Evaluation: question 1

1. Evaluation: question 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of conventions of real media products?

2. Location • Our opening was set in a remote location where our ‘Leader’ makes a phone call • We chose this location as we thought it looked like quite a dark/unappealing place and we thought this would help us raise tension which is a convention of thrillers. • The building in the background of this shot shows this as it is quite a harsh looking setting and it looks very remote. For our ‘Runner’ we made sure to choose urban locations without any distinguishing features. We did this so that it does not give away his location and that this could be set in any urban environment. This gives the viewer the sense that it could be happening anywhere. In most thrillers they do not give away the location and film in quite plain looking areas. We tried to follow this convention.

3. Narrative. Our thriller opening is very conventional in that it sets the scene and establishes a clear storyline. Our story is very loosely based around the film ‘tekken’. We took inspiration from it as we all liked the films idea of having all control of the country lost and various organisations taking over. We adapted this in that we had the government take back leadership by using a new generation of messengers called runners. We also took inspiration from the short film ‘Storm Origins’ which is a free-running/parkour film and was part of ‘Concrete Circus’ and directed by Claudio Voicu. We liked the idea of testing a candidate and we decided to incorporate this into our thriller opening. We had our ‘Runner’ do parkour which is similar to other films such as ‘District 13’ which also used parkour. We have a similar target audience to ‘District 13’ and this is partly the reason we made this decision.

4. Characters. We had two main characters in our thriller opening. Our protagonist was the ‘Leader’ on the left. Our main focus of this character was to have someone older to play this role as we didn’t want the viewer to watch our opening and just consider it another student film, we wanted our project to seem as professional as we could make it. The Leaders costume consists of a black suit, we chose this as it makes him seem more important. Our Runner remains mysterious throughout the entire opening. We did this by choosing his costume carefully, he wore an all black costume with a facemask in order to hide his identity. The viewer doesn’t really learn much about the runner or his purpose in the opening and this makes them wonder why he has to hide his identity, which helps build up tension, a convention of thrillers.

5. Credits An example of where a credit is hard to read • For the titles we used white text on a black background. We thought this looked appealing while not distracting the viewer from what’s actually been written. We didn’t want the text to be necessarily boring however we didn’t want it to be too distracting. • For the credits we used a more bold text. I feel like this blended with the scenes quite well and helped keep the atmosphere without making it look too cheesy. • For some of the scenes the text is quite hard to make out but there wasn’t much we could do about this because in order to fix it we would have to use a bright font such as blue or red and we thought this would have ruined our atmosphere and would be very unconventional. I especially liked this credit, I think it blends with the scene really well.

6. Techniques. When filming we used ‘Technicolor Cinestyle’ which is a preset for canon cameras which removes lots of the colour out of the shots and makes it look darker at give it a more atmospheric look. In editing we also decreased the saturation and added a 50% black and white tint in order to make the scene look darker. At the beginning of our opening we used riot footage and security camera footage and edited it together to create a very fast paced feel which should grip the viewer. For the sound effects on this part I got a sample of a record scratch and cut it very short to make it sound like a glitch when it cuts between the footage and the emergency broadcast system screen. This creates a feeling that something is going wrong and this should excite the viewer. For the sound when the leader is on the phone we recorded the dialogue on an iphone indoors in order to avoid having wind ruin our sound. We then dubbed it over in editing.