Evaluation- Question 1- Imogen Evans

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

In my thriller research, I looked at, Kill List, Silence Of The Lambs, Lovely Bones and Pulp Fiction, which all follow the usual criteria of the thriller genre, having a protagonist and antagonist in it, creating enigma and using restricted and unrestricted narration.


Unrestricted narration is the term used to explain whether the audience knows more information or is presented with more information than the character is.
Restricted narration is the term used for when the film is filmed in the characters point of view only so the audience only know what the character knows.


EXAMPLE: The Lovely Bones
The opening of 'The Lovely Bones' is all set using restricted narration. This is used so it doesn't give too much of a hint of what is going to happen in the rest of the film. There are subtle moments which uses unrestricted moments to give the audience moments of realisation that something has happened to the main character.

                                                                Here it is shown


The subtle match on action on the picture and how the light turns off as the picture is in mid shot, it expresses that something has happened to this character, therefore unrestricted narration.


OUR FILM:
We used unrestricted and restricted narration in our film because throughout it was in the eyes of our main character and that was all the audience would see. In the graveyard scene we used restricted narration to make it look like the antagonist was not there, this allowed the audience to realise something mysterious was happening,

                                                     Here is the antagonist disappearing



We based our thriller opening titling from  'The Lovely Bones' which has an iconic opening which created enigma and set the storyline up well with it's use of fades and transitions. We took inspiration from the use of titling in 'The Lovely Bones' as we thought it helped start the scene off well and didn't give too many hints.

                                                 On the left 'The Lovely Bones' on the right 'Unanswered'
Throughout the rest of the opening we continued to take some aspects from 'The Lovely Bones' because we used the same idea of cutting from different moments in the life to show momentum and nostalgia. This has been shown using familiar locations as 'The Lovely Bones' used childhood memory locations and we used sentimental locations which the main character would feel nostalgic from.

















We filmed our thriller at night which represents danger and panic, we based this on 'the Usual Suspects' opening which was filmed at night and based it's theme of panic and ENIGMA as it left the audience wanting more from the scene when it ended on a cliff hanger. By choosing to film at night and having a mysterious Antagonist which you can't fully see it's identity like in The Usual Suspects it created enigma and tension which was emphasised by the use of low key lighting.

Both of these shots look very similar as we took inspiration from The Usual Suspects. A key idea we copied is not showing all of the antagonist because it emphasises the enigma of the scene and gives mystery as you have no idea who he is.