1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge conventions of real media products?
To create my thriller opening, I had to research a wide variety of techniques, conventions and media products, in order to develop the information needed for filming both my opening and preliminary. I researched numerous thriller openings such as Dawn of the dead, American Psycho, Black Swan and Se7en, so that I could gain a better insight of the conventions of the genre and use it to influence my own pieces of work.
By gathering information and viewing examples of different thriller subgenres, I was able to create a crime thriller (preliminary) and psychological thriller (main task), using the codes and conventions I found in the films. The opening sequence of ‘Dawn of the dead’ interested me, in particular. The opening is an introduction to the film which consists of alternating credits and images. This film had a large impact on the editing process of my main task.
Similarly, to the film I decided to produce an opening which showed images which were normally associated with the themes of death and fear. From this research, I concluded that a common convention of thriller are quick shots, as the transitions between the images and the credits were quite fast pace and so I decided to incorporate this convention of thriller into the editing of my main task to convey it as part of the thriller genre.
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Although my film is presented as a psychological thriller, there are strong elements of thriller, due to the gruesome nature of the images.
Macarthy Productions