Main Task- Evaluation Question 1

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

In our establishing shot, I believe we portray many conventions of a psychological thriller. I say this due to our affective use of pathetic fallacy; our shot shows the sky to be very overcast and cloudy, very much darkening the entire shot. This is effective in echoing the mood in our film, considered to be one of hopelessness and distress. As well as this, we used a long shot to show our location of the bridge clinic, what I particularly liked about this shot is that it was very distant, and showed no particular detail of the building, instantly giving a feeling of distance and no particular relationship of that location. With this, a very large tree overshadowed the building, hiding many of the windows, only exposing two. This gave the shot an element of secrecy and we thought this was a good way to begin an ultimately mysterious and ambiguous film.

Our use of black and white during the flashbacks is very much considered to be a convention of psychological thrillers and is used effectively in many hugely successful films such as ‘psycho’ and ‘the shining’. We believe using this effect on final cut pro made it clear to the audience that it was set in the past and gave a better insight into the running and pacing of the film. I think we definitely challenged the conventions of a psychological thriller through our lack of dialogue. In doing this, we believed it helped to create a darker mood throughout the film and let the audience decide for themselves what to make of it. As well as this, we believed the dialogue took away from the feeling of hopelessness in interrupting the music we had chosen, being a simple classical piece. This choice of music is fairly common throughout psychological thrillers, mostly in the way it conveys a fairly ‘creepy’ feeling and builds tension rapidly yet effectively, a desirable feeling to include in a film of this genre.

Our variety of shots varying from long shots, to extreme close ups helped to create a feeling of uneasiness and disruption throughout our product, we did the in the hopes of somewhat confusing the audience and conveying feeling of distress etc. I believe we used this technique effectively when slowly building up tension and not slowly exposing the identity of our main character, this certainly helped in keeping the mystery to our film.

In general I very much believe our film is effective in portraying conventions of a psychological thriller; it does this through our editing effects/techniques in the way our cuts help to build up tension. As well as this, using the black and white effects for the flashbacks is very common in thrillers, and I believe it is one of the most defining techniques used in our film.