Media evaluation - Question 1

Question 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge codes and conventions of real media products?

Our thriller ‘3 DAYS’ uses many of the typical codes and conventions in this particular media institution.

They are: • A battle between protagonist and antagonist and this battle is shown in the storyline as a chain of bad events who build up tension.

• Quick cuts • Tension music, it starts slow and then build up • Cross cutting • The storyline will be designed so the audience will think that it can happen to them in their life, this should also make the audience scared

• Changes in the angle of shots

• Antagonist has a hidden identity

• Jump cuts

• A lot of CU and ECU of the protagonist to show the emotions of this person

• Costumes: the antagonist is wearing just dark cloths unlike the protagonist, who is wearing normal clothes

• Weapon

We decided to develop this particular convention so that our product would become much more stylised. We thought this would appear to our target audience. Our protagonist is in the teenager age and the audience can also see that because of the clothes she is wearing. But the age of the antagonist is not really clear, because the identity is typically hidden, but at the end you can see that our antagonist is also a teenager, this is not typical conventional. In the existing stalker films the actors are normally between 18 and 30 or 40, but our actors are much younger than that, because we had not really much opportunity and no budge to get older and professional actors. The location we used is not really typical, because it is an open building and normally someone should be there and it is also daytime and they start the whole ‘battle’ outside at a street and there is normally someone on the street or in the building. So it is not a common place to kill someone and it is also dangerous, because you can get cached easily. Also the gender of our stalker is non-stereotypical, because this person is normally a man and not a woman, because men are stronger than women. And we also have some supernatural in our film to develop the genre stalker thriller a little bit. This happens at the end when we turn our antagonist after her death into a ghost. Also our voice over is one development we done in our film, because we’re not talking in English we’re talking in German. We did this, because we wanted to have the antagonist more far away of the audience. The thing we developed the most is our music, because we done the whole music by ourselves. We thought first about the conventions of thriller music and listened to some, but then we decided that it would be better for us to do our own music and not steal it from the Internet or from other films. This is better, because we then can have music, which is fitting perfectly together with our storyline and is building up tension at the right moment.

Our media product challenges conventions by the non-stereotypical features we have in our film. We changed some from stereotypical to non-stereotypical, because then we maybe get some more attention from the audience. Actually the audience has a picture in their head how a thriller film would be, but we wanted to change because of that some things. We changed for example the gender of the antagonist our stalker. A lot of people are thinking that stalker are male and not female, because men are stronger and are more typical for that as you can see in the films. We also changed the lightning, because you normally expect a low key lightning and we changed this expectation while we filmed with normal daylight and a normal day time. This should show more that it can happen every single time at the day. And because of these changes we’ve done, we thought more people are interested in our film to see not only just a film as all the other stalker films. We wanted to have a complete new view of a stalker thriller. And we also changed the genre stalker thriller a little bit by putting a little bit supernatural at the end, when our antagonist is turning into a ghost. This gives us a complete new thriller genre and this would be a good point to get people to watch our film.