Task 1

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

Our media product does stick to conventions, but at the same time it does also challenge them. As in thriller media product our sequence does alert the audience as to what genre the film will be. It makes this very clear by use of sound and light. It also challenges conventions due to its change of "worlds". This change in worlds is not often featured in films and adds to the eeriness of the sequence.

When looking at our titles we had to consider whether we wanted our media product to use, develop or challenge fo

rms and conventions of real media as all these factors would be considered by the audience.As you can see in the picture above we used 2 different worlds to help gain suspense and pressure. We did this through dissolves between each world, these were a "real world" and a "ghost world" the different light in each world helps to emphasise the change. This breaks conventions of real media product as 2 worlds are not often featured in films.

As you can see in the

photo to the left this is the ghost world and we have used red head lights with a blue gel filter in order to crea

te this cold, blue glow. The change in light colours helps emphasise the dramatic change in worlds. I really like this shot as I think it brings a new dimension to our sequence as the audience has to concentrate on two things at once.

In the photo to the right there is a shot of the real world. To shoot this we just used ambient light from outside on a day when we had good weather. This does go against real media conventions as not often in thriller opening sequences do you have shots of outdoors and good weather. Often shots outdoors are in bad weather or are edited in post-production in order to make them more eerie.

In the photo below there is one of the title cards shown. This is a shot of the real world which demonstrates one of the real-world shots. I think in this part of the sequence, the sunny and nice weather helps to create suspense as the audience will wonder what is happening in the ghost world. This conforms to real media product as often in thriller films they will use suspense to keep the audiences attention and to keep them interested in the story line.

Our media product does in some ways subvert conventions and play around with what the audience are expecting. The titles are one of these subversions of conventions, many people would be expecting the titles to be in a "written-in-blood" font or a typeface which is scary. Also, the titles are just overlaid onto the sequence, they are not incorporated into the sequence's action. This was a purposeful decision as we wanted the audience to concentrate more on the story line and the action rather than having to look for the titles in the action. But to go against the convention we decided on this plain white sans-serif font. In some ways our media product does conform to conventions, an example of this is the sound, the audience would expect to hear some sort of low drone noise overlaid onto the sequence.