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

Our product is influenced mainly by two real media products.

The first of these products is 'Dexter', a popular American television drama series about a forensic blood-patternist working for the police who sets about murdering serial killers. The opening sequence for the show influenced our decisions for the house/getting ready scene from our film. Dexter uses a collection of close up shots to show the character performing a routine of somewhat ordinary household tasks before leaving the house (cutting an orange, flossing his teeth, breaking an egg etc), yet producers constructed this to appear sinister with this use of close ups. We replicated this by also using close up shots of everyday occur

rences (toaster, looking in the fridge, buttering toast etc). We also chose to place our titles in this scene, similarly to Dexter. We develop on these conventions by using a male as the dominant, powerful character in the scene which is something very common in the thriller film genre.. However, our inspiration for colour scheme throughout the film (including titles) was from the 2000 thriller film Memento...

The producers of Memento decided to use a blue colour scheme

throughout the movie, this inspired our costume design, props, location and titles. We felt blue was an effective use of colour for our thriller film as it conveys the eerie nature and feelings of our main character in the film.

We challenged typical thriller film stereotypes by using a male as the 'victim' type character in the dream scene (despite him also becoming the dominant hero) unlike Alice (Alice in Wonderland) and most films where this type of 'damsel in distress' character is portrayed by a female. This stereotype is usually only challenged by a 'femme fatale' character depicted in Film Noir genre thrillers in which the woman is depicted as the more dominant. However, we decided to oppose this and use a male victim figure in the scene, although he also acts as the hero. Alike 'Alice in Wonderland' in casting we chose Ryan to play Damien, he has blonde hair, blue eyes and he wears blue in the film, much alike Alice's character, challenged only by gender. In terms of stereotyping, the fair skin/eyes/hair combination is also one which conveys a victim or a 'goodie' character as opposed to dark complexions, hair/skin and eyes being related to the 'baddie. For example, Princess Aurora in 'Sleeping Beauty' is shown to have long blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes, wearing feminine colours and soft feminine facial features versus the 'bad' character, 'Maleficent' has dark skin, eyes, clothing and sharp, harsh features.

The second of our main inspirational products was Tim Burton's 'Alice in Wonderland'. We based the first (forest) scene from our opening sequence upon this movie. Our aim was to create an essence of surrealism to portray to our audience that the character was in a dream rather than reality. Alice in Wonderland captures this sense of surrealism through use of special effects and graphics as well as lighting sound etc. As we didn't have such access to special-effects equipment etc we made the most of lighting, prop, costume and particularly sound to convey this. The location was a forest, we decided the trees in the forest were helpful as we found many twisted branches to work with and create surrealism. Despite our access to special effects being quite limited, we did the make the most of the resources we did have opting for effects such as blur and colour manipulation during the editing stages of constructing our opening s

equence for 'Premonition'. Our use of sound meant we could use low resonant sounds to create eeriness and build tension as well as hyperbolic forest sounds to further enhance this and remove senses of realism from the scene thus accentuate surrealism.