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

1. Our thriller ‘After Dark’ conforms to the thriller conventions because our victim is a female who’s portrayed as a damsel in distress that the audience is meant to feel sympathy towards. I got a lot of influence from the opening of the film Scream 2, the location of our film mimicked Hollywood films. The establishing shot of the house was a feature of many horror films like ‘The Hand that Rocked the Cradle’ and Scream 2, despite it being a horror film it still has similar conventions to thrillers. My opening thriller was different to conventional thrillers because it was a low budget independent opening. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? • The title sequence should establish mode of address. The typical conventions of a thriller opening is to create enigma with the first few seconds enticing the viewer to want to watch the whole film. The visual codes that we encoded in our thriller were the three main characters wearing pyjamas to contribute to the plot. The three girls were having a sleepover, so the title sequence needed to `highlight the genre i.e. thriller would stereotypically have low angle shots of the villain and high angle of the victim. Storyline/Location: Our thriller was set in Saima’s house and there’s a psychological twist. • Thriller films often play around with point of view and the idea of looking and watching. Therefore, I thought of getting a point of view shot of our victim of her journey to the kitchen. This is the very last shot of her before she goes missing. Our opening thriller ended with a fade out then our title sequence came up ‘AFTER DARK’ we put this is the same font style and colour as our cast and crews names.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups? • I reinforced dominant modes of representation within thriller, I used Mulvey’s idea of the ‘male gaze’ to reinforce how three girls are subject to the male eye through their costume. My character, Ashley and Saima wore pyjamas as a way of attracting our target audience male and female teenagers who can mostly relate to the girls circumstances. We used a couple of Propp’s main eight roles in film we used an unknown antagonist/ villain and ‘damsel in distress’. Saima was assigned to play the victim as we felt it would make the most sense as the thriller was set at her home so it would create more sympathy as it reflected the idea that ‘your not even safe in your own home’. • My thriller represents teenage girls from middle class backgrounds in a stereotypical way as they all have similar interests in fashion and their hobbies.  The three girls discussing their holiday plans represented their age to the audience. Each main character was of different ethnicity which represented how diverse London is which is where the film was set. My thriller opening reinforces stereotypes as all three of the girls briefly discuss insecurities in wearing bikini’s on holiday, which is a problem many teenage girls tend to have with their body image due to the idealistic representation of the female body in the media. We intended to reinforce gender stereotypes with our film. • ‘After Dark’ replicated dominant representations of teenage girls, we got influence from films like ‘Mean Girls’ the three girls are portrayed as quite vain as Saima’s bedroom is purple and a jewelry box, hairspray, hair-straightner’s and IPod is displayed in the panning shot of her bedroom at the start of the opening. The three girls are all wearing bikini’s and our online shopping for swimwear, nail varnish is also shown in the establishing shot of her bedroom. Scream 2 used similar forms of representation to us. This is our representation of teenage girls in a similar way except they’re growing up in the UK rather than US.

3. What kind of media institution might distribution your media product and why? The plot of our film was a universal idea as Americans who produce the most successful movies in the world have the same form of activity held amongst teenagers but they just refer to it as a ‘slumber party’ but it has the same content which was another way of us conforming to the bigger US market, makes it likely to secure international distribution. The film is for cinema distribution but also promotion at film festivals. The BFI is dominated by American distributors like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures, that may be interested in distributing my film. Despite our film being an low budget film because of it’s universal content it will get a lot of financial backing privately like ‘The King’s Speech’ and it will also gain money from the national lottery. This will enable the film to be recognised by the major distribution companies that will be able to invest in the film. Films with pedigree distributors tend to dominate the cinema and make the most sells e .g. Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. DISTRUBUTION: refers to the process through which film is made available to it’s audience via a film distributor. EXHIBITION: showing films in cinema or on DVD. INSTITUTION: any company or organisation that produces, distributes or exhibits films. Columbia Pictures have distributed many successful thrillers with similar narratives to mine like Scream . Also they are part of the massive American movie distributors and release a lot of films with the same content. This would also allow us to have the financial backing to make a sequel to the thriller which Independent British distributors may not of been able to offer. The distributor would be in charge of getting my thriller into as many cinema screens possible and later released onto other platforms e.g. DVD/Bluray. Pictures, The Weinstein Company or Dimension Films might distribute my opening thriller.

4. How did you attract/address your audience? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIdBBROlUeM I encoded a psycho villain to create suspense. The fact his identity was never actually revealed to the audience kept the mystery going through the opening. I carried out research onto other films that established the same genre, such as After Earth. Despite, this film being an Action- Adventure film, I feel it really grasped the viewer through it’s futuristic location and narrative. The opening consisted of a voice over the whole time which instantly revealed who the main character was but nothing about how they got to this mystery place. The title sequence at the end of this trailer inspired me to do something similar with ours, as I felt it was a successful way of attracting our audience. After our thriller got peer assessed, we took on the necessary changes to produce a better final product. We were informed that our speech sounded distorted at some points and too long, so we took note of this and went to the editing suite and cut it down. I feel my thriller ‘After Dark’ worked as a film opening due to the feedback I received from the peer assessment. Undoubtedly, we were given some criticisms such as continuity errors with the iPod in the bedroom scene and the garden scene not be fluid enough. However, I felt that all this feedback helped shaped my final product. We took the necessary changes to make sure that our audience decodes the preferred reading. I showed someone from our tertiary audience to truly see whether they’re able to decode the narrative and they were able to do so. Therefore, I felt my thriller had met our target audience. Despite their still being minor issues with the film such as the title sequence not including the production company.