Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In the Thriller genre of film, it is evident that there are key conventions that make a Thriller. In many Thrillers, these conventions are shown and sometimes they are shown in a different way but still have the same purpose. Thrillers commonly include elements such as cliff hangers. A cliff hanger is a plot device used in films to engage the audience by cutting off a part of the film. For example a boy is being chased by a group of men; he wants to cross the road but cannot because of the traffic. What does he do? Does he risk his life in by attempting to cross the road or does he let the men catch him? Cliff hangers are extremely effective as they create the feeling of tension and suspense. The purpose of cliff hangers is to engage the audience and force them to want to continue reading the next series of a book or to continue watching the film to see what happens next. In my media product, we analysed many cliff hangers in Thrillers and found that it was highly common and also very effective as we all agreed that we would continue to watch the film because of the cliff hanger. This gave my group and I confidence that we could utilise a cliff hanger in our own product. In our product we used a cliff hanger at the end, we did this because when analysing Thrillers, we found that most cliff hangers came towards the end of the film and the end of chapters in books. I believe that our cliff hanger was very good. We see Sarah entering the house, completely unaware of the danger that she was potentially in. She walks in and the Stalker along with his friend grabbed her and we hear Sarah scream. This is very effective as we do not know what The Stalker and his ally did with Sarah but the audience should be eager to find out. We did not develop the use of the cliff hanger as we were not sure how we could take it one step further. In addition, in our own Media product, we used the typically love interest. We were inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock Thriller ‘North by Northwest’, in which Roger Thornhill falls for a dashing blonde haired woman. However we analysed this and changed it slightly. In our own product, The Stalker is actually in love with Sarah but because she cheated on him with the most popular boy in school, he does not know how to react as he has mental problems. The only way he wants to get revenge is to set out and kill Sarah. This shows in our product that we have looked into the idea of love interests in thrillers and have adapted it to our own. On reflection it may not be evident that the Stalker is actually Sarah’s boyfriend as we did not make it clear to the audience. In thrillers, you will often see fast paced action and cut scenes because Thrillers are about excitement and drive. The fast paced cuts make it seem as though the Thriller is moving at an incredibly high speed. This is very common in many Thrillers, particularly in chase scenes. In our own Media product, we tried to emulate the idea of fast paced cuts. However it was very hard as if we had used fast paced cuts the audience might not have seen the full surroundings. We did however use really fast cuts in the part where Sarah enters the Stalker’s house. There are many different angles and it was me who cut them up and placed them together because after looking into many Thrillers, I realised the fast paced action present in nearly all of them. The fast paced action does not have to be throughout the film but it just makes the film incredibly entertaining if it is present in one part of the film whether it is a chase scene or just a casual scene.