In what ways does your media product use, develop

or challenge forms and conventions of real media

products? By Amber Renshaw

Narrative (how we established a plot)

When writing the story for our film I looked at many different films. We wanted something that would catch peoples eye for my research into a film I chose the recently released Wolf of wall street. We could easily take inspiration from this. This film included everything that we were thinking about doing for our own film. It has drugs, sex and violence all in it and is new and modern. When I did my 15 minute analysis the film starts off pretty slow but then after the 15 minutes I watched all the film because I was that engrossed in it. In our group we wanted a thriller film something that would shock the audience and want to make them carry on watching it. The plot was set in a busy area in the city and has suspense building from the first moment. I like how in this film their not afraid to do things like swear and drugs are seen a lot. I think our film will be a little more tamer and probably keep to a 15 rating. I also looked into other films and tv series that were similar to this such as Pulp Fiction, Dexter and Catch me if you can. We want our plot to be fast paced and immediately attracts a certain audience. We all decided that after watching different kind of films that we thought that crime/thriller/psychological kind of film would be the best to go with. Our film is linear because we do not flash back before an event it all goes in time. The event that does complicate the film happens first though we decided to do this because we want to get the shock out of the way and then find out why its happened. This event includes drugs being used in the first scene.

Genre (where does it look like your chosen genre)

In our film we establish the genre in various ways. The use of props in ours is very significant with the use of drugs. The audience immediately recognise that the film is going to be about some kind of crime. Plus the use of music in the background gives the sense of suspicion as well as tension. At first when the film first starts no one knows exactly what the film is about. We also set it in a park which can be linked to crime as a lot of teenagers are known to cause trouble there so we thought it would be smart to do this. We did this because when we took inspiration from the clichéd story lines from ‘taken’ and ‘the da vinci code’. We left our film on an open ending to add intrigue to the crime drama.

Camera, angles, shot movement and position

Throughout the film we used shots such as match on action and shot reverse shots. This is because we had lots of conversations throughout the film and the camera is shot from a characters left shoulder then the opposite to the right and we didn’t cross the 180 line because it would confuse the audience. So the audience knows who's speaking at what point. We did close ups of the drugs also to draw attention to them because it is a key part of the narrative, especially when they are brought out of the bag accidently we had to include match on action for this. When doing this I referred to shots from pulp fiction when characters are having conversations. Furthermore we included the use of high and low angle to show the audience who would be the ‘superior’ character in the shot. This happens when Daniel falls and Olivia looks down on him. It could also indicate ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Continuity and editing In our film we tried to keep our film smooth and edited the clip to make sure we achieved this. The pacing of the film could have been better by using a tracking shot on Daniel when he walks through the park, as it does look like a hand held camera because its shaky. The rhythm of the film goes very fast when Daniel falls and we cut this to make sure it all fitted in to run smooth so we had no pauses. We wanted to film so it was verisimilitude so the audience felt like they were actually watching it that’s why we did close ups of the drugs so they could actually see what was happening. This was achieved by doing short takes. We also used fade in and outs on the end and beginning of our film to make it smooth and not just jump straight into it.

Sound With the sound we decided to put music in to accompany the majority of the film. We used a sound bridge so it would carry on smoothly into the next scene. When researching for the music I found the sound and took inspiration from Law and Order and films such as Shutter Island to get that tension in traditional crime thrillers. We also used a sound effect of a ‘gunshot’ when the drugs are accidently spilt onto the table to create a tense atmosphere for the audience as well as the characters this can also be called a synchronous sound.

Mis-en-scene and iconography

Our film is a beginner for a crime thriller and we included appropriate costume and props. We used a bag of flour for our prop to portray cocaine. Furthermore Olivia was holding a suitcase looking bag to fit in with the crime stereotype. Then for the costumes Daniel needed to look smart and older so he wore a suit to go with his lawyer career that is mentioned. His hair is quite messy as well to suggest there's something off about him. Then Olivia wore a mac coat and sunglasses this is easily associated to a traditional crime thriller because it suggests an inspector/spy role creating a twist in the story line. For my role I had just casual clothes on to suggest I’m just a normal friend, when Olivia was still dressed smart.

TypographyFor our film we spent a lot of time deciding what typography to use. We did some research into films to decide how we wanted ours and we found in films such as crime thrillers they used quite bold but simple text for the title and credits. We did this because we wanted a clean looking film. This is why we decided not to use colours and stuck to black and white.