1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge conventions of real media products?
The filming method of my main task holds a great similarity to thrillers such as The Blairwitch Project as the film is shot as a video diary; however, In order to add originality to my film, I combined the video diary with a narrative.
To create the plot of my main task, I researched various topics which I could address in my main film. One theme that took my interest in particular was the theme of sacrifice and cultism. My story line is based on the idea of young girls being abducted and killed, this was inspired by the real life story of ‘Shafilea Ahmed’ a young girl who died from an honour killing. However, I decided not to use cultural references in my film but rather tackle the issue of murdering innocent people.
The reason I chose this theme was in order to address serious issues in modern society and to capture the audience through the narrative. The chosen topic was also to adhere to conventions of thrillers such as psychological thrillers which often use controversial themes such as schizophrenia. Nonetheless, I challenged the conventions of the genre through the casting of my characters.
For the plot of my preliminary, I decided to pick a more classical story line, to follow the conventions of the thriller genre, the plot involved a young girl going missing and an older man is a suspect in her disappearance. This is typical of the thriller genre as the idea of a person going missing usually induces the audience to feel upset as well as shocked.
Macarthy Productions