Evaluation Question 1

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

Our group adapted the idea that a girl had stolen a confidential document and because of this somebody comes after her in order to plot revenge, we don't learn why the girl is being followed until we are taken towards the end back in time to three days previous. She is followed for a good minute through streets and back alleys, without being aware that it is happening but having an eerie feeling that someone is behind her, she is eventually captured by the enemy and then we are taken to the flashback of why she has been captured.

Location

For our location we wanted somewhere that was relatively quiet but not so quiet that there was no other people in the scene. We chose the high streets of Wem because they weren't too built up and the many roads and alley ways allowed us to create the feeling of being followed when we were recording.
We also felt the high street was a wise choice rather than fitting to the stereotypical location for thrillers EG. old houses or woodlands because the viewer would be expecting something to happen whereas it is very unexpected for something like that to occur in daytime high streets. From our questionnaire we also learnt that people found that being able to predict what happened next was a let down to Thriller films when they were asked "Do you enjoy Thriller films? If so why? If not why not?"

Sound

In order to create a good thriller you need sounds to build tension, suspense and atmosphere. We wanted to ensure our viewers were on the edge of their seats in suspense when watching our videos so we added the sound of a beating heart over the audio of when the girl is being followed. We chose the beating heart because it slowly got faster which was ideal for us as the enemy progressively got closer to their victim.  Not only did the heart beat create tension but heart beats also give connotations of death which we really wanted to emphasise, with the sound combined with the visual we felt it really gave a hint at what may be to come later in the film.  

Character

We only had 2 characters in our film and we didn't want any more than that purely to emphasize the lonely feeling. We kept the identity of the killer hidden until near the end when we had to reveal the story behind the capturing. We did this because we wanted the capture the element of mystery. We wanted the victim to appear as a regular person that you wouldnt expect to get in any sort of trouble to again get the audience to keep asking "why?"

Props

The prop in our film was a piece of paper with "Do Not Open" written on it. This was our only prop and it was revealed by a close up. We did this in order to reassure the viewers that the paper did have significance to the narrative.