Evaluation 1

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

 

As a group we have followed all the main conventions of a psychological thriller the ways we have done this is by the location that we choose to shot our opening in and the also the setting. Many psychological thrillers are set in the woods that are dead slient or a grave yard the reason behide this is because to the audience this symbolisms death or something bad is going to happen that involes killing or death.

We chose the woods to be the setting for our opening the reason why was because the woods is commonly used in Psychological thrillers and is a main convention that is used quite alot, they use the woods because the woods are mainly always quite and when they are dark suspicious things happen in them like someone being kidnapped or hurt. We have changed the conventions of the thriller because they normally film the woods at night time and we set the scene during the daytime. The reason why us as a group decided to chose the daytime to film was because we wanted to portray to the audience that what time of the day you are in the woods you are never really safe and you should always pay attention to what is happen around you, by us filming the scene during the day it make the attack more unexpected to the audience and they wouldn't see it coming they would of thought it would happen during the night time. For us it made the opeing look more realistic because it makes it look like the young girl is on her way home from school and she is being followed and this situation we all know that it can happen.

What else is good about the woods is what associations go with the woods like the wildlife these adds a more of a effect on the audience because of the weird noises and the strange rustling noise that they make by having these it makes the audience more on the UN-easy side and it builds up the tension in the scene to show the audience something is about to happen, and normally when they start making more noise it indicates to the audience that someone is there watching the person that is in focus to the audience attention. By having these different elements in the film it starts to build the tension up along more if it was just the music playing on its own than the audience would start to get bored and not a scared with what was about to happen.

In many thrillers birds are a animal which is commonly used to build up the person tension and to make them more un-easy the reason why they use them is because they know the sort of effect they have on people. In our opening we used birds noise but during the opening you do not see the birds and where they are hiding by doing this is builds up the suspicion of where these noises are coming from for the audience this is good because it gets them thinking and in psychological thrillers thats what you want the target audience to do. By filming the birds during the day we challenged the convention because when you film in the woods at night you can normally see the bored and normally they make a much higher pitch noise which also adds to the tension and the suspicion to the person out in the woods. The bird that normally come out at night relate to the scenario of thrillers with them praying on the birds that are much weaker than them, as this is they same with people the older person always praying on the young weaker girls that cant fight back.

Another factor of thrillers would be the stepping on branches this makes the person in focus think that they are being followed by someone or something but there is not normally anyone there, this also ups the paranoid of the audience and the victim becuase with there being many trees around them it makes it harder for them to see if someone if actually following them and with the audience not being able to see if someone is hiding it makes them feel un-easy and it build up their feeling of suspicioun and them they start believeing something is actually out their.

This is one of the shots from our film opening in which shows you how we challenged the turned out in the end. Here we have a image of the main girl character who is being stalked by a mysterious character which throughout the opening you don't see their face Here you can see the expression on her face is scared and suspicion that she thinks that someone be hide her and following her through the woods on her way home from school. This shot of her turning round to face the camera  shows the audience her expression of being scared and paranoid because she is not for certain that someone is following her through the wood .We also tried to attempted to challenge the make up ideas to a thriller as usually they normally would just paint the person to have a pale white face but us as a group decided to we should have Laura's face white with black eyes and black lips. The reason we wanted to do this was because we wanted to make the character to be this dark character that always hides away and with the eyes and lips being black to represents death and what that characters mood and how it affects people, But in the end this did not succeed because as a group we decided that  we wasn't going to be showing the stalkers face as it helps to build up the tension towards the audience and also in the scene and if we was going to show the face we would be giving to much information aways to the audience as we wanted the audience to have it playing on their minds of who the stalker was and what he or she looked like, if we was to give the face away to the audience they would just get bored with the movie and not want to carry on watching it.