The CulpritEvaluation

In what ways does your media product use,

develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media products?

The conventions of short films, typically short films have simple, linear narratives and a small number of characters. They always normally have a twist in the narrative to make it more interesting taking into account the length of the narrative.

Typical conventions of short films

Genre

The genre of The Culprit is thriller, which I thought would challenge this particular genre, as thrillers usually contain adult theme narratives, with mainly adult characters. This in turn means that audiences for thrillers are usually older age groups, such as 40-60 year olds

Genre

The Culprit however has a plot with a mainly teenage setting and all the characters used in the film are teenagers. But the film does follow other conventions of the thriller genre, with the plot of the film creating suspense for the audience, doing this by covering up important information from the viewer

The TitleThe title of our film The Culprit suggest straight away to the audience that the film will be a thriller and that the narrative will have something to do with finding out who the culprit was. The title also uses typical thriller conventions, with many titles in thriller films using dark colours and backgrounds to reflect the dark nature of the narratives, which we have followed

Title sequence appearing after screams are heard

Blood stains incorporated into title to suggest murder

NarrativeI feel that the narrative also challenges forms and conventions of real media, as the structure of the narrative is not in chronological order and therefore differs from most thriller films. The use of flashbacks in the film where the girls are telling there stories of what happened at the party make the narrative anachronic and forking path, with these types of narratives designed to keep the audience engaged and thinking throughout the entire production

Flashback scenes are shown in black and white to show a distinction between past and present

NarrativeThe film did however use conventions of typical thriller narratives, with narrative theories such as Vladimir Propp’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s being used. Elements of Propp’s theory can be seen in the film, with the policeman being the false hero, as at first he seems helpful but is revealed at the end that he is in fact the culprit. Todorov’s is also used, with the equilibrium being the party and the murder of Darren being the disruption of the equilibrium.Party scene shows

the equilibrium, where everything is ‘normal’, before the equilibrium is disrupted by the murder

CinematographyWe used many typical conventions of the thriller genre when it came to cinematography. We used these conventions particularly on the policeman, who in the end is in fact the culprit, and we use certain techniques to give clues to the audience. For example we used silhouette lighting to make him seem dark and mysterious in one scene, whilst also using a low angle shot on him once, making him seem powerful and dominant, giving another clue for the audience. Low

angle shot

Silhouette lighting

Sound Techniques

We used our dialogue in our film to show audiences the relationships between our characters as many other films do. We also used the the convention of thriller films to have some non diegetic sound play in the background and act as a sound bridge in the opening of our film, this would set the atmosphere of our film allowing our audience to guess the genre as well as possibly getting some insight into the characters or location about to be shown. We followed many of the conventions of sound from thriller films as we thought they would work perfectly within ours.

ComparisonsA production that can be compared to The Culprit is the 2006 short film Across The Hall, which is a thriller genre and has a narrative that creates suspension for the audience in a similar way in which our film does. The narrative slowly builds up, revealing more and more information to the audience and then shocks the audience at the end, much in the same way The Culprit does when the audience find out the policeman is the culprit all along.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DnuWAaHn7ohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-y7HqAn770&feature=related