Evaluation Question 1

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

Our film uses continuity to make it seem real, it had to have a clear time line so that what was happening made sense, it had to look like it all took place within 2-3 days. A confusion in the continuity is my hair colour, as in the earlier scenes that we filmed before December my hair was a lighter colour, yet in the first scene the colour is red, during most of the film it is not a large concern as my hair was covered by the mask and hood, however in the rough cut at the end where my character had fallen down the stairs the hair was on show so when the two scenes were put together there was still a clear change difference even after using a colour corrector so as it was noticed in the rough cut by the audience so when making changes post production we cropped the shot and it looked a lot better.

the opening scene with the change of hair colour

original hair colour during filming

Our film is a psychological thriller which is a sub-genre of thriller films. We stuck to the genre convention that the film should be filled with suspense and keep the audience wanting more. The main way we did this was using plot twists, which were used so that the audience is shocked with something they don't expect, it was effective as the audience didn't know what was happening in reference to the plot twist before hand. Music also plays a large role in the atmosphere of the film as it can add suspense and turn the audiences attention to a certain action that is happening. Overall I think our film reflects the genre well but at the same time is challenges the codes as while most films use a male as the killer we decided to use a female, originally our antagonist was going to be a male and the protagonist Deb's boyfriend but we changed this to challenge the stereotypes that are within our chosen genre.


We decided not to include any elements of parody in our film as we created an original plot line through a treatment at the start of the year that we did after researching into the sub-genres of thriller films to see what we wanted to make. Although in our film we have elements of pastiche, such as the book in the opening titles as we used something similar to the book seen in se7en. Another film that we took influence from was Julia's eyes as in the film a camera flash is used for a character to see so we payed homage to this by having a similar thing in our film. 

The book from Se7en opening titles

Part of the scene in Julia's eyes where the camera flash is used

 In our film we also payed homage to film noir as we used low key lighting, similarly with our poster the lower lighting was used as well. We liked the idea of using part of the iconography of a film noir in our short film as in modern horror flicks they use dull contrast as the films are in colour where as in ours the contrasts of bright and dark lights can change how the audience views it.

an example of film noir using shadows and bright lighting 

We used the Richard Dyers theory of entertainment which uses intensity to evoke certain emotions in the audience, we did through having a scene where the two characters Deb and Tina are having a conversation and then the masked person appears which is made to shock the audience as they are not expecting it. Our audience feedback shows that while some were not a affected by the film the majority answered that the film did scare them, which shows that our film did what it was meant to.