HOLLY: EVALUATION: QUESTION 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In my thriller research, I looked at, Kill Bill, Inception, Shutter Island, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Usual Suspects, which all follow the usual conventions of the thriller genre, using the technical codes, creating enigma, using unrestricted or restricted narration to attract the audience.

We wanted to take something from the opening of Shutter Island, which  creates enigma and mystery to the audience making them ask questions, using stereotypical conventions of the thriller genre, such as using unfamiliar locations and the soundtrack and dialogue to create danger or apprehension within a situation. Dull colouring and dull grey lighting creates a desolate atmosphere.

Shutter Island uses restricted narration throughout the whole film leaving the audience knowing less or the same than the characters, which leaves the audience on edge. We however decided not to do this in our opening, We used a sound bridge and flashbacks of the main character Elijah's mind, to give the audience more information than the other character which is not commonly used in the thriller genre, as usually restricted narration is used to create surprise. 

In our titles of our opening, we first researched other thriller openings. I research the opening of 'Se7en' where the opening used disorientating techniques to make the audience uncomfortable, but continue watching. The opening only used minor institutional information, using non diegetic sound to disorientate the audience. A large amount of actors names are mentioned in the opening, introduced in the same style as the rest of the sequence, with flickering distorted images used in-between, on a black background with white lit up writing.

We wanted to use this idea of lighting up names making them stand out.











This still taken from the movie 'Se7en' is what we wanted to try and achieve. Their transitions used are also similar to the ones we used, flickering quickly to catch the audiences attention.









We used 'Long Note Two' in our title sequence, the pitch is high and disorientating, which we wanted that effect on our opening.
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100420

"Long Note Two" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

However in our film we went against the typical conventions of the genre, as we didn't de-saturate the colouring in the film, which is commonly used to create a duller effect. We wanted to go against this convention, so we made the colouring in our film stand out, making it vibrant, which catches the audiences attention and could potentially make it disorientating.

We created enigma in our opening  although not in a typical convention, we did not reveal any characters, (commonly used in the thriller genre, e.g. the Usual Suspects)
We had all of our characters presented to the camera, as we wanted to show the audience that the 'innocent' character, is not actually innocent.