Question 1

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

 To make our final media product substantial as an opening to a psychological thriller to our audience, we have used a range of different methods to show the correct conventions that are seen in real psychological thriller films. Not only have we used conventions in our media product that real psychological thriller films use, we have also researched into the thriller genre as a psychological thriller is a sub-genre to it.

Characters:

During our research into a few Psychological Thriller films, we noticed that the main antagonists were male. Because of this, we wanted to challenge the gender of the male antagonist and create a female antagonist to create a contrast. Male antagonists in thrillers/horrors are proved to be shown as powerful and threatening so because of this, we thought it would be challenging to put the conventions of a male antagonist into a female antagonist.

Throughout the second half of the scene of our film opening, we made it clear of who the main antagonist is due to making her the center of the shot which allows the audience to focus on her and nothing else. We stuck to the colour of clothing that most thrillers/horrors use for their antaonists in their films. We dressed our main antagonist in a black vest top, black jeans and black shoes and also painted their fingernails in red; both of these colours connote death, violence and danger which, in thrillers and horrosrs, usually associate with the antagonist of the film.

Also from our research, we noticed that children were often involved and were seen as the innocent characters. The film ‘Hide and Seek’ greatly shows this in the opening of the film with a young girl playing at the park with her mum. This particular scene inspired us for the opening of our film to include young children as it greatly emphasises the innocence and purity they hold which suggests to the audience that they are the protagonists in the film.

Lighting

Lighting is a very important feature when it comes to the horror/thriller genre. The right lighting sets the right mood and atmosphere to the scene. Because of this, we had to think very hard as to the type of lighting we were hoping to create. 

In the first scene of our film, we planned to film a ‘flashback’ outside at a childrens park. Lighting outside is always a risk as the weather may be cloudy which makes the atmosphere fairly dark and dull, or the weather may be sunny which makes the atmosphere bright and colourful. Luckily when it came to filming at the park, it was fairly sunny with only a fair bit of cloud in the sky. After researching into ‘Hide And Seek’, we noticed that the beginning of the film was a flashback and was very well lit with warm colours and bright lighting. We wanted our opening of our film to be a flashback which was well lit, bold and brightly coloured so we were lucky that the lighting outside was the perfect lighting to create what we wanted. The use of high-key lighting suggests to the audience that things are happy and calm which is what we wanted to create in the flashback.

To contrast this, we wanted to film our next scene somewhere dark and isolated to show things are not as happy as they were and to show a sense of danger and a tense atmosphere. This is very common in psychological thrillers from what we researched online, for example the film ‘Se7en’ uses a lot of different lighting techniques but for many reasons, which creates a tense atmosphere.  We decided to film in one of our group members’ loft which is very dark with only little source of lighting. When watching the clips we recorded in the loft, the outcome was fairly grainy. To reduce this, we edited the lighting on Premiere which made the outcome look better than what it did.

Cinematography

When it came to camera work, we wanted to use a range of different types from extreme close-ups to long shots. One thing that we did notice that is common in most psychological thrillers is the use of Point Of View shots. This allows the audience to see things from the protagonist/antagonists view to help engage with the characters. An example of this is in the film ‘Hide and Seek’ when the girl is on the round-about. Because she is spinning on the round-about, it may foreshadow of how her life is going to be spinning out of control which is what we wanted to portray in our opening film. We did this in our opening film but on a seawsaw that spins around. Another Point Of View shot that we used in our opening film was in the second scene in the loft. There is one Point Of View shot of a light bulb which switches between being in focus and then to being out of focus, and the second Point Of View shot we used is when the protagonist is tied up in a chair and watches the antagonist slowly approach her, again, the shot is out of focus. Being out of focus suggests to the audience that the character that’s point of view we are seeing may have been hit in the head causing their vision to become blurred.

Another shot we noticed that is in a lot of thrillers/horros is the use of Close Ups. Close ups capture a characters facial expression whether its sad, angry or happy. We used close ups in the flashback of our film to emphasies the happiness of the characters’ faces.

Setting/Location

From researching many psychological thrillers, we noticed that the setting in the majority of the films appear to be set in a normal setting; somewhere where anyone would go in their normal life. This creates a sense of realism and highlights that any bad thing can happen in the normal places everyone goes to. Because we wanted to include young children in the beginning of our psychological thriller, we took the setting of other psychological thriller films into account and decided to film our footage in a normal and simple park. The park we chose looks like any other ordianry park you would come across which gives the audience a feel of comfort as they are familiar with this type of setting, and also because it is a setting where a lot of ‘fun’ happens.

Another thing that we noticed for the setting in other real psychological thriller films is that when the main event of the film happens, the setting is often in an isolated place. For example, a single house in the countryside near the woods or on a farm. This gives the audience a feel of being ‘cut off’ from the rest of the world, emphasising the sense of lonliness and isolation. This is something we wanted to create in our product so we decided to film our main event of the film in one of our group members’ loft. Again, a loft appears to be a normal and simple setting due to it being part of a house which is very familiar to the audience. Not only this, but we wanted to film in the loft because its usually the one place in a house where not many people dare go to due to it being dark and away from the rest of the house. A basement is a perfect example of this too, which is always involved in psychological thillers, for example, in ‘Hide and Seek’.