Evaluation Question 1-Sophie

Question 1

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

In my thriller research, I looked at 4 different films; Inception, Seven, Face Off and Drive. All of these film openings had the usual conventions of the thriller genre, using the technical codes, creating enigma, using unrestricted or restricted narration to attract the audience. These openings helped inspire for the original ideas for our own Thriller Opening. 

We wanted to use ideas from the thriller opening of Seven as it's shots are very dark and create Enigma, and mystery to the audience making them ask questions, and by using stereotypical conventions of the thriller genre, such as using very close up shots of unfamiliar objects and the non-diegetic soundtrack to create danger or apprehension within the sequence. Dull colouring and dull grey lighting creates a scary and desolate atmosphere. This screen grab (1)  is showing the dark, dull, red colouring and a mysterious figure which creates confusion within the opening. In our Thriller Opening, the beginning shots were in the dark and made to create mystery and enigma, giving away only small bits of information and let the audience make out what it's about. This screen grab (2) is one of our shots from our final film, the atmosphere is dull and dark outside, creating mystery within the shot.

We were also very much inspired by Shutter Island, personally, I didn't research this thriller opening. However, one of our group members did and collectively we used this film to helps come up with the idea to base our video about mental health. In thriller films there are two main characters, the protagonist and the antagonist, we used this idea in our video however, we only have one main character. The antagonist is his schizophrenic personality that can take over, the protagonist is the main person in this telling him to stop. Thriller films usually have a storyline that incorporates crime, we did use this slightly in our video, although it is mainly based around mental health.

For the aspects of mise en scene, we used a lot of inspiration from other thriller films to portray our characters look. In a lot of thriller films they have a slightly scruffy looking costume as we wanted our character to look slightly ill. Also we used a particular character in Shutter Island to help us with how to make our character look slightly older, quite pale and red eyes, as screen grab (3) shows. We also noticed from other thrillers that the costume is key for any thriller film as it shows what type of character the actor is portraying. 

We used the opening to Inception to inspire us with the sound for our video, as well as the main idea of the type of music the majority of thriller films use. We noticed that a lot of thriller films use off screen, non-diegetic eerie sounds to create mystery and suspense for the audience, we have used this throughout our feel to show how our character feels and the mental state of him. We have also used a common thing in thriller films, the chase music. As our character gets more and more worried and runs around, we have non-diegetic chase music to intensify the mood and keeping our audience on the edge of their seats with this.

For our title sequence (screen grab 4), we noticed a lot of thriller films use black, white or dark colours to emphasise the thriller genre and darkness in the film. We used examples like the title to Seven (screen grab 5) to help us decide what we would do for our title. The title from Seven is slightly creepier than ours, I think if we could change ours to be slightly more affective then we would. 

The lighting in thrillers tends to be rather dark and low key lighting to make each scene look slightly mysterious and have a creepy feel to it. The majority of our first shots are filmed in low key lighting to make the ambience negative, to show that the character is doing the wrong thing, in this case escaping a hospital.