Sadie Breed Evaluation - Q1

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our coursework is the opening of a thriller so we had to use the conventions of this genre along with conventions of film openings.
Psychological thrillers often use the idea of a non-linear time line which we incorporated into our opening to disorientate the audience.
We decided that having no diegetic sound during the flashback would disorientate the viewer and leave them curious as to the importance of the scene therefore drawing them into the narrative of the film as is the purpose of an opening.
An opening that also uses a non-linear time line is 'Minority Report'.
The opening uses shots that are not completely in focus to show us that these events are not happening in the present of the film, they are happening in the future therefore they are unclear.
We used this idea to show our audience that the flashback was in the past by using a sepia tone over the clips, a colour that indicates age.

We also took the convention of stalkers and decided this would be the plot of our thriller. An example of stalkers in thrillers is the film 'One Hour Photo'. This uses a more traditional form of stalking, wherein the protagonist stalks his victims in, in the more traditional sense of the word.






However, we chose not to use the traditional stalker but rather decided to build on this idea and have the protagonist stalk his victims through social networks. We felt that this made our thriller more modern as many things are done digitally in modern society. We also felt as our audience is young, this will appeal more to them as it is something they will be familiar with whereas an older audience may not be particularly with social networks.