Evaluation: Question 1

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

Through analysing and doing deconstructions of the openings of psychological thrillers, we got a lot of ideas about how to do our opening. When planning the opening of ‘Recurrence’, we wanted it to have more substance than many thriller film openings because we wanted to include enough story in the opening scenes to draw the audience in. Although we wanted to stay mainly on the normal conventions of a thriller, we wanted to also develop them. I think that we managed to expose the audience enough so that they realised the genre was a thriller, but I also think that we made them really wonder what is going to happen throughout the film.

When discussing our film with people, we found that lots of people asked themselves these questions...

·         Is the film going to be old fashioned?

·         Who is the girl?

·         Will the film have flashbacks from modern day to the past?

·         Will the whole story be in the past?

·         Will the girl from the opening scene reappear?

·         Why are they arguing?

·         Does the mother know she’s gone?

·         Where is she going?

·         Whose house is it?

·         How does she have a key?

·         Where is her dad?

·         Is there a relationship between the girl and her father?

·         Why is she acting like she has never been there before?

·         Why is she in the same place as the other girl?

·         What is going to happen next?

At the beginning of the task, I did a deconstruction of the film opening of ‘Road to Perdition’. After doing this, I thought that the opening of our film should have more content relevant to the story. In Road to Perdition, the opening starts with a clip of the end of the film where a boy is standing on the beach. The shot then changes to a clip where the boy is cycling through the town, going the opposite way to everybody else. I think this represents him taking you back to the beginning of the story. The long opening doesn’t really give you a full sense of what genre the film is. In contrast, we started with a clip from the past, whereas Road to Perdition started with a clip from the future. In ‘Recurrence’, we wanted to start the story immediately from the outset. We also wanted to subtly convey the girls’ family situation to the audience to help them empathise with how she is feeling. I think doing the deconstructions really helped us to realise what we wanted our film to be about, what target market it should be aimed at, how much story we wanted to include in the opening two minutes without giving too much away and how we would portray to the audience that it was a thriller.