Evaluation Question 1

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

The opening for our film we created titled ‘obsession’ mostly closely follows all the main codes and conventions of opening scenes of the genre.

Firstly the title alone fits the conventions of a thriller. The word ‘obsession’ gives the audience an immediate insight as to the genre of the movie. Obsession creates a ‘stalker’ image in the audiences mind, which is inevitable to lead to a somewhat mystery film about the antagonist having an obsession with someone. We decided upon the title of our opening after various researches into other film titles of the same genre.

As you can see in the two examples above, we noticed the main convention of thriller titles was the length. Upon looking into various titles, we saw that almost all titles were no more than two words. So we realised that we needed to have a short snappy title that will be easily recognisable, and after looking into our main plot for the film, we decided that obsession was the most accurate representation for what we were trying to create, as the title alone gives an immediate impression into the rest of the film.

Once we decided on the title that fits the genre, we had to produce the actually credit for the title in the film opening.

as you can see in the two examples, a noteworthy code and convention of thriller titles is the colour scheme of black and white. We decided to go for a title similar to that of interception’s, we wanted a title that would create the feel of suspense and mystery, and my having the title small, black and white, and fast, it created the feel of confusion with the audience making them want to continue watching. Looking back, im happy with out title and the fact that we kept it simple as if we tried to make it elaborate it could have come across as cheesy, whereas simple means it comes across as sleek.

Location

As soon as our group had decided upon the genre, being thriller, we immediately had ideas about locations. We all live in villages in the countryside, which means there’s so many places for potential location. We knew that we wanted to go for an abandoned, run-down vibe, and with us living in villages, there were so many potential paths and tracks that with the right camera work, could appear abandoned to the viewer. We took some time discussing the options and as soon as we decided on one location, we went out there to shoot some test footage to see if the location gave the effect on the camera that we were hoping for. It came out giving us the abandoned road feel, which we were aspiring to create, as we’ve noticed this is a very common there in the thriller genre as it creates the feel of fear and suspense to the audience. By having our location on a long road, this gave us so much potential in thers of camera work we count try out. We could shoot from various angles around the protagonist to induce the feel of suspense and fear.

Costume

When deciding upon the costume of our actors, we looked into what the conventional clothes for the genre are. The main most predominant point we found that recurred throughout the majority of films we looked into was that the antagonist either wore black or other dark colours. As you can see, in scream the antagonist is completely in black, with the exception of the mask. We decided to follow this my making our antagonist wear a pair of black jeans, black boots, and a black top. This supports the conventional themes of real media products of the genre. As for the protagonist, we noticed that their clothing usually contrasted the antagonist, by being lighter shade. This helps to create the sense of innocence for the character, se we followed this convention by making our protagonist wear a bright coloured jacket. Overall I’m happy with our choices, as it created the feel that we were intending for in our opening.