Evaluation Question 1.

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

The media product we created was a five minute film. Our film uses many different techniques and conventions generally used in movies. The genre we chose for our film was a sort of horror/thriller, this lead us into a whole different choice of typical media conventions used throughout these films. I believe that our film follows and also breaks typical conventions. An example of our film following typical horror movie conventions is the fact that our main character is a female who gets followed/hurt by a man. I believe following typical conventions is a good things as it allows the audience to anticipate what will happen next, which has been proven to give them a sense of thrill and achievement because they can predict what’s happening. As well as this, it is also a good thing to totally surprise your audience, especially in a genre such as horror. By changing typical conventions in horror films, it adds an extra sense of fear and builds the tension, giving a better overall effect to the film. In our film, the gender stereotypes are reversed, but this doesn’t happen until the very end. This is seen when the female character turns, and kills the male character. However, we don’t actually see the killing, so the audience only hear noises and are left to imagine what will have happened. The reveal is done following a point of view shot which keeps the audience thinking for much longer. I believe this is a good aspect of our film as it shows female strength and subverts the typical stereotype.

I also believe that our film follows certain aspects of a theory proposed by Richard Dyer. The theory has five different sub-genres; energy, abundance, intensity, transparency and community. The aspects of the theory our film strongly follows is intensity. This is because the film has extreme highs and lows giving the audience the chance to feel the emotion with the characters. I believe an aspect of lows in the film may be the drug scene at the beginning as it symbolises an extreme low point in the characters life. Another aspect of lows would be the realisation that someone unknown is inside her house, again building tension amongst the audience, allowing them to experience it with the characters too. I think that the highest point in our film was the ending, when the female character has killed the male one. This is because she managed to get rid of the person and thing that was causing her the most trouble and causing all the lows.

Right at the start of the horror film genre, nobody ever thought that in the future women would be seen as the main focus of the films and known as the ‘strongest’ characters on the ones that always survive. Our film plays with the genres history and codes because of the use of a female as the male character.

Many of our ideas used throughout our film were taken from real media texts. These allowed us to develop our film and ideas to produce our final outcome. A film that we looked into very closely was ‘The Strangers’. Our film has used many similar aspects from this, mainly the idea that someone managed to enter another’s household without them knowing. The ending of the film is also similar to ours in that the female character survives, although it is not exactly the same because the character in The Strangers is also injured, it has the same idea behind it.