Evaluation Post 1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our film is called 'Shadow of Your Past' and is in the crime thriller genre. Our opening both challenges and uses the typical conventions of real media products of the thriller genre.

Our Film's Plot
'Shadow of Your Past' is a film that follows a young black woman in her mid-20s whose name is Shania Morcott. She is a high profile lawyer who becomes the victim of a revenge stalking by a rapist who she had previously prosecuted. As the film progresses Shania becomes increasingly paranoid and is eventually kidnapped by the stalker. She is rescued by the police but the stalker escapes. The film ends with Shania moving away and trying to rebuild her life, but the stalkers whereabouts are unknown and he may still be out there.

Form
I think that our film opening follows the typical format. In general film openings tend to include titles and credits, a soundtrack and either dialogue or a narrative voice over. Additionally our film opening introduces the main character and establishes the genre.

Genre
Below is a mind map of the genre conventions of thriller films. There is also a key at the top. The mind map shows the typical narrative, characters, settings, iconography, sub-genres and themes of thriller films. I have also indicated which conventions we included in our film and also real life examples. Please click and drag to navigate the mind map. Press present mode to make it easier to view (the first of the three white buttons in the top right corner). 

Below is a prezi explaining in detail the choices we made for our lead character based on our genre.

Narrative Structure

Style
The aesthetic we wanted to give our film was very naturalistic in terms of lighting and effects. During the editing process we graded our shots to have more of a grey colour scheme to make the shots appear bleaker. This is typical of thriller films, such as 'Gone Girl' from which we took inspiration. 

We have two soundtracks in our opening. One is a classical piece of music (called 'Ever Evolving') consisting of only a piano which creates a relaxed and gentle atmosphere. The other is a more fast-paced soundtrack (called 'Codename') with drums and stringed instruments helping to build tension during the red herring sequence. The two pieces of music help to create the desired mood in each part. Firstly a more soft, calm mood which contrasts with the suspense and tension later on, emphasisng the danger and uneasiness.

The wording and order of our titles were inspired by the film 'Se7en' along with the effects we added to them. The shaking effect adds to the uneasiness in our opening and hopefully adds to representing the genre better.


Our film's credits


An example from 'Se7en'

The font we used for the credits was very simplistic as we didn't want to distract from what was happening on screen. The font for our title was different to the rest of the credits as was the effect. We were inspired by the film poster for 'Shutter Island' for our font choice as it was simple yet bold.

Overall I feel that our film opening follows the genre and form conventions of a thriller film opening. Hopefully this means that our film will be easily identifiable as a thriller to our target audience and will be similar to the existing films in this genre.