Rashida Dixon- Question 1

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

Before we began our project we did some research. We gave out questionnaires and then collected the information to help us decide what we were going to do in our media project. We also watched some psychological thrillers to get an idea of key things about the character, setting and sound that we needed to incorporate into our on psychological thriller.

Setting

We had to consider what we could or couldn't incorporate into our media project, because of restriction on where we were able to shoot we had to either find places around the school that didn't resemble the school or we could shoot in the school. Our result from our market research had shown us that majority of the people liked psychological thriller shot in school so we decided to base our opening sequence in the school; we then built our ideas around this. The opening sequence establishes the setting. The fact that the thriller is set in a school gives the idea of the norms being disrupted which is very conventional of a psychological thriller; this also enables the audience to identify with the characters and themes. Not many Psychological thrillers are set in schools as they tend to be set in a home environment.

Characters

Our characters are to some extent typical of a psychological thriller as they are ambiguous; the opening sequence makes it confusing about what to think about the characters this is conventional of psychological thrill for example Blood Simple. The school girl represents a femme-fatale character. This type of character is an archetype of psychological thrillers; we tried to imply that her relationship with the other character by the use of body language. Body language is very important when portraying a femme-fatale character. She is dressed in school uniform to give the idea that she is young and naive girl in a forbidden relationship this is unconventional of a femme-fatale character as they are normally dressed very seductive; this contradicts the typical way femme-fatale are usally dressed which tend to be seductive. We also have a villainous/corrupted character; we chose to make him a teacher as male teachers are portrayed negatively in the media. The male character is in a way like a detective character you see in some psychological thrillers, we portray this by focusing on him snooping through the classroom; he isn't dressed like a conventional detective character however his actions are quite conventional of a detectives.

Convention Characters

1. Femme-fatel

2.villainous/ corrupted

3.Detective

Mise-en-scene

We used both coloured and black and white to show the difference between the past and the present; this is very common in psychological thrillers for example in Momento. It also helps to confuse the audience about the order the events should come in.

Camera

We used a lot of close ups to help confused the audience of who the characters are, it is also used to draw the audience attention to certain details that we wanted to highlight. This is a convention of psychological thrillers as it helps to create confusion about an object or person. It is also used to draw the persons attention to something specific, we used the close ups to emphasize the body language of the characters and show facial expression. We also used a lot of mid shots to establish the setting.

Editing

We decided to stick with black and white for our title as we thought that using any other type of colour would take away from the action going on. We decided to uses lions gate entertainment as they have distributed psychological films such as American psycho. We used dissolves to help to link scenes together this is conventional of psychological thriller as it leaves the audience disorientated about what is really going on in a sequence.