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

We have created a dramatic thriller; we got the idea to do a dramatic thriller from films like gaslight. This is a real media product that bases its story on a girl who lost someone close to her and went a bit mad because of it. In comparison to stereotypical dramatic thrillers it is lacking the action scenes like most other film beginning’s, in most dramatic thrillers there is no non-diegetic dialogue unless being used in a sound bridge, we used non-diegetic dialogue the entire time to let viewers understand her story, the mise-en-scene was basic, bridge boots big coat and a classic cigarette to show signs of stress in her life and the coat shows mourning which isn’t a normal thing at the beginning of dramatic thrillers, they may wear black but there isn’t usually mourning unless from a chase scene. The style of her clothes is a stereotypical teenage outfit. So is the cigarette when adults think of teenagers they tend to think of them smoking and acting out for example by moping like our protagonist is. We decided to manipulate this stereotype to work for us it would make teenagers warm to her quickly because they could relate the instant they saw her. The structure of our media product is different to the conventions of our genre because we decided to keep quite aloof which is an uncommon this for a dramatic thriller opening.

In gaslight the opening shows the main character surrounded by people to show her involvement in her community. We decided to isolate our character because she only knew one person in England and also the isolation reiterates the genre. The camerawork we used made her look even more isolated despite the fact there were others walking past her. For our flashback scenes we used the gladiator film for research and used that theme of him thinking of the flashback then when it stops showing his eyes straight away to get their reaction. We used flashbacks repeatedly to show how important these times of her life are to her. The flashbacks are an important part of our media product because it produces emotion in the audience and intensifies the genre of our media product.

At the end of our film opening, we have the protagonist alone on a set of swings, which again makes the audience feel sympathy, which is a rare emotion for the audience of a dramatic thriller. The only prop in our media product was a cigarette, which is seen through out the opening. It restates the stereotype that teenagers are rebellious. The mese-en-scene is very simple and works with the stereotype of a teenager, we did this because we wanted the audience to feel conflicted emotions of whether they wanted to sympathise with our protagonist or feel threatened by her.