Question One Evaluation

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

The existing media conventions that we have used for our thriller two minute film opening are the typical camera angles. The camera angles that we have used are close ups and then we have also used point of view camera angles to show a closer meaning to what our character is actually looking at and his interests. We have also used typical titles, with the font cracked, which provides the thrilling theme through-out the opening and the colouring of red and black which conotates the feeling of death and blood. We also used the colour red because it is a psychopathic colour and is the colour that is typically linked to a killer. We also used dark settings, by editing the lighting of our filming because we believe that this will captivate our audience. We have used the typical transitions such as cross dissolve and fade outs and used music that we found via youtube, which sets the scene with a creepy tone. All of these things that we have used are typically provided within other thriller films. 

We used influences such as One Hour Photo, Seven and Red Road for our opening titles because these all suited the aspects within our film, such as the opening titles for Seven used murder and showed his victims within a book. We got one of our main ideas from here and this is where our film idea progressed. We also used the idea of the male character, this shows that we are tending to 'stick to what we know', whereas we could have developed this idea by changing the gender of the character to a female, which is what red road is based on.We used One Hour Photo as inspiration, but developed it in the way that, in One hour Photo the male character uses photographs to follow his 'victims' whereas, in our film we used the idea of a laptop. This shows the development of technology and we used this to our advantage to be able to connect to our audience better.

The way we developed our film idea from other thriller films is by the way we decided to focus on our killer straight away, this allows the audience to gain an understanding about the stalker and begin to empathise him rather than empathising the victims. We also developed it because we only see the male character in his own living environment, this allows us to gain a deeper meaning for him but also shows what he does behind closed door, such as gaining an unlimited access to watching people via the internet. We also see instantly that our main character is a young male character, whereas people normally associate stalkers with old, perverted men.