Question 1

   In what ways does your thriller use, challenge or develop forms of conventions of the real media products.

     The brief was to create a two minute opening to a thriller that includes all the credits, sounds and conventions of a typical thriller film. I had to ensure that my final product contained all the elements expected in a thriller. The narrative of our film was one we created within our group. The sequence followed the codes and conventions that would appeal to the target audience of the thriller we were producing. There was three memebers in our group a first. Nojus, Harry and myself. Harry left our group before we started the filming process. This left me and Nojus to distribute the different job roles. Or roles included the producer, editor, producer of photography and the director. The roles also included the actors. Our job roles were shared equally between both of us. We decided that t would be beneficial if we both picked the job roles we felt most confident in.
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     Typical conventions of the thriller genre usually include an antagonist and a victim. Typically the victim is played by a female and the identity of the antagonist is often unknown. Other conventions include iconography, such as knives and other murder weapons. Knifes are one of the most conventional murder weapons as seen in Scream and Halloween. Knives immediately create a huge amount of suspense as they are related to the image of death; this makes the audience feel sorry for the victims, thus creating a relationship between the audience and the characters within the film.

I took inspiration from other thriller to make my thriller seem more conventional to the thriller genre, one of the idea that I took from the film Halloween was the idea to make the antagonist a teenager, I was also inspired to do this by the film sinister. A child playing the antagonists is becoming more and more conventional to the thriller genre, also used in woman in black. From this comes the idea that the child has been possessed by the devil or an evil spirit and the audience begin to question their mental state.  Through my research I learnt that thrillers become a lot scarier when the identity of the antagonist is hidden. This I incorporated into my own thriller right at the beginning of our sequence when Nojus is walking down the stairs and the lighting is so dark the audience are unable to identify his face. Low key lighting like this and the music we enveloped with it made my opening sequence conventional to the thriller genre. Other convention such as quick pace is typical of the thriller genre, it is used to build Adrenalin within the audience, this build up is used to go with the image that will follow. By adding fast pace music alongside, the pace and excitement of the audience increases.

The title of my thriller is ‘Blacklist’ this tie in with the narrative of the story and follows the convention of the thriller genre. The definition of the lexis ‘Blacklist’ is when a person is put on a list of individuals which have been singled out as deserving some sort of punishment. The title of our film follows the narrative and explains why the victim has been chosen in my thriller. The title we chose revels a sinister element though just one word which incises the audience to watch the film.