Question 1 Holly Hunter-Brown

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

Our opening uses conventions from real media products in the following ways:

• In many thriller the killer/villian wears a disguise to keep their identity hidden and create a motif that the audience will regognise throughout the film. This inspired us to do the same in ours, we spefically took inspiration from 'The Dark Knight' after our initail idea to use a mask.
• We also used special effects during the flashback in our opening, we included black and white and slowed it down in order to signifiy that it was a memory and create tension. In almost every film including a flashback there is use of special effects or Flashback Effects. An example of this is The Butterfly Effect and the use of blurs to signify the flashback.

• The title of our film, 'Once Upon a Time' is also very conventional in terms of thrillers as it doesn't give much away but still hints at the themes and motifs we used. It's similiar to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds which tells us the main subject of the film but without telling us the threat. It also implies the subversion of innocence, which is often explored  in thrillers such as The Omen.
• After the titles and flashback we introduce the action with an establishing shot of the school in order to show the audience where it will take place, used in almost every film for the same effect.
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  The sountrack to our opening is also seen in thrillers. It's very repetative which creates tension as seen in the opening of The Shining:

We also challenged and developed conventions of real media products:

• The use of faiytale images in the titles and throughout the planned narrative develops the creepy way in which fairytales are sometimes presented. We got inspiration from the scary forest scene in the Disney version of Snow White and developed the idea of the mistreated children in fairytales and how they can be presented in a scary way.

• The font we used challenges the conventions of real thriller films as we chose to use one which refelected the fairytale theme rather than one which implied the scary elements.
• The introduction of the villian first rather than the victim also challenges the conventions of usual thrillers and introduces our narrative which sees the murders from the killers point of view.