Section 12 : Evaluation 2 : In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Compared to the thrillers I first analysed, our product is noticably a lower standard, because obviously we dont have professional skills as of yet. However, we did use different camera angles, locations, and the best actors we could get to our advantage to produce a smooth running and flowing production of the opening of a thriller, Perception.

We thought to make the thriller we did, as nobody else had a similar idea, and we wanted to be unique and be the only one with that idea. Also we thought it would create a captivating storyline for the rest of the film as well as grabbing your attention in the opening few minutes.

We decided on what to include and exclude by mind-mapping before hand with the whole group and deciding what would be the best factors, events or storylines to include in our production.

The certain conventions we tryed to follow were; a mysterious, gloomy and mangled location in relation to nature, abandonment and old looking. Also we wanted a tensionous however simplistic start as similar to other thrillers we have viewed. We wanted to also keep a contrast in character age, with children looking young and innocent and the men symbolising the "bad" guys, or who are suggested to be the bad guys, we figured this would help the audience side with the right characters. This is a code that thrillers such as Silence of the lambs uses, with the young woman contrasting against all other men.

We used certain camera angles to suggest certain things such as high angles to show the audience can see everything and might be able to know more than the characters know, which is a factor we needed to keep to keep the thriller interesting. We used close up angles to show facial expressions and emotions from the characters so the audience could understand. We tryed to use a lot of landscape angles to emphasise to the audience the scale and environment around the characters.

I think our completed production is a good example of a thriller opening with the limitations we had, such as lack of camera equipment from college, such as a steadycam which would of really helped us with moving camera angles. It uses the codes and conventions of a thriller well such as being mysterious however quite simple and not too intricate as it only is the opening 2/3 minutes. A dull, but normal location is what we needed and what we got, nothing extravagant like a labratory etc..