EVALUATION QUESTION 1

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

As a group we came to the decision to merge the genres thriller and crime. This was because we thought it was apparent that they are 2 genres that work well together as movies such as Se7en and silence of the lambs has shown us. Adding the sub-genre crime also helped us come up with more better and more original ideas. crime thrillers we had noticed have become more popular over the past 15 years or so, especially amongst people ages 16- 24, who are a large proportion of a target audience, making it all the more logical to do this genre in particular.

Edwina, Keisha and I also wanted to make a crime thriller opening as we all collectively enjoy crime thrillers and thought it would be interesting to make one of our own.

Due to many reasons we chose to refrain from using too many special effects. Firstly, although our film being entirely fictional, we wanted to keep an element of realism to our piece, making our film more compelling through the idea that the story could be real and using too many special effects may have made our story seem less believable to our audience. Secondly as we were both new to film editing and special effects, this meant that applying them was quite difficult in itself, but although after becoming more proficient in using the software (finding out how to do more advanced special effects), we did not want to alter our final film as we were proud of it - without such effects.

The costumes for our crime thriller 'The Investigation' was not too adventurous and some what plain-ish, much like the British TV drama Luther, where we drew a lot of inspiration from for our film. this was because the film was set now - in 2017 mostly in a 'police station' and this did not require any particularly interesting costuming. In addition the characters for example 'Winston', the criminal of the story (played by Lakiesha) had to wear dark plain clothing with the idea of blending in as she is a wanted person. Also, as mentioned earlier, we wanted to keep an aspect of being realistic, which meant we did not require any kind of period pieces for example as this doesn't fit with the theme.

What was also quite convenient was that our costumes were pretty simple and easy to put together. This was because most of our characters were supposed to be dressed realitivly formally and as we filmed the majority of our film in school this meant all of our actors were already in business dress.

One thing we had to make sure of when filming was the fact that as we were filming in a church of England school, we had to remove all religious symbols if visible in the shot. This was because our films main themes are crime and corruption and we did not want create an association between religion with the concepts above, as this could potentially promote both resentment of religion and our film, both of which are issues.

In our film The Investigation' we wanted to have a wide range of representation of social groups in society (as mention in question 2). one of these reasons was because thriller movies rend to have predominantly white cast and we wanted to challenge that. In addition it is clear that having a thriller theme and a diverse cast is of the same quality as shown in successful shows such as Luther (2010) what stars Idris Elba as the protagonist 'John Luther'.