Evaluation Question 1

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

One of the main ways in which our media product defied conventions of similar media products - that is to say, British crime thrillers - was in the costumes of the characters. While most British crime thrillers such as Kidulthood often have hooded or unsavoury looking characters, we made our characters well dressed, one of them wearing a suit and the others dressed fairly inconspicuously. Through this, we hoped to give our characters a more unpredictable edge and not make them caricatures of British street criminals.

We also decided to make our opening rather slow-paced and use no shaky camera motion for it. This is unlike other thriller openings we studied such as Collateral or London to Brighton, and we chose to shoot the opening in this way to establish the characters and setting rather than put the audience into the action, as we felt that our film would be more of a slow-burn character piece. This meant that we often focused on the main character in between scenes of shot progression such as when he meets the two other men and begins following the girl. This reminded me of the film No Country For Old Men, which focuses as much on the behaviour and actions of the main characters than the general crime story it is based around.

For the graphics, we decided to go for a font called Bank Gothic - this font has been used in many films and TV shows, such as 24, The International and X Men.

We were influenced by some other more character based crime dramas for our opening, notably the films Drive and Heat in terms of cinematography, location and costume. Drive is noticeable for its lack of handheld cameras and slow-paced cinematography, while Heat opens on the Los Angeles MTA and uses several establishing shots - we were originally going to have our film set on the London DLR though could not. We did, however, use several establishing shots of the location in the way that Heat did.

^It can be seen here how the cinematography of Heat is atmospheric and consists of slow and steady cinematography which our film also had elements of.

The main characters in Heat and Drive are also dressed fairly inconspicuously when we first meet them: Robert De Niro's character in Heat in the opening is in fact dressed in disguise as an ambulance driver, while Ryan Gosling's character in Drive wears a simple satin jacket and jeans.
We did, however, not want to make our characters seem totally inconspicuous as we wanted to also build a mounting sense of mystery with regard to the story. Drive also influenced us directly in this aspect as we had our character wear leather gloves identical to those that the main character in Drive wears. In this context, these are particularly suspicious given that the character is not a driver.

One trope present in many crime films of a similar budget and setting to ours, however, was having a female character killed or attacked. This is often more surprising than killing off a less innocent looking male character and can be used to put the audience on the edge of their seat. We decided to make the character getting killed female as it demonstrated the dangerous nature of our possibly sociopathic main character.