Evaluation Part One

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

Our film uses a lot of aspects typically shown in thriller/horror films. Although nothing is actually seen, at the end of our credits the main character (Emma) is seen looking shocked and scared as she finds out that someone has been following her. Eventhough nothing is actually seen happening to Emma, we used the same idea used in a lot of films from this type of genre, that a big part of the storyline happens at the very beginning of the film. For example, in the Scream trilogies, someone is always seen dying in the first part of the film and then the rest of the film is spent working out who the villain is and/or why they're doing it.
In most horror films, at least one person is killed straight away and its fairly obvious what is going on. We decided that to make our we'd take more of a thriller approach and created a sense of enigma throughout our film to keep the viewers interested. We felt that a thriller film would be much easier to recreate but would also look a lot better than a horror film, as we're able to use camera angles and different shots to create suspense.
We liked the idea of a handheld camera (Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project) as we think it makes the viewer feel like they're involved in the film which causes fear. We decided that the use of the shaky handheld camera would be a good effect to our film and straight away give an idea to the audience about what type of film to expect.
We mainly used female characters in our film which is what we found a lot of similar films do. We also used one male character, who played Emma's boyfriend to show the difference in representations of males and females. We used the still images of the girls at the beginning of our film to give a clue to the audience about what they're watching but without giving too much away and making the rest of the film seem predictable which would make the viewers lose interest. We used a similar idea for our opening credits as the opening credits in Se7en which uses a black background with white writing. The titles flash up between different shots very quickly. We decided to use a white background to make our film look a bit different, and we thought it was quite effective because of the brightness. We also used the flash idea, but only a few times in between the photos to put more emphasis onto the pictures rather than the credits.