Sana Haq - 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the conventions of real media products?

I believe that our final outcome of our opening consists of many conventions that occur within a Thriller such as;

Orchestral Music

We found that during our research we commonly found that almost every opening used orchestral music, therefore we felt obliged to follow this tradition, as we did not want to make an error in choosing a different type of music. I also believe that this music suited very well with the theme of our story line, as it doesn't sound too aggressive and gives the perfect feeling towards its viewers. We also noticed that in our opening that after every other title there's a dip in the sound of the music just as it begins to fade away and arises again as the title is shown. 

Use of Fonts. 

We had decided to typically represent our title sequence as white on black, because we felt it gave off a thriller vibe, and as before we researched many thriller films that have used this same concept of white font on a black background.

Although some of the modern thriller's we researched had their title sequence running throughout scenes. However a majority of the old thrillers didn't use this concept. Therefore we felt that by going with a old tradition would be a better decision as we wanted to keep our audience engaged with the story line and not get distracted by the text that is shown with it. 

The reason why we have decided to go for a basic font compared to the title of the thriller is because we felt that the simple font begins to represent the life of the victim by showing she is an ordinary person. We then contrasted this with the title 'The Stalker' by being in a font which is named Cracked. I believe that is effective as this implies to the audience that the life of the victim gets disturbed by a person who is not right in their minds, therefore the font was perfect to reflect on the stalkers character. 

 Editing. 

The use of black and white images in our opening follows the conventions of a thriller as it gives the audience a sense of the past. They are inserted into our opening as jump cuts, which emphasizes the importance of the images. We decided that by portraying these images as black and white implies that she's already taken these images in the past. We developed the idea of using black and white by also showing colour images that are shown during the jump cut through a pan shot. The reason why this works well is because the past is clearly distinguished from the present by the use of colour. However we decided to try something a little bit new by having a clock over the stalkers face, this was to also suggest something in the past as the clock is moving anti-clockwise which. We used this concept because we wanted to show a varitey of ways showing the same thing so that it remains interesting for the viewers. 

We decided to have a voice over during our opening, even though it doesn't match with the conventions of a thriller as usually the only time dialogue occurs is when there's a coversation, therefore we decided to battle against it so the audience get a better understanding of the life of the stalker. I believe without our voice over the opening may seem a little bit boring therefore dialogue was the perfect way to overcome this problem. Although we understand that during our research the majority of the thrillers we viewed did not have any dialogue, we decided as a group to tackle this and have some different features to our opening.