1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge conventions of real media products?
The cast in my films was a method of developing and challenging the conventions of thrillers. The characters in my preliminary task dared the norms of character casting, especially the detective character. Often in thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the female character is presented as the “Damsel in Distress”, However, I decided to reverse the roles and cast a female character as higher status to the male character, without having to present the male character as vulnerable.
On the other hand, using this example of The Birds, I casted a young vulnerable girl as my main character, in order for the audience to feel sympathetic towards the character and thus present my film as a realistic media product, as the weak female character is common in the thriller genre.
Observing the character stereotypes in thriller films, I decided to develop the idea of the traditional blonde, young, beautiful female and casted my main character with a different ethnicity. This was in order to develop the basic ideas of the female character and present it in a contemporary form, as during the time the birds was produced, the “Blonde Bombshell” was a typical ideology of females. However, in modern society female ideologies are much more diverse.
Macarthy Productions