Media evaluation - Question 1

My group consisted of 3 members, myself, Lily Badcock and Amber Johnson, we worked well and after several discussions came up with the idea of creating a revenge thriller that followed a woman left at the altar on her on her wedding day. Our group worked very well together with rarely any arguments or disputes, each member worked well in their respective role within the production of our thriller clip. Lily was the director, she created the storyboard and had a very specific idea as to how each shot would take place in every aspect, and she essentially gave the guidelines in terms of camera angles, camera shots and positioning. Amber was the editor, we decided that she was the best out of the three of us during the preliminary task and duly so, she improved our clip majorly and we were mainly impressed by the credits she created. I was the producer, I felt as though I adequately organised the group and provided the group with several props that we used such as wedding flowers and the wedding dress. Overall I feel as though we created a unique and interesting thriller clip however I believe it could have been slightly more entertaining through the use of less dialogue and more action.  

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

There are several conventions that altogether make a thriller film what it is; many of these aspects were a result of arguably the most important man within the thriller genre, Alfred Hitchcock, some of the things that he used within his thriller films that are still used are the use of an attractive female victim usually blonde, which originated from his own personal experience of his mother who was blonde being the victim of physical abuse by his father, this is a convention that has featured in many films as it both appeals to the male viewers and thus generates a bigger profit as it gets bigger audiences. Our noticeable and controversial decision within our thriller clip was to make our killer female, we all agreed that this would be a talking point as it would not expected at all by the audience, we agreed that using a female character would even further increase the male viewership, go against the norms of cinematography and to also get a higher female viewership as females watch a significantly lower amount of thrillers than males. The only film we had seen this in is the film we compared ourselves to, The Orphan, this film also had a female killer and was very successful as it had a shock factor as nobody thought an innocent looking female would kill people. Our opening thriller is much alike to several others, it introduced the main character and made the audience aware of the plot, they could tell that the main character was left and seeks revenge. 

The victim of Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho is blonde and female.

The strong use of tension and suspense without the use of strong violence or gore, this is mainly due to the censorship regulations during the 1900’s, nudity and things such as blood were not allowed to be on screen and thus directors had to find a way to keep the audience enticed using things such as lighting and music, we then subsequently decided to use no blood or gore within our thriller and use the Koleshov effect to engage and challenge the audience into creating their own assumptions, for example within one scene in our thriller clip the two friends of Hayden talk about his ex-fiancee, then walk away, the "bride" is seen in the background and then it skips to her crossing both of their faces out, this will create more tension than actually seeing the murders as due to a lack of funding and equipment we believed it would not look authentic and thus would look tacky. The use of low key lighting is also very important as it helped us put more attention on the wedding dress and the killing weapon which are both motifs within the clip, the tattered wedding dress combined with the messy make-up can give a visual representation of the "bride's" emotional distress, we used light sources such as street lights and torches to make the "bride" the point of interest, this is very stereotypical as several thriller films make the main character the main point of interest through the use of lighting to draw the attention away from other things.

The audience's attention is on both the
killer and the knife through the use
of lighting.

The use of a knife as a weapon was also included within our thriller and is a very common within thrillers, the knife strikes fear into the audience’s eyes and is easily the most used weapon within thrillers. We were made very aware of the several films within the thriller genre that used knives within lessons such as Halloween and Psycho, so we agreed that a knife would be the best weapon to use for our main character as it can create a sense of anticipation which goes along with the theme of the thriller clip. Other weapons were considered such as a hammer or a gun however we believed a knife was the most sinister as it is a everyday item found in a kitchen that holds so much threat and also has the capabilities to kill easily.

The knife strikes fear within the audience
as they can expect death.

Another convention used within our thriller clip is the use of cinematography, we used several methods that would feature in a high majority of thriller films, such as the use of close ups, we used an extreme close up is used within our clip. Extreme close ups  are used to put a strong focus on a particular object or aspect, within our clip it puts focus on the bride's (Lily Badcock's) eyes, which has ruined make up as she has been crying.