutter Island, L.A. Confidential, The Ghost Writer and Along Came a Spider.

Codes and conventions taken from Thriller Films:

• After watching The Third Man we decided we would like to go down the Film Noir genre of Thriller Films and after watching Casino we decided that lighting should play a large part in our film. This shot in particular strongly influenced our main scene:

Codes and conventions take from Thriller Films:

• The narrative of Memento impacted our narrative as we decided starting at the end and having a rewind to the beginning was an easy way of making the audience think hard about what is going on, much like in Memento.

• Like typical thriller films, we followed the reverse of Todorov’s theory, where the film starts at a disequilibrium.

Codes and conventions taken from Thriller films:

• We took our use of colour editing (bright red lips, washed out background), from Sin City and felt it would work well with our chiaroscuro lighting and Film Noir effect.

How does our film conform or challenge real media products?

• A lot of our narrative conforms to the typical narrative of thriller films, by not showing the audience everything and making them work out what has happened.

• Our female character challenges the stereotypical image of women in thriller films as they are usual shown as weak, whereas in ours she is the antagonist. However in the Film Noir genre of thriller films, it is quite typical for a female character (Fem-Fatale) to be portrayed as dangerous and trouble.

Fem Fatale

• We made sure our Fem Fatale character conformed to most of the conventions of Fem Fatales, like dark clothing, fur coat,smoking and using a gun to makesure our characters fitted the stereotypes of different sub-genres.