-Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When planning our media product we wanted to make sure we stuck to the typical conventions of a thriller film however also subvert from the genre subtly in order to make it more gauging for the audience to watch. we watched many different openings to films and found that the opening to 'Se7en' really inspired us.
In this opening there was a fast paced change between to scenes that appeared to be very different from each other, one scene seemed fairly normal of making tea and flicking through a book, and one seemed to be quite odd a man cutting his finger tips. We decided to use this in our project as the two scenes juxtapose each other making the audience think about what is going on. However in our project we decided to make the odder scene more subtle in order to create more mystery. We also liked the idea quick, fast transitions as it fitted in as if it was a heart beat, which help to build tension for the audience as it speeded up, we implemented this into our film to help give this effect to our film.
For our music we decided to stick to the normal conventions for thriller music being generally fairly simple and having a steady pace in order to help create tension. This music was very useful in helping to develop our thriller opening as it creates a kind of eerie feel to the atmosphere making people feel uncomfortable, this make the viewers aware something is to happen. We also created a almost humming sound using garage band and have this playing over this music too. By doing this tension is created as the constant hum makes us feel uncomfortable and makes the veiwers aware that there maybe an under lying problem.
Overall i feel that our media project conveys to most of the conventions of a thriller opening as it builds tension, and is fairly subtle with the story line not giving much away. We also used the innocence of children in our project to further aid the development of our thriller as we are again conforming to the genre, and also used the idea of a weird lonely man to be our psycho killer, however we do not make this apparent straight away, instead we make him seem fairly ordinary however we placed snakes around the scenes to demonstrate that there is something else going on with this man.
-Question 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?
Our media project involves two social groups being, school girls and older men. I think that our project represented them in the fairly stereotypical ways, especially in terms of the thriller conventions. We decided to choose to have the victim to be a young person in order to create vulnerability and innocence, we further added to this by also choosing it to be a girl. I think that this has represented the social group of school girls to be vulnerable innocent and un aware of the dangers around them. The second social group we used were lonely old men, i also think that we represented this social group fairly well as we showed him to be fairly weird by having him sit in his room alone, we also used the use of snakes to also demonstrate his creepiness. However i also feel as if we slightly subverted as we normally expect older people to be kind and gentle, which in our thriller he clearly is not.