Evaluation 1 Alex Barker

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

In our project, our group worked and looked on using a variety of conventional features of thriller as a whole to our best ability and the impact it has to the audience. One of our main purposes for our thriller was to leave the audience questioning wanting to know more about the opening which many other thriller openings use. This is called enigma.

By using enigma we would create part of film to be mysterious.  In particularly our opening scene the purpose was to make the sequence be unpredictable and to have tension to the audiences from the start. We achieved this by doing the following: we would edit the shots and linking other shots. We would then trim them making them 3 seconds roughly each shot. This would make the shots be fast paced clips. An example of this is when we film the girl running by using a range of shots shot from behind her or behind a tree where this would give the idea she was been watch without her knowing this would be the starter of the tension. However to limit it we would place diegetic upbeat music to give the idea the audience is listening to her music in her earphones. For her running, we used a range of shots such as a medium close up of half her body moving and close up shots of her feet. All of the editing of them shots would be cross cutting to make the scene start with less tension. But as she starts to suffer with flashbacks the cutting would change to parallel cutting combined with a change of music and close up of her face and shots of the machinery. The shots would then be mixed with a white fade to show that our character suffering from hallucinations and feeling weak. This would give questions to the audience on what is going on and if are character would be able to make through this. This is where the tension would begin.

When planning, we wanted a range of random and fidgety cross-cuts in order to make the audience feel uncomfortable and question what was going on such as close up of our character and would fade back and forth to old machinery and webs.

Mise en scene

Setting: Both the settings we used were very stereotypical for a thriller piece. The rural, quiet woods which she was running in contrasted effectively with the dirty machinery room.

Lighting: we used very low key lighting which was used for the machinery room shots, which contrasted well with the morning sun light in the running sequence. When put together they would contrast between each other by the lighting working well together to improve to darkness of the flashbacks and as a result it would have a bigger impact on the audience.

Costume, Hair & Makeup: The costume of the kidnapper especially fitted in with the conventions of thriller. He was wearing all black, with a big coat on meaning you were unable to see his face, which again added enigma.

Which I studied Mise en scene in thriller as part of the pre-production planning.  One of the factors our group liked was the idea that the shots were consistently random which as a result kept the audience guessing. But the contrasting shots would be related to each other which led the audience to be kept interested. The low key lighting of the shots in “The Woman in Black” meant that the dark atmosphere would be shown to the audience another way of creating tension. When we picked the flashing shots would be used the purpose was to have a view of relevance to the character's background life rather than be random shots to set the genre and be used for no reason. Therefore we decided for the flashbacks that we placed the section her life on when she was kidnapped and kept. Furthermore, we wanted the shots to start off as random shots of machinery but we also wanted to develop the extreme close ups of significant objects such as the women's ring and close ups of the women being held hostage with diegetic sounds of her heavy breathing and shots of her foot on the floor with very little lighting. Finally at the end we would use an extremely shadowed close up of the man’s face, half revealing him for the first time this would be there for 1 seconds so that the audience would not have that long to see his face and not enough time to gather his appearance properly.

Although we used very little music for our opening. The music used against the flashback sequence worked well as it would create suspense and enigma by the use of tense instrumental music.