Question 1 - In what ways does my media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

-  After long and hard discussions with the group crime fiction/thriller became a popular idea with my group and we then started to ask ourselves what makes a crime fiction so popular to modern day viewers. Soon after we found a local focused group and they gave us an amazing set of feedback in which we could develop upon, the most common reasons was because the genre is known for its exceeding amount of tension and builds throughout however negative comments were also took into consideration being that the genre is far to predictable.

- After knowing this we then starting to place our eyes into certain aspects we would have to include in our film opening. These include:

-A disruption order by an event

-Recognition/disorder occurred

-An attempt to repair

Enigma code that would question the audience


Roland Barthes was a very intelligent man in the media industry and he was the man I found to supply the best codes to creating a mystery film I followed his codes and they were as follows:

-Enigma Code: We used a mystery character in our opening where we didn’t reveal much identity and when filming him caught him in low lighting to resemble he was keeping low.

-Proairetic Code: This relates to the kidnapping scene and Laura lunges forward to bite ‘9’s ear and you will find our opening scene in the opening ‘9’ has a plaster on his ear to cause the audience to question.

-Semantic Code: We successfully breach this code as we reveal the bite was to a certain part of the body, the ear.

-His three codes had helped our group create a solid story line and create an effective mystery genre.

- Then we included in our planning what audiences we were trying to interact with based on social class/grade and overall we thought due to some violence discrepancy we came to a decision group C2 would best match. These are jobs such as; plumbers, electricians and other blue collar professionals simply down to pure fact it has a slightly violent outline and would attract this audience far better then students or lawyers clearly down to the features in our film and what job roles consist of.

- now look at films that would inspire me like ‘taken’ for example, it was not the genre my film was based around however I examined into purposely placed objects in the camera frame that does not appeal at the time of viewing, once my eyes looked at the bigger picture I found many things that are cleverly put/placed purposely to create an environment.

- Shortly after I then looked into very well known films around our genre to see if I could pick up on any common techniques I could transform into our piece.

- Sherlock Holmes: The most well known detective film ever made therefore this was a high study point for me as I questioned what made this film so popular? It had a very low lighting on Sherlock, a high intensity in parts and illustration and I thought this was highly effective towards the opening sequence instantly giving you drama to keep watching the film.

Seven: This was interesting to evaluate as from the opening scene you couldn’t really set it a genre and it was miss leading however this was one of the best I watched, instantly setting the emotion and theme, fast transitions and disturbing pictures with glitches played as the audio really did entice the audience to try to work out what is going on? One thing that stood out on my behalf was how well they merged the credits in, this worked so fluently and didn’t take the viewers eye of any of the action.

The time I took to look into other successful films to generate ideas of and study why they became so popular was a massive help towards ranging and expanding upon my ideas to make them sound and look more professional. I looked at the range of different genres because in some way the filming shots and techniques were almost the same, I feel the edit was different however I could still take hints from other movies that inspired my media and interact with there style also.

- Originally our film was crime fiction and we were certain our story board would create this mood the genre can produce however after shooting the first location, the kidnapping scene we had come up with the idea that it was starting to look like a thriller, this was maybe due to us shooting the violent scene first but it did strike up in production meeting. I personally was not worried at this stage as we were sticking to the story board well and if we produce what we had planned it had no interruption of other genres. Now that the video is uploaded on the world wide web I genuinely do feel it has a cross bread of thriller/crime fiction, I had a look at the definitions and our final product seemed to be sitting on the fence in between both. This was not a great deal as we could simply just add that it turned out to be a crime fiction/thriller on the other hand I also think could our planning may have slipped slightly, did we push the boat out on expanding out ideas to an extent where we forgot about genre.

Below I will provide an embed code of a voice thread I produced to explain why I chose the selected 9 key shots from our opening sequence.