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

The main genre of our media product is a thriller, in many ways our media product compares to many other films of this genre. Firstly because of the way it has been structured and the camera work we involved into our film. Our media project involves many different aspects of handheld camerawork including the effects that the main protagonist is being stalked throughout the woods, which is an important feature within our film. We were able to give this effect by holding the camera behinds the trees and also running whilst holding the camera which although it makes the quality of the film very poor, it distinguishes our film as a thriller and that even though its not clear, something bad is going to happen to the main protagonist.
Before we chose the main genre of our film, we were quite certain in what we wanted to do which was a thriller, we chose this genre because we found it was the easiest to portray in the short amount of time we were given and also that it would be quite interesting to research and conduct ourselves into how a thriller is made. We conducted research into various thriller films, such as The Blair Witch Project, The Strangers, and also Silence Of The Lambs.
Firstly, we chose to conduct research into The Blair Witch Project because it is highly popular and known, especially for its use of handheld camerawork. This feature was a main aspect of what we wanted to include in our media product. We also thought that this film was relevant to our main product because of its fairly similar location, and it also doesn’t fully allow the audience to know what’s going on, which leaves them interested and intrigued into what’s going to happen next after the beginning of the film has ended.
We also researched The Strangers and The Silence Of The Lambs; as these were both thrillers and both have slight scenes of our chosen location of a forest. The Strangers forest scene had a lot more impact on the thriller genre in comparison to Silence Of The Lambs because of the context it was put in. This is because in The Strangers the woman in the area of forest was being followed, whereas in the beginning of silence of the lambs the woman is just running through the forest to give the film an eerie feel.
The final film that we analyzed was Brick. This film influenced the way in which we chose to improve our final media product, and was a fundamental inspiration into the way we edited our product e.g. the flash-forwards of the tunnel scene we incorporated into our main media product. The originally thought features that we thought of ourselves and included into our media project were the various different video effects we used such as the “bad film, and bad television effects” which were basically cut in scenes from the tunnel that involved miniature cross dissolves, dark colored effects which were different to other parts in the film and also we incorporated two clips we had filmed into the one clip we inserted into our media project.