In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Laura flowers

Use of forms and conventions

When creating our media piece, we tried to use the general forms and conventions of thrillers as much as possible. During the planning and research stage, we started to look into the different types of thriller conventions and forms and what the best rated thrillers contained, we felt that using real media (thriller) products would help us to gain more knowledge of the genre, pick up on some more information of what different forms and conventions of thrillers that there is, and help us develop a thriller product at the best of our ability. To achieve this we created moodboards which consisted of pictures, we created a wordle to show some of the features we already knew and also ones that we had discovered during our research. When filming our product, we used conventions such as dark corners, shadows etc, and to make our genre of thriller a supernatural one.

Developing our media forms and conventions.

We went on to develop the forms and conventions of our media product when we got to the editing stage of the whole process. We decided to play on the dark corners/shadows convention of a thriller and make it so the whole product had dim lighting in the background, to try and give our piece a more grim and gritty feel from the beginning. We also took advantage of the setting of our thriller, which we were lucky enough to use; using the cellar as the background scenery helped us create the kind of mysterious supernatural vibe we wanted the audience to feel when watching our opening. Throughout most of our product you will witness key forms and conventions, we tried to develop them so they were more obvious, helping the audience to understand what type of opening they are watching; helping them to establish the genre of the opening, to which they would begin to question what could possibly come next.

How our media product challenged forms and conventions.

Although we tried to stick to most thriller conventions that we knew and we were familiar with, we did not include some conventions that most thrillers do tend to include such as mcguffins, suspense, action, mirroring etc. we felt that the style of thriller we were trying to achieve did not need these conventions and forms included in the opening sequence. When researching into thrillers, we came across certain thrillers which had most of these conventions in the first 2 minutes; however we wanted to create more of an atmosphere and decided to focus more on how to keep the audience interested, how to begin to build questions in the audience’s heads and how we were going to include conventions and forms which we felt were more important to include when creating a thriller opening.