Evaluation // Forms and Conventions // Task 1

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

Our media product takes the form of a opening title sequence that includes titles/credits. 
To get to the stage that we are at we had to research different opening sequences to get ideas of what our should look like. Some example we looked at were: 

We looked at Kill Bill because we liked the idea of being trapped in a small place, we also liked the use of the music and the sound effects. We also really liked the way they did they lighting as you can't really tell where she is until later on. This adds a sense of suspense and keeps the audience guessing.

We then looked at American Horror Story because we liked the idea of the scariness of it and the way the cuts are made in a static way. American Horror Story is a horror TV programme so this fits in with our thriller because our thriller has a subgenre of horror. We also really likes the used of natural sounds made into music and the way the cuts are a bit distorted. We wanted to try and do this in our thriller but in the end we decided that it didn't fit in to well with our idea. 

The conventions that we see in our thriller is a weak and helpless girl being the victim. This is a normal convention for some types of thrillers because it is very stereotypical. However, in our thriller we try and break away from the norm as their are other dead girls and only one of them has survived showing that not all girls are weak and the "damsel in distress".

Our titles are very plain because we didn't want them to distract the audiences attention. To help with this we didn't have them on the action but we had them on separate black screens. This made the atmosphere of the thriller really intense and added suspense. We chose a simple font to keep with the simplistic look of our thriller. 

Here are some examples:

When we were looking at ideas to help with our thriller we really liked the simple but effective ones. For example we looked at Se7ev's opening sequence and decided that we their opening sequence was a bit to complex so we made it more minimalistic. 

To get the final product we had to do a lot of research on thrillers and what opening sequence they have and what we need to do to make ours as good as it can be. We did this by planning and having discussions about what we wanted our final product to look like.

Our editing style is again quite simplistic as we didn't want to distract from the action. This is also seen in Kill Bill opening sequence.

Here I have linked both title sequences from Kill Bill and our thriller so you can compare them:

We decided that we should use diegetic sounds to make our thriller more atmospheric. We used gasps, creaks, sounds of the bag rolling over the floorboards and the sound of Rosie crawling on the floor. This added to the suspense of our thriller and made added more tension to it, we used silence in our thriller because we thought that it was a good way to added a eerie feel to our thriller which is what we were aiming for.

Our thriller sets up a narrative by keeping the audience guessing as to what is going on and what is going to happen. At the end our thriller we have the killer open the top of the floorboards however, we don't see the killer. This sets up a cliffhanger and gets the audience wondering what is going to happen next. Also, because our opening sequence has a cliffhanger in it this sets up expectations that the rest of our film will have cliffhangers within it so this will attract audiences and make them want to continue watching the whole film.