Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our film is set in this period of time. The establishing shot is of the three boys strolling between two big cliffs, in this scene you can tell that the boys have gone off course and have got lost. We then see a medium shot from the trees, this makes the audience think that the boys are being watched or even followed by something. We then see two of the character Robert and Chad having a dispute over being lost and what happened to the map. We decided to keep creating the impression that they are being followed by something so it keeps people watching throughout.

Our brief was to create a short opening sequence of a thriller film. A thriller film in normally a scary/ frightening or puzzling plot which reals in the audience so they carry on watching so they end up having a scary experience. For a thriller to be successful and interesting it must have the following
components, a variety of camera shots, on edge music/sound,creepy mise-en-scene and clever editing. Our target audience was teenagers aged between 13-18 we found this out from our survey. Out of the three boys Travis (Chads friend) is the quietest throughout the whole of the sequence, he very rarely says anything at all, but at the end of the sequence he is the one who pushes Robert over the cliff, we thought this challenged the normal conventions by having a character that did not get involved with Robert at all, so it looks like he only did it because Chad did not like him.

The horror/thriller ‘The Hills With Eyes’ gave us many ideas and techniques to include in our film, our main inspiration from the film was the plot, “The Hills With Eyes “is a movie which makes the audience watch more because it keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout, which does hold your attention very well, This is what our group wanted our film to be like.

 

Another program that we based parts of our film on was ‘Hinterland’; in ‘Hinterland’ there is many well filmed establishing shots of the cliffs and the rest of the landscape. As a group we decided to try and film some of the shots like “hinterland” has, because it would fit our thriller very well. We think that our film ‘fallen’ challenges normal conventions because whereas a lot of films are not filmed in the 

rain ours is and we think that it makes our movie a lot better. 

This is a shot from "Hinterland" which the series is located on a sea front. We liked the idea of the big high cliffs which made it more dramatic so we wanted to try find a place similar to this.

This is a shot from our open scene, it is quite similar 

In our thriller we do not have a hero or a criminal but we do have two dominant characters and one other character that seems alone and outnumbered. In our thriller the character Robert is on his own and does not get on very well with the other boys throughout the whole of the sequence and just seems to get on their nerves a lot. A thriller is normally also based on a mass murderer, terrorist or Major gangs. As a group we finally decided to use an abandoned quarry, this really paid off because even though we had to be careful and use many safety precautions in the end all of the group were really proud of the opening sequence that we created. I think that the lighting, camera shots, music and mise-en-scene we used and created very well to show the protagonist and the antagonist of the piece, you could tell this in a number of ways, one of them was that one of the characters called Robert and he hanged at the back following the other two boys which’d showed that the other two boys were more important and superior than him not as the openings of thriller films is basically the establishment of the main character. Normally thrillers tend to use horror, religion or physiological tricks. For example –Shutter Island, silence of the lambs, phsyco, north-by-northwest and seven are only a few of the great thrillers that have been created.

Here we have a shot from our sequence which is a long shot, also known as an establishing shot. We use this to show our audience where we are to give them an idea of whats happening.

This shot is from "The Hills have eyes" which has quite similar scenery to our sequence using establishing shots to show whats happening. There is a similar plot to it as in the hills have eyes there lost and bad things happen, ours also has the same plot line. The only thing that differs to our scene is the weather, our scene is cloudy and raining to create a more dramatic feel.

I think that in our opening sequence we took some really good shots to create enigma codes and to make viewers interested so they get hooked into the film. An opening sequence normally creates a question that is answered at the end of the film. In most films Men play the dominant hero roles, but as the years have gone by many females have taken the heroic roles. In our film you do not see the character Robert falling off the cliff which leaves it on a cliff hanger which is that leaves the audience thinking that he possibly died but there isnt any proof that he did this makes the audience want to watch the film even more so they will eventually find out what happened to him. We carefully chose titles that suited the our thriller, our titles are a dark red and these colours were chosen by me Jake and Lewis because we thought that they both stand out. Also I think that in our opening sequence we took some really good shots to create enigma codes and to make the audience think that something scary could happen which keeps the audience interested so they keep watching the film.