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

 

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

Thriller films usually centre on a central protagonist fighting against insurmountable odds, be it physical, such as The Expendables, or psychological, such as Black Swan. There are many variations with their own conventions, but all thrillers share a common goal; to create tension through the use of fast paced editing, dramatic camera angles and keeping the storyline as shrouded in mystery as possible to keep the audience guessing. Thrillers also effectively use lighting to leave parts of the set or characters in shadow to add to the mystery of certain areas or characters. This is most prevalent in the film noire sub-genre, most popular in the early twentieth century, although it has recently made a comeback in the form of The Artist.

 

 

Openings to thrillers usually have their own conventions as they need to impose a message onto the audience as soon as possible and set the tone for the rest of the film. This is done through the use of long shots with captions to distinguish location, as in The Bourne Supremacy, or extreme close ups to keep the audience interested without giving too much away to what the subject is, such as Se7en. The use of non-diagetic sound builds tension and suspense in the opening scenes where very little actually happens. This keeps the attention of the audience while the opening gives some backstory and an insight to the main character.

 

 

This image shows a collaboration of screenshots from the opening of Se7en. It uses extreme close ups to disorientate the audience and force them to think more about what is going on, rather than it being explicitly depicted. The opening gives an overview to the major themes within Se7en, through the use of emotive and provocative imagery such as the letter writing and photographs symbolising memories and the razorblade symbolising violence. We used a close up to start our thriller to not give away the location of where the film is set and to give a dark backdrop in which to overlay our credits, much like Se7en.

 

 

This is an opening scene to The Bourne Supremacy. It uses an extreme long shot to set the location in the mind of the audience without focusing on a subject. Since the film starts in Amsterdam, it is most likely a location viewers are unfamiliar with, which makes the viewer uneasy straight away as they suspect something unusual will occur. While facts about the film are scarce to begin with, the director (Paul Greengrass) felt necessary to give the viewer a solid statement to base their understanding. Straight after our close up, we used a long shot to determine location to the viewer as well as revealing the back of the main character. The character turns his head away from the camera quickly, and this brief look builds an interaction point with the viewer, making him appear more human.

Shutter Island is a quintessential thriller; a slowly unwinding story that keeps the audience interested through the use of unexpected plot twists and dark undertones. The film utilises the geography of the island to make the detectives seem isolated, which makes the audience fearful at the end of the film when the truth behind the lighthouse comes to light. It’s a physiological thriller in that it makes the viewer think, rather than just take in information, much like one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s similar films, Inception. In our thriller, we don’t reveal who the people in the pictures are. This is to make the audience make their own conclusions about who they are, and the importance they may have on the story.

 

Films predating the introduction of colour to motion pictures (The Wizard of Oz, 1939) had to use different methods to get across their message, and silent films more so. The Artist, released in 2011, chose to film without diagetic sound and in black and white, rather than technological limitations. The film looked authentic without mocking the era, as the mise-en-scene perfectly emulated the 1920’s. It utilises many tricks used by silent film makers of the time, such as reflections, pantomime and props to bring to keep the audience interested. It uses intertitles as well as props such as newspaper headlines to tell its story without spoken words. We planned to do something similar in our thriller, to have the credits or title appear on a piece of paper the character threw out of the drawer, but we thought it looked forced and took away from the action.

 

The typical poster and opening credits has bold text to draw attention to the poster as well as to distinguish itself from the action taking place on the poster. We have emulated this in the titles of our thriller, which uses bold text to make the text stand out from the background it is on. Thrillers often have a lone wolf character, which we also have used. We have done this because we wanted the story to be the focus, rather than distracting the audience with lots of characters introduced in a short period of time.