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

When planning our thriller we were heavily influenced by The Bourne Ultimatum. In this scene many flashbacks are used to show what he is seeing in his head and how that is affecting him, we decided to do the same but with flash forwards instead. By doing this we can see who the threat is and why that is so, this also explains the reason our main protagonist starts to run faster and become more paranoid even though he has only seen the antagonist once. This helped us with our story a lot and just made the film seem to have a much larger impact.


For the location I believe ours is very similar to the style of the horror film "Eden lake", in this film two adults are chased around a forest by some violent teenagers. This film proves how creepy and isolating forests can be, if this film was set in the city then it wouldn't have the same effect as someone could come and save them, but with the forest no one can hear you call for help. Forests are also very enigmatic, cities have monuments and icon places in them, whereas a forest doesn't, you really could be anywhere, just the idea of this isolation in an unknown location is eerie.

Coming up with an idea for our antagonist was tricky as we needed it to be creepy, realistic and enigmatic. When thinking about it this way a mask seemed like the best method of doing this, the idea came from Jigsaw's mask in the film saw. As you can see these two shots are extremely similar, the use of the mask hides the persons identity while adding a chilling aura to the character. The low angle then shows them as being powerful and in charge and is also perfectly realistic as anyone could buy or make a mask like that, giving a sense or realism to the character.

But arguably the film that had the biggest impact on our thriller would be The Blair Witch Project. This film is very similar to our own, the claustrophobic shots giving a sense of loneliness and the unknown entity following them through a forest is very similar. However what the Blair witch project does differently is they never show what is following them, it's all audio and the characters reactions. This is very powerful and enigmatic  it leaves a lot to the viewers imagination, by the end of the film you're not sure if there ever was something following them. We built on this to a point leaving the ending with a cliffhanger, you want to find out what has happened instead of being left with questions.

The clothes that our protagonist wears were chosen to make it so that the viewer would build an immediate opinion on him, this can change how they view him and how they react to what happens to him. This idea was based upon the film tyrannosaur, as soon as we see his clothing we judge him even if we don't mean to, and our reactions to what happens to that character changes as well.

We took inspiration from the movie se7en and decided to include sound before any image is displayed on the screen, in se7en this is used to build an image in the viewers head before they even see any of the film, when watching se7en we first hear police sirens and this tells us all we need to know about the area and it portrays the film to a certain degree. In our thriller we used the wind of our first scene before any picture is shown to give an idea of the location while also adding a eerie sentiment to the thriller from the beginning.

The vast landscape of our first shot really emphasises the idea of loneliness, how no one can help our protagonist when there is so much to get lost in, it also gives a sense of hopelessness. We were inspired by films like transformers 3 and no country for old men that also use wide scenes and locations like this for similar reasons. There is something quite powerful about a shot like this.