Natalie Barnes . Evaluation . Question One

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

Our opening thriller sequence uses the conventions of a real psychological thriller as we used only non-diegetic music and sound, which is common with most thrillers. We got this idea through films like Donnie Darko which has no diegetic sound at the beginning to heighten the tension and to construct a bigger mystery. Another convention we adapted from different thrillers is the idea of voyeurism; this is used to position the audience as intruders into something they wouldn’t usually witness, we developed the idea into the government watching someone and having to eliminate them after finding out things which they shouldn’t. We also made a more symbolic opening rather than a narrative opening, as most thrillers start with a narrative opening, so that they can start telling the story right away. Our main theme for the film was the illuminate and government conspiracies, as this is not a topic in which most thrillers take; this allowed us to be as free as we wanted to challenge the different conventions of real media products.

The title of our thriller is “Researched” is ambiguous as it doesn’t give much away to the audience and allows them to question the narrative and what it is about. This way we were able to keep the beginning as unstructured as we liked, we did this by adding lots of intercuts of shots of cameras, this did however allow us hint to the audience what the narrative would be about. This is how we challenged the conventions of real media products.

We used a range of different camera angles and shots, including close ups, long shots, wide shots and mid shots; we also used tracking shots and zooms, we did this to give the opening surveillance feel to it. This is like many conventions of thrillers as they use different shots to convey different emotions, for example in Psycho there are many close ups to show fear or panic.

Above are nine shots from our film “Researched”. I picked these specific nine shots as they all either challenge or develop the conventions for real media products. We tried to challenge the usual perspective of physiological thrillers of someone being obsessed with someone then stalking them, the “typical” story line. We chose to do a story line about the unconventional topic of the government and the illuminate.


As our film has some connotations to surveillance so I compared it to the physiological thriller “Mind Readers”; there is a clear resemblance between the two shots as they both noticeably show two different ways of surveillance. Ours is done by cameras and monitors whereas the other is done by what looks like a night vision camera.

Despite the film being produced my an independent company we did use one special effect of speeding up part of our film, most independent films don’t use special effects, but this very small effect made a big difference to our film. However we didn’t use any visual effects as this would make it seem childlike and unreal.