EVALUTAION - 1 In what way does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media productions

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

Our two minutes sequence is called MANIPULATION and we followed many conventions of the Thriller/Horror genre to make our project. The point of our thriller is to mess with the Protagonist who may be being haunted or who may have a multi personality disorder. This is a plot that has been seen in thrillers like “Memento” and “The Machinist” with Christian Bale.




The point is with these movies, that you don’t know whether or not the characters are in their right minds or not, and in this way they act as representations of everyday people that may or may not be going through stressful psychological times and make us all feel better and a little bit more normal compared to them!!!

One thing from MEMENTO that I admired that the time lost its not in chronological order he needs to find out what he is doing. This makes every move feels very uncomfortable as he is going through short term memory loss he keeps tattooing himself to keep memory but that is even messed up all about the mind.


Our protagonist thinks he is working on secret government project cataloging undesirable social groups in the U.K. and ways to get rid of them. He is not very happy or comfortable with his job though, and because of this he is a bit nervous and stressed out. We used the prop of a KALMS bottle which is a type of “over-the-counter” medicine that is supposed to calm people down in times of stress, but then we changed the pill packet label so it suggests to our audience that even there naturally everyday medication can be tampered with as it is only stress relief pills not even prescription stuff. This could be a warning against taking so much medication and becoming too much like a paranoid USA businessman, or it could just generally be a warning to say “Stop polluting your bodies and minds cause you start to do unreasonable things when you want money and status in this context”

The sub genre (of the meta genre of thriller) that we are working in is Psychological Thriller. In these types of films (until the often violent resolution) the conflict between the main characters is mental and emotional, rather than physical. where much of the action is going on in the mind of the protagonists.

We have an antagonist that likes planning mind game with UK government officials who are responsible for making the lists of undesirable racial groups to be removed its set in the future for a warning. Or do we? The point of the film is to imply that a group is being taunted by a ghost or a real live persona who is a threat, but that you don’t know who it is. I think that it would be good to air issues of racism in this country, as our group and teachers discussed a lot of times recently where foreigners hadn’t been treated fairly, which fits in well with the recent push to introduce cards for all foreign nationals in the UK to carry around with them. It feels sometimes that history is going in circles – printing more money etc and I think that identity cards as well as passports are pretty unnecessary and that there should be a UK film that addresses that.

We are just lucky that we were in a position to beg,borrow and steal (almost) a convincing location and props from people we know who live around our school. This really helped to create the feeling that it was a higher budget production than just a student film.

Examples and some influences of another psychological thriller that we liked was FIGHT CLUB and SWORDFISH, which are American, Both of these had similar themes of making society take a good look at itself, before sometimes taking radical action to change the balance of power – especially at the top.

The most interesting thing about FIGHT CLUB is that he is obsessed with commercialism and that he is an avid consumer of society before the protagonist (played by two characters who are part of the same mental entity) loses it.

We tried to convey confusion with editing pace and a variety of shots, as well as a soundscape that was eerie and suggestive of more confusion and mind games to come.