G321 - Evaluation Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Film Titles

Azier Title                                            VS                                           Seven Title

Our media product uses the convention of using the titles to reflect the narrative of the film. The street-style and slight graffiti appearance of the titles used in our media product reflects Azier's "beginning" of being a street magician and foreshadows his return to this lifestyle at the end of the film. The titles remain unobtrusive throughout, only dominating the screen for the display of the film title itself. This conforms to the way titles are typically used within the genre, such as in Seven and Gone Girl, and helps to establish our film as a thriller.

Editing

Silence of the Lambs tones                 VS                                                 Azier tones

The dark tones of the second scene conform to the generic convention of thrillers being dark and mysterious and this creates an ambiguous atmosphere to entice the viewer. However, the use of bright tones at the beginning of the clip is non-conventional and therefore shows a development of the genre.

Camerawork

Close up in "Gone Girl"                                   VS                             Close up in "Azier"

Our media product uses many close ups which is yet another convention that we have developed due to encompassing their use with other shots. This is an unconventional aspect of our product and indicates that we are pushing some aspects of the genre to its limits. However, some of our shots were inspired directly from other film openings within the same genre, such as Gone Girl.

Setting/ Location

Typically, thriller openings are set in small, enclosed spaces with little reference to location so as to create a higher sense of ambiguity. However, our opening challenges this by establishing two different locations, one of which is outside and the other of which is shown to be some degree of workshop. We did this to aid in the clarity of the narrative, despite risking compromising the presentation of genre. However, this establishment of location can be found in some thrillers, such as Silence of the Lambs.

Special Effects

Like the majority of thrillers, we refrained from using any special effects within our opening. This not only helped to indicate the genre of our piece but also allowed us to keep a low budget. The use of special effects was not present in any of the thriller openings we had previously researched and therefore allowed us to do the same.

Sound

Finally, the eerie non-diegetic music used to accompany our opening is extremely conformative to the genre and is easily comparable to the soundtracks used in both Donnie Darko and Se7en. This makes it clear that these two openings were the main source of inspiration for our piece, despite the other aspects of our media product developing conventions rather than sticking to them completely.