Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In order to create a successful thriller opening we had to do our research as a group to see what a thriller contains. As we only had to make the opening, we had limited timing, so we had to try and get everything important in. From watching some opening scenes from thriller movies, these were some of the more common conventions we saw: Black and White scenes, Explosions, Darkness, Blood, Flashbacks, Villains, Fighting Scenes, Suspense, Mysterious, Murder, Exciting, Car chases, Shock and Revenge. These are some of the thriller openings we looked at:

The Dark Knighthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OYBEquZ_j0The scene starts off with some robbers escaping a building, they were wearing masks to hide their

identity. From this we can see that they were the villains in the film. The scene goes straight into the action. All the villains were also carrying guns to kill people who came in their way which also is another indication that they were the villains. At the end of the robbery, the two villains are actually against each other as they both want the money to themselves.

Vertigo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sznnL0NZ0Similarly, Vertigo also goes straight into the action. It starts off with a chase scene between a man

and two police officers on a rooftop. The villain gets away whilst one of the police officers slips on the roof and is hanging on to the roof. The scene is quite dark as it looks like it has been set at night. As the other police officer tries to help the one who is struggling to get up, the police officer falls and dies.

Interrogationhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-UpMTLK6rUFrom doing some research on thriller openings and the conventions used, we decided not to

start off with actions scenes like the other two did. We thought it would be better to introduce the characters first so the audience can connect with the characters. I personally feel just by reading the title of our film, you can tell that it’s a thriller as it makes you question what you think will happen. As we only had limited timing, we tried to get as many conventions in as possible. The interrogation scene was an idea we got from The Dark Knight. It only made sense to have a interrogation scene as that is what the film is based on. The flashbacks was something we decided as a group to add in, to make it clear to the audience what happened before the scene which also created more suspense. I think our opening scene does fit into the genre of thriller, but it can also go under murder mystery as that is what the film is based on. From watching it, it makes you want to ask several questions like whether the suspect is lying or not? The characters used were people in our class, for each characters we had to make sure they were wearing appropriate clothing in order to be the character. For example, the suspect had to look casual so we made him wear a jumper. With the flashbacks we tried to get low key lighting to make it seem like their were hidden secrets that needed to come out. The sounds were only used during the flashbacks, which showed that something wasn’t right, this also created suspense. Due to the limited timing, the editing could have been better. We added fades in to indicate to the audience every time there was a flashback. Finally, we made a group logo which we put at the beginning of the scene , we also added credits during the scene and the title at the very end.