Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?

My media product follows most codes and conventions of films that are drama/thriller and even aspects of a psychological thriller. The codes and conventions of these are such things that follow the aspects of drama is the boy losing his love and breaking down due to her leaving him, also that it is happening in a school where he is getting bullied. Dramas don’t always have a happy ending, which this doesn’t so this is another code and convention.  Our opening sequence leaves questions like why is he acting like this and what is he going to do, this is common in psychological thrillers as the viewer tends to want to find out who damaged the boy and normally like to solve riddles. Thrillers tend to have unexpected turns, and the turn in our opening sequence was seeing the text from the girlfriend who had broke up with him. We thought of themes such as
Lost
Love loss
Madness
Obsession
All these themes become clear during our opening sequence, especially madness and lost as he is often seen on his own while everyone ghosts around him. We developed around the idea of lost, and at first they was just going to lose their girlfriend, but we decided to make it more interesting and show him starting to lose his mind, which we hoped to achieve in our opening sequence. Ashley  (the main character) starts off as an protagonist, drawing sympathy to himself by constantly thinking and showing love towards someone that doesn’t care. But as he starts to crack, he turns into an antagonist eventually killing himself and his girlfriend; this is another twist people expect in thrillers.
The audience for psychological thrillers normally watch the films and feel uncomfortable, we did this by adding ghosting and black and white, it’s not something you see in everything. It is abstract, which isn’t aesthetically pleasing causing discomfort for out target audience.
We challenged the convention of having a grown man by placing a 13 year old teenager in the film; we did this because we were aiming to attract an audience of 15-23 which would mean that they would prefer to watch someone they could relate to themselves. We also challenged the location, most thrillers are in an eerie place(such as a broken down New York in ‘Cloverfield’ after an alien attack) whereas we used a public school and his aunt’s house to make it more realistic for a 13 year old to be in.
A code and convention we often stuck too was the idea that he was slowly going crazy. This is often seen in psychological thrillers as normally the antagonist is a crazy psychopath such as that main character in paranormal activity who switches from being completely innocent to a demonic being. We followed typical effects and developed them to become more original, you don’t tend to see a blue lens in a thriller film, but you come to expect ghosting which was seen in this film in nearly every hallway shot. This may of creeped out our audience with the effect that real people look like ghosts.  One of our first shots make the audience feel like they are in Ashley’s position, this is done through a point of view shot. This point of view shot was to show everyone how human he is, it is the view we all wake up to see.  Comparing Ashley to Robert Neville (Will Smith) from ‘I am Legend’ we see how differently the characters our interpreted, in ‘I am Legend’ he is instantly seen as a hero, that is capable of anything, whereas Ashley looks weak, this goes against the normal hero stereotype in the thriller film. A drama although its not a film, which we could relate our storyline too is most soaps, but a soap that sticks out straight away is Hollyoaks and the ‘newt incident’ where he started slowly breaking down due to mental problems and went to kill himself because of a schizophrenic outburst. We followed the traits that Newt had as he slowly broke down.
We challenged the convention of sound, if you listen to our opening compared to se7en you can definitely see the difference; because our film has aspects of drama in it, we didn’t want to creep out the Audience, which se7en does. We wanted it to sound odd, but also fit in with the audience we were aiming for.