ALEX: EVALUATION: QUESTION 1

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

When I was researching Thriller openings, I made some notes on similarities between 'Pulp Fiction', 'The Silence of the Lambs', and 'Shutter Island' - notes that we should and would consider during production of our own Thriller.

'Use a large, bold font (preferably centred)'

Our media product did achieve this! For our titling, we wanted to use a font that wasn't too decorative. Using a simple white font on a black background wouldn't be very enigmatic, so we used a red glow and shaking effect on the text to follow the typical conventions of a Thriller film.
Click here to see the titles.

Our font was very thin; if we were to develop or re-create our product, the title font would be one area I would like to spend more time on.

'Don't clog up the opening with additional information'

We also achieved this! We used 7 bits of additional information - which may seem like a lot, but they were all on the screen for a very short amount of time and don't take up more than 10 seconds of the film. The .gif file to the right shows a preview of the additional information (minus the titles).



'Use appropriate soundtrack to the genre...'

We felt that the non-diegetic backing tracks we used were appropriate and enigmatic to genre. I created a blog post on our sound construction decisions here!

'Long Note Two' builds to a crescendo, just as the tension builds within the film so the conventions of this soundtrack was beneficial to us as well .

'Possibly use outlined font if we layer text over the film'
'Stay consistent with styles'

This was another issue we had; on how to go about presenting our additional information. I'm very stylistic and spend a lot of my spare time creating on Photoshop, so decided to go for a simple black font over a white boarder-background. The additional information is a very small portion of the overall film so this was just a preference more than anything.
We did layer text over the very beginning of the film just so our film wasn't a static, choppy film - we wanted some sort of cross-over to make it look semi-professional. I feel as though we achieved this.

We also challenged the conventions of Thriller films as we didn't desaturate the colour of our film - a common theme within the genre. As we had already desaturated the flashback sequence of the murder itself, desaturating the rest of the film wouldn't look as effective. The clear distinction between flashback and interrogation was what we wanted.