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

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

Our film used a lot of the conventions of thrillers but it also challenged certain aspects of the thriller genre. The score in our film uses a lot of the conventions of a thriller’s score. It follows the traditional thriller scores that make the situation tense. This type of score creates suspense because you know something is going to happen but you do not know what. Our score started very quiet and got louder and more intense as it went on, it then cha

nged to a more intense score that was traditional to the thriller convention because its be

at was following in a way the main character, Anna. We also use a lot of long shots and establishing shots of the people and the buildings and we hard

ly use any close ups in our film. However we do have some key close up shots of Anna talking on her mobile phone and also of her turning around to se

e the antagonist. This challenged some of the conventions of a thriller because close ups are a custom to thrillers because they are used to demonstrate the expression on characters face. We also felt that in our film long shots and establishing shots would be more suitable than close ups or high angle or low angle shots. We also use a point of view shot which is not common in a thriller film however we felt it was necessary to show how desperate the stalker was. We used long shots as in shots that took a long period of time in our editing because they emphasised the situation the girl is in and the situation the stalker is in. There is slow cro

ss cutting at one point from the stalker to the girl this is to link the two people and show the audience that their paths will collide that day.

The lighting was natural and is mostly high key lighting because we shot the scenes during the day time however when we see the stalker we shot the scenes in a dark room that had low key light lighting because it showed the audience that something dark and sinister is happening. The photos on the wall are also showing us that this man is not thinking normally for it is a shrine to this girl whom we

 discovered only a couple of minutes ago. We used the school as our location because even though its not a common place for a thriller to take place in they usually take place around houses, main streets and even abandoned buildings and factory’s that are still in use. We also thought it is nice and easy for our film to be filmed around and for our cast who are there constantly as are our props. We chose a dark room to film the stalker in his “office” and we chose various well lit classrooms to have the girl sit in and even well lit corridors to have her walking by.

The main prop in this film is the red bag this is because it’s the missing link between the girl disappearing and who took. The bag was left alone at the end of film as a clue to make the detectives get an incentive as to whom might be the perpetrator. This follows the classic conventions of a thriller because we don’t get to see who abducts the girl but we know she got abducted, this leaves us wanting to find out who abducted her and why. The other props are the photos showing the stalkers devotion to this girl. We cast Cristina as the girl because she is a very small and attractive yet innocent looking girl and she can act like an innocent looking girl. We cast Ivan as the stalker because he has the build of a huge man that really liked this girl at first but then his love turned into an obsession hence the title.

The narrative does leave us on a cliff hanger like in the James Bond movie “From Russia with Love” when the person was killed in the Saint-Sophia we want to know who did it and why. The same could be said about our movie because we want to know who abducted the girl and why. These conventions as seen above are classic especially the cliff hanger ending to the opening sequence really sets the mood of the film in a classic thriller way. The espionage thriller “From Russia With Love” and the Psychological thriller “copycat” influenced us. James Bond because we wanted to leave the audience on a cliff hanger and copycat because of the way the main character kills his victims and taunts the policewoman by sending her the pictures of the dead body.

We also thought that the way the crimes are solved in both of those movies should have been the way our film’s crime would have been solved. Our film is more British than American however the idea may be of American origin. We distinguished that it was British because its slower than the fast paced American action thrillers. The cliff hanger is also identifiably British because its slow and concentrates more on “where has the girl disappeared to” rather than “where is he taking her”

All in all I feel that we have developed our film from the ordinary thriller that we are used to, it is much slower and less action and we definitely took on the idea of a psychological thriller. However our film is a more modern version of the traditional psychological thriller because of filming techniques used and the establishment in which we filmed it in. We developed our film from the normal conventions of a thriller but to say that we challenged the conventions of a thriller is going too far. We did not challenge many things other than the cinematography because the conventional shots of a thriller did not suit our film and scenes.