In what way does your media project

use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real

media projects?

Use & Development

In the opening to our own thriller, we as a group have used the common conventions of our political sub-genre to develop the suspense and reality of our film. The opening to our thriller is very similar to The Wire, a TV series. Therefore, through the use of MES we have conformed to existing ideologies of the political sub-genre of thriller.

MES In Characters

In our thriller we tried as best as possible to follow the dominant physical ideologies of how high political figures are represented to the public through costumes and natural physical appearance. We took the older members of staff from the school and placed them in the roles of the world leaders to make the thriller more believable.

Location Lighting

The location lighting in our thriller in particular scenes helped to establish the mood that we tried to create. For example in the corridor scene between Roy and Alison, we only had two lights on at either end of the corridor. We didn’t add any extra lighting because we felt what was already there created a dark, secret atmosphere which we wanted to show in the beginning of our thriller to give little away to the audience. In this we have used the forms and conventions of existing media projects such as ‘Inside 9/11’.

Props

From this screen shot of Ted, you can see that in our thriller we attempted to follow the common ideologies of political thrillers through the use of props. We used a desk flag for each individual nation, envelops with ‘top secret’ stamped on them and Apple Mac Computers in order to make the thriller seem more believable. I have also seen this in other existing media projects such as The Day After Tomorrow.

Vertical Wipe

This edit subverts the dominant ideologies of what you’d usually expect to see in any type of thriller. This takes out the realism from the thriller. However, this adds to the confusion of the situation of the thriller. Therefore, even though the editing makes the thriller less realistic it adds to the surrealism of the situation that is developing in the thriller.

Reflection

The reflection has come from layering two shots together and decreasing the opacity on the top layer. The reflection reveals the identity of the hacker which, subverts the common themes in many existing thrillers which is not to reveal the identity of the evil character straight away.

TitlesThe titles that we edited we made so that they came up as if they were being typed. We edited the titles so that they conform with the dominant ideologies of the sub-genre political thriller. The slow revealing of the titles also add tension to the opening of the sequence.

Another piece of media where the titles are similar to this is in the Call of Duty games that are produced for Xbox 360 and PS3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNjCv9OIF-M