In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
For our thriller opening we decided to show our video online on Youtube, we decided to upload it to Youtube because it is one if the most used websites and many young people use the app, which means that the audience will be a lot broader because more people will have access to it. We also decided to chose this website because many official film thrillers are shown on it which adds to the professional feeling that we want our product to show.
The conventions of the thriller genre often include very tense music, dark scenes, gothic or bold font, female victims and male perpetrators. All of these features are just some examples of what most successful or well known thrillers involve. Within out thriller we used many idea from one very successful and well known thriller, Taken, this is one of the thrillers that have very conventional styles used within it such as the idea of having a female as the victim and the men as the villains, they also used a male hero which within every genre is the typical story. We decided to have our opening scene to be a young girl being kidnapped from her house under her bed because the key scene in Taken is the scene where the female victim gets taken, so we knew that the storyline would be received well because of how successful this film was. To make sure that we included the same or similar thriller conventions within this thriller genre we made sure that we had tense music, cuts back and forth from the victim and villain, as in the film. This scene in the film is linked below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJiml5xzK68
Even though throughout our opening we developed many forms and conventions of real media products, we did start the opening in a very alternative way as we used girly, happy, soft music to start the scene. This is very unconventional for a thriller because it wasn't there to create suspense or tension, but we used it to show how normal the victim is and we wanted the kidnapping to be as unexpected as possible, which is why we chose happy music as oppose to tense or dark music because it gives the audience ideas that something bad is going to happen. So we wanted the audience to be as shocked or surprised as our victim was.
In terms of our mise en scene the setting or location that we chose to have the story set in was a house, we chose this because whilst researching thrillers we found one, The Call, where a young girl gets kidnapped from her own home and it creates a higher amount of fear whilst watching than other thrillers that were set in other locations like abandoned warehouse or the woods created. By using a house as our location it brought the realism of the thriller to the situation because of how normal it was for the young girl to be in her own home, it again was unexpected for her to be kidnapped from there. Within the Mise en scene we again developed previous conventions of having the intruder wear a mask, we initially got this idea from the films such as Friday The 13th and Scream which are two very well known films in which the villains wear masks. The reason for us deciding to have the intruder wear a mask is because we felt it makes the thriller far scarier if the audience are unaware of who or what is behind the mask, we wanted to create the fear of the unknown. It also meant that the victim was also unaware of who was kidnapping her, which again creates the relationship between the audience and the character because both the two are unaware of who this person behind the mask is.
In terms of challenging the conventions of a thriller, we definitely did this with the main character because for the villain/intruder we used a female actor instead of the stereotypical male villain. Even though it isn't as clear to the audience that the intruder is female due to the way we made her look and dressed her in a costume which completely covered her figure and hair, she actually is a woman. We decided to have the capturer be a woman because we didn't want to conform to the conventions of having a female victim being taken by a male villain because of how common this theme is, which is why we wanted to go for an alternative spin to a typical thriller because we have conformed to many conventions but this was one that gives out thriller a unique spin.
For our thriller opening we decided to show our video online on Youtube, we decided to upload it to Youtube because it is one if the most used websites and many young people use the app, which means that the audience will be a lot broader because more people will have access to it. We also decided to chose this website because many official film thrillers are shown on it which adds to the professional feeling that we want our product to show.
The conventions of the thriller genre often include very tense music, dark scenes, gothic or bold font, female victims and male perpetrators. All of these features are just some examples of what most successful or well known thrillers involve. Within out thriller we used many idea from one very successful and well known thriller, Taken, this is one of the thrillers that have very conventional styles used within it such as the idea of having a female as the victim and the men as the villains, they also used a male hero which within every genre is the typical story. We decided to have our opening scene to be a young girl being kidnapped from her house under her bed because the key scene in Taken is the scene where the female victim gets taken, so we knew that the storyline would be received well because of how successful this film was. To make sure that we included the same or similar thriller conventions within this thriller genre we made sure that we had tense music, cuts back and forth from the victim and villain, as in the film. This scene in the film is linked below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJiml5xzK68
Even though throughout our opening we developed many forms and conventions of real media products, we did start the opening in a very alternative way as we used girly, happy, soft music to start the scene. This is very unconventional for a thriller because it wasn't there to create suspense or tension, but we used it to show how normal the victim is and we wanted the kidnapping to be as unexpected as possible, which is why we chose happy music as oppose to tense or dark music because it gives the audience ideas that something bad is going to happen. So we wanted the audience to be as shocked or surprised as our victim was.
However another convention in which we conformed to was having the victim a young female. This is a common theme within the thriller genre because within society women are seen as the weaker gender so for them to be the victims in films makes them a lot more believable and relatable to the audience. Another reason was because we felt that having a small, young female as the victim, it makes the storyline more interesting and the viewers to want to watch what is going to happen to her because of how small and gentle she was, the villain could possibly do anything to her. We liked this aspect because of it was a real life product we would be able to keep the audience gripped enough to continue to watch the film.
In terms of our mise en scene the setting or location that we chose to have the story set in was a house, we chose this because whilst researching thrillers we found one, The Call, where a young girl gets kidnapped from her own home and it creates a higher amount of fear whilst watching than other thrillers that were set in other locations like abandoned warehouse or the woods created. By using a house as our location it brought the realism of the thriller to the situation because of how normal it was for the young girl to be in her own home, it again was unexpected for her to be kidnapped from there. Within the Mise en scene we again developed previous conventions of having the intruder wear a mask, we initially got this idea from the films such as Friday The 13th and Scream which are two very well known films in which the villains wear masks. The reason for us deciding to have the intruder wear a mask is because we felt it makes the thriller far scarier if the audience are unaware of who or what is behind the mask, we wanted to create the fear of the unknown. It also meant that the victim was also unaware of who was kidnapping her, which again creates the relationship between the audience and the character because both the two are unaware of who this person behind the mask is.
In terms of challenging the conventions of a thriller, we definitely did this with the main character because for the villain/intruder we used a female actor instead of the stereotypical male villain. Even though it isn't as clear to the audience that the intruder is female due to the way we made her look and dressed her in a costume which completely covered her figure and hair, she actually is a woman. We decided to have the capturer be a woman because we didn't want to conform to the conventions of having a female victim being taken by a male villain because of how common this theme is, which is why we wanted to go for an alternative spin to a typical thriller because we have conformed to many conventions but this was one that gives out thriller a unique spin.
No comments:
Post a Comment