Thriller Evaluation Question One

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

Our opening scene hold many of the traditional thriller conventions, during previous research carried out before the making of our opening scene, we discussed these in order to attain the best and most professional and perfect to genre opening scene, to do this we considered most if not all of these conventions.

The narrative: We wanted to allow the audience to get a quick insight into the full length story, although we have not fully planned the film we wanted the audience to feel like they could expect and anticipate what would occur later on in the film, we went for the classic chase between venerable female character and the typical all in black dominating male. She is wearing a floor length black ball type dress which insinuates that she is not expected to be there which again adds to the classic thriller story line.

The protagonist: We again followed the classic thriller roots of using a venerable female lead which in recent years has been adapted with the different hybrid versions of thriller films, female leads have now often become power characters and can help solve or even become the antagonist in new aged Thrillers.

The title: We named our piece Tortured we thought that again this defined and could straight away address the audience and let them know that this is a thriller and hopefully it would be a title that would attract a wide audience to watch it. There was a film produced named Produced name Tortured in 2008 so, we might be confused with this film but with it being a small British production it might not be seen all over the world.

The antagonist ensnares the protagonist: Although the audience cannot fully see this unfold we do let them see shortened version of it during our opening scene, this is also to add tension and anticipation to our piece. Our antagonist (male character) chases and ties and tortures our protagonist (venerable female character) making the link and difference between them very strong. We show the antagonist ensnaring the protagonist with a chase scene using short shots that change between his and her feet and other small shots that allow the differences in good and bad to portrayed strongly to the audience and hopefully allow them to choose a side and want to watch more of the film.

Micro elements:  We used many different short shots. Adding different scenarios and aspects, with these short shots, this is an important aspect for a thriller as micro elements add to the overall story line and plot and can engage the audience and make them to watch further on.  However these micro elements will differ in traditional and new age thrillers as new age thrillers are set out differently and include many other aspects of the other sub genres they are mixed with in order to create a 'perfect' type thriller film.

A series of/ one important enigma(s) are/is set up in the opening sequence of the film, we found out this meant adding small complicated information so that it could involve  the audience and that could be later solved, we did this by adding small sharp clips to allow the audience

However I felt that we could have explored some more conventions but didn’t have the means or time to add them in plus edit and make sure we had got it to the best and most professional stage that we could with the time we had provided.  We could have explored lighting more we could have used more artificial lighting to add light in to dark scenes, although we wanted this feel at times I myself felt it to be a little too dark and distracted from such things a s facial expression and character emotion.
            We heavily based our opening scene on the 1995 successful international thriller ‘Seven’ starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker, as this also contained the dark lighting, short shots and vulnerable female character as ours did.