Question 1

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


The genre for our film sequence was a hybrid of Crime and Thriller. Although these are two separate genres, they are often combined in the film industry.
Crime/Thriller films usually contain:
Spider Gram Conventions


A film which follows most of these conventions and is of the same genre as ours is ‘Seven’ – starring Morgan Freeman and directed by David Fincher in 1995. The film uses a male villain who commits seven criminal acts – the film is very psychological and forces the audience to think a lot, there are clues throughout as to who the killer may be just like there will be in our film.

Our film also follows many of these conventions – we have a female character being raped by a ‘hard’ male villain. In our opening sequence there is a mix between the bright lighting of the girl talking to the camera in a direct address form, and dark and gloomy lighting in the build up to the rape.

A factor of our film goes against conventions is the fact that it is from the woman’s perspective. She gets raped and throughout the film, the audience sees how she copes with this and the repercussions of the act. Usually Crime/Thriller films are from a male perspective; either a male helping a female, like a policeman, or from the perspective of the criminal.


Setting
The setting of our sequence was important to create the correct mood and feeling:
- The build up to the rape scene was conventionally set at night - this plays on the audience's minds, suggesting hidden dangers and the sense  of the unknown
- The actual rape itself took place in a brightly lit flat - this is a location where the girl would feel safe compared to the dark outside. It is typical of a thriller to invade the victim's comfort zone and make them feel that nowhere is safe.

Costume

The costume’s we used were very much deliberate and key to our characters:

- We dressed the rapist in a large coat which covered most of his face to hide his identity. Other than that, he was wearing regular clothes as rapists don’t have set attire – they are just like ‘normal people’.

- For our female character, we dressed her in a relatively conservative outfit – a big coat and a skirt that wasn’t too short. However, the pink heels and skirt suggest she had been on a night out which is what we were trying to achieve – a naïve character who wasn’t expecting this to happen to her.

- For the clips of her talking to the camera after she had been raped, the girl was dressed in a baggy grey hoodie done up nearly to the top – this shows that she has been hugely affected by her rape experience and is trying to cover up and hide from the world.


Music

We used two pieces of music for our piece as there were two effects we were trying to achieve:



The first piece is a sad, mournful track called ‘sad story’. We used it in our sequence to create a sense of sorrow and sympathy for the girl. It runs over the second track and creates an eerie effect. http://www.freeplaymusic.com/search/keyword_search.php


The second piece we used is a typical thriller track from the same website. It builds tension and suspense and drives the sequence on – suggesting something bad is going to happen even before it does. 

 
Narrative Structure
 
Our opening sequence also challenges theories such as Todorov's - a theory that claims films should start with an equlibrium where everything is as it should be,as example for this would be Legally Blonde. Our sequence does not follow this structure as it starts with a disrupted equilibrium and it is not restored .