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

Our film is of a thriller genre, which traditionally focuses on the plot over the characters, emphasising intense and physical action. Our film opening consists of non-stop action and builds up suspense, as we are unaware of what is going to happen until the end, when it becomes clear that it is a kidnapping. From the opening sequence we get the impression that it is a life or death situation. We studied two familiar thriller film opening, Taken and Memento, which both influenced our decisions and helped develop our ideas.

We have used a lot of close ups in our film opening, in the same way they have been used in Taken and Memento. The close ups emphasise the importance of specific objects within the film and make the viewer feel more involved and as if you are really there.

We have used aspects from the film 'Taken' to help inspire us, for our idea of the kidnapping and also other aspects such as the opening credits, we have took the idea of basic white writing on a black background to introduce the film just like 'Taken', although it looks plan, it stands out to make it eye-catching to the viewer and looks professional. Also, we used 'Taken' to inspire our ideas of the flashbacks of the kidnapping. Similarly, to 'Taken', which uses a flashback of a video recording when his daughter was younger at her birthday party years before. Whereas, we chose to make our flashbacks much more recent, and added effects to them in order to make it obvious to the viewer. We made them stand out by making the lighting brighting and adding a saturation effect to show it has already happened. The dark lighting throughout the opening conveys a typical thriller film.

We also looked at another opening to a film, 'Memento', and took ideas from the camerawork, lighting, etc. In both 'Taken' and 'Memento', they both start the film with music to build up impact, we decided to use this for our film and created our own soundtrack, however, the sequences we looked at used slow instrumental music. We thought for our opening, a faster beat would work better in order to help build up the suspense, which in the end worked really well.