Question 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? When developing our thriller opening sequence we had many ideas in mind based on previous and well known real media products. We had four main ideas when planning our thriller which we then narrowed down to one, three of the four ideas were taken from clips of different successful thrillers. Idea 1 Our first idea was about a girl who kept having hallucinations, meaning everywhere she went, she believed something or someone was following her. This effected her being outgoing and affected her friendships. In the opening sequence, we would have seen the girl walking through a graveyard, a field, or getting on a bus to school. Each time she see’s a figure appear behind her, this could result in suicide, and we can show this by showing this main character hanging her toys or other possessions first. This idea we took from part of the film "The Exorcism of Emily Rose”; how she see’s demonic faces in normal people and how it affects her everyday life and relationships. Two thriller conventions which are used in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and we would like to follow are ‘A narrative pattern of establishing enigmas which the viewer expects to be resolved’ and extraordinary events happening in ordinary situations. The trailer for 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' Idea 4 Our fourth idea and the idea we developed and turned into our own was group of young people on a train, and the train has to take a detour due to engineering works, as the train passes through an abandoned station, the tunnel collapses. As the survivors get off the train, they find a video camera and record their progress as they try and escape the abandoned and haunted station. This gives us a lot of options to use close up shots, intensifying the scene. This idea required a lot of editing techniques and skills such as having the tunnel collapsing, we thought this isn’t a very realistic thing to be able to create as we are just media students and don't have the correct software and experience in editing to do this, so we developed it and changed it slightly to make it more realistic to work with. This idea was taken from bits of, “The Blair Witch Project”, it relates to our idea as, the protagonist has a video camera and is recording themselves and the events, making the thriller seem more realistic. This is the trailer of the film… The idea of filming at a train station and on a train, was taken from the film “Creep”, a lonely train station creates a sense of mystery and adds tension within the film. We can create a deep sense of fear from this setting easier than other settings, as the audience can relate it to a real life situation. We also decided to use the same target audience as ‘Creep’, 16-25 years old as thrillers are more targeted and watched by the younger generation. This is the trailer of Creep… Final Idea This is a post on my blog, telling the audience our final idea to our thriller… http://alexhelsby.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/our-finalised-idea/ As you can see we developed this idea and changed it to suit us and what we were able to do (it would have been quite hard for us to show demonic faces in normal people so we altered this idea by just showing hallucinations and flash backs which would be easier to create). "The Exorcism of Emily Rose” has many enigmas in it and everything is a mystery to the audience especially from just watching the trailer, this normally encourages the audience to wanting to watch the film or keep watching after seeing the opening sequence of the film. An example of how we changed it was instead of having the tunnel collapsing we instead had a power cut on the train, which we found much easier to work with as didn’t require advanced media software.