Thriller Evaluation

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

Firstly, and maybe most importantly, was our decision to create a thriller of a psychological nature; this being because it captured our ideas well and the psychological genre proved one of the most popular choices within our audience survey. Psychological thrillers are more intimate with the viewers mind, making the audience try and work things out for themselves and solve various plots – it’s this that makes the genre so effective, it involves (almost relies) on the viewer, the viewer feels almost part of it all – making it all the more ‘thrilling’.

We also utilised various thriller conventions prevalent within other thriller films, such as; Donnie Darko, The Book of Eli etc. We were very much influenced by the opening scene of The Book of Eli, and recreated it to include in our product. The dingy and isolated woodland area set an eerie and disturbing atmosphere straight away, and the thick dark trees created a sense of imprisonment – acting like bars in a jail cell. Another convention we used was the fact that we made our villain anonymous by obscuring the face with a gasmask. This puts us as the audience on our seats, as we have no idea who or what we’re being made to interact with, or what they’re/it’s capable of – the fear of the unknown.  

Please go here to see more influences over us, and how our media product uses the conventions within them.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product included British youth, and a representation of both males and females within thrillers – however preconceptions about the conventional roles of both sexes were proved wrong.

In Britain’s current youth culture we see frequent acts of crime, violence, sex and copious amounts of drug abuse. Many British youths take part in the use of cannabis, acid, cocaine etc. – forming a separate ‘social group’. We included this social group with our production’s character (and victim) Rhys – a schizophrenic who takes part in a rave, and mixes his prescription drugs with acid. He’s visually an everyday, normal looking male teenager – but has a secret life of mental terror and drug abuse.

We represent both males and females within our production – but the roles we have given them break the norms and conventions of other thrillers. Normally in any action/thriller/romance/comedy you have the strong male protagonist, and the female cast as a victim or ‘damsel in distress’. However we have decided to reverse these roles in order to make our production more interesting and unusual. Rhys is a tall, masculine young adult – who looks like he could hold his own in a fight – however the audience is shocked when he becomes the victim under the hand of a mysterious lady. He is brutally assaulted by this woman (which is very unusual as he looks far stronger than her), and left to die in an abandoned woods. This attack will shock and confuse the audience, as we have altered the normal conventional gender roles within previous thriller films.

Please continue here to read our character profiles.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Obviously as this is only a two minute opening, we would be looking at using Youtube as a starting point. Youtube is highly convenient for first-timers like ourselves, as it is a no cost, no strings attached way to distribute our thriller opening. We would be able to receive a rough idea of its popularity among the general public, and general comments and feedback. Also, many people get their ‘break’ on sites such as Youtube, attracting larger more professional names in the media distribution market is a possibility. If we were to do so, I imagine a smaller company would fund us to create a full feature length, a company far less well known that creates films of the ‘indie’ genre i.e. Miramax or MetroDome.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our main target audience is men and women varying from ages fifteen - eighteen onwards. Our audience is more likely to be of an intellectual type, one who has a good attention span and the ability to think independently and logically in order to understand and enjoy our production. Our audience research showed us that the main audience for our thriller would be fifteen upwards, both male and female. In our screening session the audience was made up of college students, and we received a very positive reaction from them regarding our plot, characters, visual conventions and sound.

Please refer to our audience research data here.

How did you attract/address your audience?  

We decided to include aspects of life relevant to our audience, i.e. our characters, youth culture etc. We also had no dialogue within our production, this made it all the more tense and eerie – also the dialogue would have had to have been written and acted out perfectly so as not to break this tension we had built. I believe that our choice of making it a psychological thriller was a success, as this sub-genre is becoming more and more popular among the general public – with box office smashes such as Shutter Island and Inception.