In what ways does your media product use, develop or challange forms or conventions of real media products?

In our group we have develepoed an urban British film. The film we have produced came from ideas from watching Shaun Of The Dead, Mirrors and The Messenger. These are a mixture of thrillers and horrors we wanted to base our main task on. However we chose to mainly focus on the films Mirrors and Shaun Of The Dead.

We have developed this idea by having a male character who at the begining see's a mysterious black figure on two occasions. He then becomes highly paranoid and begins to run looking around nervously. We end the opening scene in a dark boiler room, this relates to the opening scene of Mirrors where the man enters the grungy locker room.

We also took the typical horror convention of "You don't know who the villain is" and used it in two occasions in our opening. We were inspired by films such as 'Final Destination', 'Halloween' as well as 'Shawn Of The Dead'. As you can see by the image on the left we took the figure look from the film 'Shawn Of The Dead' due to the fact it was our inspired film of choice.

However we challenged the typical 'Damsel in Distress' theme that runs through thrillers by planting the role of the victim on a young male. From films like 'Halloween', 'Cloverfield' and 'Silence Of The Lambs' it is a female character who is the victim. In our film we didn't want this reoccurring stereotype so changed it to fit the modern era and cut the theme of scream queen. This was made ironic from the final part of our film where the protagonist screams before the sequence finishes.

The music added is typical of thriller films as such as our own. Its progressive and suspenseful and we received a great reaction from our audience based upon our film and its music. Its similar to songs from films like 'Requiem For A Dream' and '28 Days Later'. Those two films (Drama and Horror) suite the songs perfectly and our thriller genre film has the same effect with the help of the track used.

We also used horror setting to make the fear set in. This is used in our 'Tunnel Shot' or 'Pipe Room' scene. The eery environment and exclusion in the dark add to the fear that we wanted to show by captivating the theme into our story. Films that do similar are 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', '28 Days Later' and 'Nightmare On Elm Street' proving that we have hit the right theme due to the sheer vast library of immensely scary films which we used.

We also used the idea of relationships to do this we looked at the film Shaun Of The Dead. In this film the protagonist Shaun has an issue in his relationship with his girlfriend Lizzie. We used the consept of broken relationships but put a twist on it so that the girlfriend was not seeing her boyfriend and being distraught due to him being missing. This takes the idea of broken relationships but in a different direction.