AP Evaluation 1 - Media Conventions

Evaluation 1 


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


Genre, form and style of our opening

In my opinion, our opening sequence is conventional to the genre of psycho-thrillers. This is because compared with some of the opening sequences we researched e.g. The Bourne Supremacy, Seven etc (of which we took a lot of inspiration from Bourne) a common style of opening is a montage. 


Similarly to the opening of The Bourne Supremacy our opening was that of a dream. The position of our titles within the sequence, I believe to be typical of a thriller as we used them to build tension. Not necessarily were they conventional to a psycho-thriller but the font ‘Mom’s Typewriter’ gave a sense of something unnatural and linked to the shots of book pages in our opening.


How does your piece conform or challenge the conventions of your chosen genre?

Characters
Our opening sequence both conforms to AND challenges typical gender stereotypes in psycho-thrillers. The main character goes against the conventional main character of a thriller because she is female however she is still shown as a vulnerable character which is a common stereotype for women. Similarly our stock character is female which conforms to the conventions of a thriller.


Plot
The plot of our opening, a murder, is conventional of a thriller. This murder is that of a stabbing which is also considered as a typical convention of our genre because it gives a sense of a more urban environment and uses the common iconography of a knife.
This murder also takes places within a dream which is more typical of our psychological sub-genre and is communicated through our use of a montage.

 Sound
In our opening we have various layers of different sounds to create a sense of disorienation. We used sounds from http://www.freesound.com/  which was really useful for finding interesting sounds such as:
- A music box
- A distorted guitar
- Birdsong
These are not typically conventional to a thriller as they do not create tension but the way in which we edited the sound i.e. having bits fade in and out and overlay eachother, helped to build the atmosphere that we wanted.

Camera Work + Framing
For the majority of our opening sequence we used midshots, MCUs and CUs. We used these shot sizes because we needed to show the details of objects and faces to emphasise the disorientation and confusion of a dream and create an enigma. In addition to this we used several shots with a canted angle to support this.