Evaluation Question 1

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

Our production, Case #058, is embedded in the final part of the evaluation.

For our AS Level media studies, we were tasked with making a two minute thriller film opening, which went from research, planning, filming, editing and post-development evaluation. A thriller is a film, a piece of literature or a TV programme, anything,  that has themes of crime, mystery and suspense. This gave us a wide spectrum of thriller sub-genres to work with, like action-thriller, crime-thriller, etc.

There are basic conventions that we want to follow in our production, like;

• Camera work – The thrillers we looked at used a wide variety of camera angles, like close-up shots and over-the-shoulder angles, in our thriller we wanted to mimic this, so there are a lot of close ups to bring attention to important parts of the opening, like in the "past" part of the opening, the knife and when the antagonist grabs the detectives wife. The whole "present" part of the film, when the detective is in the attic looking through the evidence files, is shot in over-the-shoulder angle.
• Mise-En-Scene – Because our thriller was set in the noir period, our use of mise-en-scene was to play a very important part in making our thriller seem authentic. This meant we had to spend a lot of time talking about what we would need and put a lot of effort into making it work well. We didn't spend much on props that we had to buy, like the files and documents. The rest of the props we used we already had, like the radio, the costumes, the handgun, and anything we could use we saw on the day, like the table, the lamp, and pretty much everything else in the house.
• Sound – We planned to have an opening sequence, similar to that in Seven after the first clip of footage, the detective climbing into the attic, of the names of the characters and then a shot of them from somewhere in the film, so we had small soundtrack over that which we made on the iMacs. We also made use of a wide array of sound effects, like a gun shot, for example.
• Narrative – Because we are only making the first two minutes, we didn’t want to give too much of the story away, leaving little to the imagination of the audience, while keeping them interested so they would want to keep watching.

Influence

We looked at a variety of thriller films before we started planning our own, and the one we liked the most was Seven. We agreed that we didn’t want to make the same action-thriller that everyone else would try for, so we opted for crime-thriller, using the conventions seen in Seven as a basis.

Lighting

We tried to use dark lighting as much as we could in the ‘future’ parts of the film, where as in the flashbacks, it is lighter. We also looked at the title sequence in Seven, and how our opening title sequence was idealised with the title sequence of Seven in mind.

This scene was very dark, whereas the "past" scenes are much lighter

Location

The house from the original Psycho film

Donleys house.

We filmed all of our production at Donleys house, we thought this was suitable because it seemed secluded and isolated against the trees around it, much like a scene from the original film Psycho, a reason we liked it, and inside there was too much that we would have to work around, because our thriller was set in the 50s, noir period, we had to ensure that there wasn’t anything that would give away that it was filmed recently. We spent a lot of time making sure there wasn’t anything that would give this away, like a modern radio or the digital clock on the oven. Props included an old looking radio, a leather suitcase, a variety of document folders and newspaper clippings, a toy gun and vintage cars which were parked outside.

Costumes

For costumes, Donley, as the detective, wore a shirt, suit trousers and smart shoes; and he had a suit jacket and an old leather suitcase as props during the scene where he walked from the car to the house, all similar to Morgan Freeman in Seven.

I played the role of the murderer/burglar antagonist. As the murderer, I had shirt and suit trousers, smart shoes and a jacket. We didn't want our antagonist to be completely stereotypical, like in No Country For Old Men, where the hitman, the antagonist, isn't wearing what you would expect him to wear, he just looks like an ordinary person, this is why we chose him to be wearing smart clothes, instead of the typical "hoodie" murderer that a lot of thrillers have.

Sound in our thriller was mostly sound effects; we included a small soundtrack we produced on GarageBand over the credits, although this was mostly to prevent the scene from sounding empty after we had muted the background noise from those scenes. We also used a gunshot sound we found on the Internet, and a car engine we recorded when we filmed.