Narrative

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

2. Narrative The narrative of our opening is a girl running away from someone/something and ending up hiding in an abandoned building. She is identified as the victim, and a fear/problem is also identified. Immediately the audience see that she is running away from something as she keeps looking back over her shoulder.

3. Characters • Victim- In the opening we are introduced to a girl who is running away from something/someone and so is identified as the victim. They are portrayed as vulnerable, especially as they hide in a scary looking, abandoned building and are all by themselves. We expect something bad to happen to them, or that something already has happened. • Friend- We are also introduced to someone who seems to be a friend of the victim, they seem worried and think something might happen as the victim was upset/distressed when they saw her last. They are on the phone in a panicked voice and so the audience begins to wonder what is causing the victim to be so scared.

4. Font and Titles • We used the font ‘Requiem’ from dafont.com as it suited our genre and was exactly what we were looking for. Its name was the inspiration for the name of our opening. • Our credits were placed in the corner of our footage so they were not in the way. They fade in and out and are paced the same as our music so everything flows together. • I think we made a good choice of font as it looks really good and suits our genre perfectly. The word ‘Requiem’ looks particularly good as our title as it is white on black and is conventional of a thriller film.

5. Location • Our location was an abandoned building at Longstanton. It looked particularly effective as it had broken windows and the brick was very worn out. It is a conventional setting for a thriller; we took inspiration from the movie ‘The Hole’ in which teens find a deserted basement and get trapped inside. ‘The Hole’ is also a psychological thriller and so we thought an abandoned building would be the next best thing rather than a hole/basement. We see the outside of the building looking very run down, and we also see the inside showing a staircase which has fallen down and a lot of rubble.

6. Sub-genre • At first we wanted to do a crime thriller, in which the victim was being chased by a serial killer or found a survivor who had been beaten up by the serial killer. However due to complications we had to change our idea to a girl being chased by the serial killer and hiding. We think we could also define our thriller as psychological, but it leans mostly towards a crime thriller. • The character fits the sub-genre as they are a victim who is in danger; they may later be killed and are at the centre of a crime investigation. The mise-en-scene fits the sub-genre, especially for our storyline, as it is worn down and ‘dodgy’; somewhere in which a crime could take place. I think our storyline is conventional of a crime thriller, it was slightly hard to show in just the opening. Instead of having a friend on the phone, we could have had an investigator or police officer to show that a crime was going to occur.

7. Techniques used • In our opening we used a lot of panning shots of the buildings and of the victim running. They were edited together at a quick pace to create a ‘frenzied’ effect and put the audience on edge. We have shots of the character running in which the cameraman is also running, which creates an element of danger as the audience suspects that the victim is being followed. Our music was called ‘Ghost Return’ by Moby which we got from his website; it is very effective in our piece as it is very low and droning. It contrasts with the quick-paced editing and creates an eerie/gloomy mood to show the audience that the setting is a dangerous place. We used the sound effect of a telephone ringing when the character is rung by her friend, we decided that it would be better with non-diegetic sound. We used a tripod for most of the shots, but used it handheld for point of view shots to create the effect of desperation as the character finds somewhere to hide.