Evalution Question 1

 

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

 

All films have generic conventions that are associated with and specific to a genre, for example all Westerns use cowboy hats, six shooters, and horses and spurs to place them in their genre.

Our film has the generic conventions of an action thriller genre, as it contains violence with face pace action and intense, dramatic non-diegetic music. Our film opening also leaves the audience with an enigma code as they are unsure on what going on and are left wondering how the characters have got in to the situations we see in the film opening. As an action thriller, our film has many generic conventions similar to real media texts of the same genre and are film rarely challenges these.

 

Much like real media products of the same genre, our film uses conventions such as weapons like the knife used when Agent Thomas stabs the suited henchman after escaping. The storyline of our film also means that various weapon will be used within the rest of the film including guns, knives and fists. This is similar to other action thriller films that have these generic conventions in the media text for instance James Bond Skyfall which has knives as well as gun in both the opening sequence and throughout the film

 As well as the props, our film opening uses tense low pitch non- diegetic music which is another generic convention of an action thriller. This convention is often used in action thrillers to create a dramatic effect that keeps the audience in suspense about what is going to happen next such. Almost all media texts use both diegetic and non-diegetic sound and music to create an atmosphere for the product an example of this would by the action thriller The Bourne Supremacy which uses low pitch tense music in scenes such as the car chase. 

 

The font of our film titles is minimal yet dramatic which is shown as the title, The Escape, written in white and on a black background looks sharp and clear giving a professional and serious feeling to the film which then helps to indicate the thriller element to our film. Fonts like this are also used in other film of our genre such as Skyfall as shown below.

 

There are different camera shots and angles used within our film opening and in terms of action thrillers high and low angles are quite generic. Real media products with the same genre as our film often have generic conventions of high and low angled shots as they can be used to clearly show power or weakness which is a key feature in action films that often have a protagonist and antagonist.

Our film can be seen as challenging conventions as the main character and protagonist in our film is a woman as a pose the typical butch muscular male figure like Bruce Willis in Die Hard or Daniel Craig in James Bond. We chose to use a female as our protagonist because there aren’t many action thriller films that have the woman as the hero. One film that influenced us on our decision was SALT in which Angelina Jolie play the main character, who is a spy much like the main character in our film.