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

Precious Ayebola

When watching and analysing thriller conventions as a group we identified that in thrillers there is often is a vulnerable character and a villain, a disturbing scene, someone often gets killed or hurt.

When we were in our designated groups we decided to watch and analyse some hybrid horror/thriller films, to help develop our tile sequence. The main aim was to see how each scene enticed the audience and how we might some ideas to our title sequence.

GenreMy title sequence is a hybrid psychological fantasy thriller genre. A sense of fantasy is created when the female character sees herself on the ground lying dead while at the same time her new self stands looking on. The camerawork creates a sense of taking us somewhere into a story.

NarrativeIn terms of a thriller, something bad has happened. A girl goes into the woods, and she sees herself as two people both good and bad. She sees her good self-dead on the forest floor and her bad self comes alive. Towards the end of my title sequence, the audience begins to get a sense of the narrative of the story to come. At one point there is a two shot of the same girl, one shot of her standing up and another shot of her acting dead. This creates an enigma, as the audience thinks "what happened/ is she dead or alive". This creates tension for the audience.

Character IntroductionThe main female character (protagonist) is introduced at the beginning. We see a close up of her looking serious then she smiles at the camera. This shows a sense of mystery and quickly creates suspense as the music is introduced and builds up.

As a group, we worked on development together but then made separate title sequences. I challenged the conventions of a typical horror/thriller title sequence, as in horror/thrillers there is usually a man who is the main character. An example of this is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In our title sequences we all developed ideas that included a female all throughout the sequence as the

Camera and EditingTo make my Title Sequence thrilling, I decided to shoot my film in the woods. The location was very important as it emphasises how nature influenced the change within the girl. Through After Effects editing I could clone my protagonist which created a sense of tension as it made the audience feel engaged with the film. I used a hand held camera to follow the protagonist in the woods, then in editing I imported the shot on to my MacBook into Adobe Premiere editing software, I added one shot on top of the same shot and I used a pen tool to blur/fade the second shot so it gives it a ghostly double effect.

Moreover I used After Effects for an opening introduction for my Title Sequence. I did this because I wanted my production to be recognized and to look professional. I got the idea from movies which showed their production introduction for example LionsGate, Columbia, 21st Century Fox e.t.c.

LightingLight was used throughout my production and I used natural light as I liked the idea of nature and wanted to my title sequence to look realistic. This challenges conventions of thriller as the light is quite dark and low key.

Setting and LocationThe setting for my sequence was at The Manor which was behind my school (Drapers Academy). My setting was set at some lonely woods.