Thriller Evaluation (draft)

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

  
  

In our thriller, we looked at many traditional conventions of existing thriller movies such as The Blair Witch Project, Donnie Darko and The Book Of Eli.

The location we chose, a forest, is a common convention of the thriller genre as it can give the audience a sense of abandonment and loneliness. Also, the vertical lines of the trees can represent bars, another convention of thrillers. This can help to give the audience the feeling of entrapment.

Masks are another convention of this genre. Our hallucination character, the woman in the gas mask, wears a mask in order to appear more mysterious and less human. We chose to do this as she is not actually real so does not need to appear normal. A mask is worn by the character in the opening scenes of The Book Of Eli in order to make the character look more mysterious. We hope we have achieved the same effect.

Our plot fits into the Psychological Thriller sub-genre as it is a bout mental illness. Our media product is, in many ways similar to Donnie Darko and we looked at that film in order to draw inspiration for our thriller opening.

We have chosen to conform to many traditional conventions of the thriller genre, bars, entrapment, voyeurism, masks... We did this in order to make it easy for our audience to be able to recognise it as a thriller movie.

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The main social group shown in our thriller is british youths. Our plot involves drug use and the rave culture. I believe that our thriller represents this social group fairly and there is no negative representation of british youths.

Our thriller challenges gender roles as our 'victim' is male and the 'villain' is female. This contradicts the stereotypical gender roles in movies as it is usually a male who is the villain and the female is usually the damsel in distress.

Our thriller does conform to the theory of male gaze as the female character is dressed in tight jeans and therefore is slightly portrayed as a sexual object. However as this is combined with the challenges to gender roles, she is not seen as a useless woman in need of rescue.

• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?

There are many ways to distribute our thriller opening. The internet is a good place to start. Websites such as Youtube allow anyone to upload and view videos for free. This is good in a way as there is no cost to us for distribution, however this also means that it is very difficult to make any money from these kinds of websites. One very good thing about using websites such as Youtube is that you can target almost all audiences simultaneously.

Our thriller opening has a challenging plot in that when we screened our rough cut, a lot of the feedback that we got pointed to the fact that people thought there was more than one gas mask-wearing figure surrounding the character or Rhys. This was the effect we were going for so that it could be explained during the film that she is a hallucination. This could lead to our thriller receiving finding to be made into a feature film and then released in cinemas. This is, in my opinion, the best way for our thriller to be distributed as it would be a lot more well done with adequate funding and would also make a tidy profit at the box office.

• Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our thriller opening is mainly aimed at intellectual people who enjoy watching movies that make them think... Movies that you need to actively think about while watching in order to fully understand the plot. I believe people who would most enjoy our movie are people who enjoy other Psychological Thrillers such as Donnie Darko, Inception and Shutter Island.

• How did you attract/address your audience?

One way in which we attracted our audience was through our choice to have no dialogue in the opening of our thriller. We did this in order to keep the tension in the scenes. We hope this had the effect of making the audience want to watch the rest of the film and our feedback supported this.