Jade Evariste Question 1

JADE EVARISTE

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

We focused on the thriller, genre specifically pyscological thrillers. The main conventions of pyschological thrillers are .
.First-person narrative, which makes the information given unreliable as they could lie to or mislead the the audience. Thriller audiences expect to be disorientated at some point in the film so will expect this convention to be at work.

 .Stream of consciousness - confusion on the part of the protagonists' between what is real or contrived 

.Distorted percepetion of reality

 .Latent fears

 Our media product challenges and develops conventions. The conventional psychopathic killer is usually between the ages of 40-50, male and white, see Silence Of The Lambs' Hannibal Lector, Mementos' Guy Pearce. Our psychopathic killer was young, female and black so we almost completely subverted the typical conventions.

Though we planned to use a male character we were unable to do so because of logistics we thought that it would be interesting to use an actress who was unconventional for the part. In doing so we open up the genre to potentially new viewers who can relate to the character and her experiences. We developed conventions by having the flash backs fade into white and then appearing which is a conventional use of flash backs. We used tense music that crescendos and minor notes which created a tense atmosphere when appropriate. We used a symbolic opening, hinting at themes and issues rather than explicitly stating them. We felt this type of opening would appeal to our target audience, who said they prefered to be challenged in this way. We are telling the story from the killers point if view which is generally unconventional within the psycological thriller genre as audiences prefer to identify with the heros rather than the villians.