Evaluation Activity 1

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

It is important for an audience to be able to identify the genre of a film within its opening minutes. In our case, the opening to ‘Intrusion’ is characteristically that of a thriller film, sharing many of the conventions that are conformed to in a variety of popular films of the same genre. Despite the basis for our film existing around three main genres, crime, action and thriller, I feel like our film is most stereotypical to that of the thriller genre. This is because thrillers typically employ the use of a number of enigmas which immediately help to establish the genre, as well as ensure the audience’s attention is grasped so that they are paying attention to every detail. This, in turn helps with the establishment of the enigmas as it causes the audience to become intrigued, and want to know the answers to the questions which are being produced. Despite this, I do not feel that our other two genres are completely ignored and I believe that they still have a significant role in our film. Enigmas are also a popular convention within these genres meaning that the DNA of our plot works well with the conventions of all three of these genres. We focused on using enigmas to stimulate the audience’s attention and enjoyment because as the popular director Alfred Hitchcock once said "an audience would rather be confused than bored". This is something we took into a lot of consideration in the planning stages of our film, crafting a storyline for the opening that would be interesting and work as a prologue to events that could potentially follow.

The use of the extreme long shot which portrays Adam as he has entered the house aides his creepy demeanour as it suggests that he is being watched. The slow paced editing allows the audience to see that he is looking around, helping to unravel the plot. The slow paced scenes also aid to the stereotypes of the thriller genre in particular as it drags out the tension within the audience. The long distance shot helps to make Christie’s house look big, representing her affluence, but also emphasises her helplessness, making her seem vulnerable as it implies she will be unable to escape. We thought that this type of shot would be effective when introducing the genre as it would make the audience feel uncomfortable as Adam’s presence clearly doesn’t belong there, which hopefully would cause a build-up of suspense within the audience. We also thought that showing Christie leaving the house would influence Adam’s representation of the genre as it would help to provide a sense of urgency within the audience because they would expect her to be returning, which could be effective as it uses the feel of ‘time running out’ which is a conventional aspect in our chosen genres.

Thinking about it, our film does not conform to the action genre in the way we had first intended. Due to a considerable amount of plot changes due to practicality, lack of planning or just unfortunate circumstances, the finished product is completely different from our initial ideas. During the changes in plot we probably should have re-evaluated the need for three genres as now they could be considered to appear slightly unnecessary, and have prevented us from completely succeeding in following our aims. Due to it only being an opening scene, the next scenes had no relevance to us at all when filming, however to the audience the creation of enigmas may stimulate them to come up with an imaginative, elaborate plot, increasing their sense of enjoyment.

The use of enigmas which helped to establish our genre, also helped with the introduction of our characters. Due to the opening mainly conforming to the thriller genre, in order to help build a sense of suspense and intrigue, little was given away about both of the main characters. In order to follow the conventions of all opening scenes, we chose to introduce the main characters quickly so that we could show their significance, and to attract the audience’s attention from the outset, however we purposely chose to keep their background information to a minimal. Saying this, we decided to reveal slightly more about our protagonist’s background than our antagonist, such as her home and therefore her affluence in order to allow a character-audience relationship to be formed. This played a significant role in helping the audience to engage with the character as they were able to feel like they were getting to know Christie, and so could successfully form emotions, such as empathy with her, when necessary. We found that this was a successful, stereotypical tactic used in many opening scenes to help emotions to be established, allowing the audience to engage more with the film. In a similar way, we tried to reveal as little as possible about our antagonist to make the audience feel uncomfortable as his intentions were kept hidden. In this sense, I believe our opening scene follows the conventions of opening scenes, in particular the thriller genre’s conventions, and I think that the establishment of the genre plays an important role in how the characters are both introduced and interpreted by the audience. We chose to introduce Adam at the moment where he was coming out of the trees. We thought that this would successfully imply to the audience that this was not his house as it was not the normal entrance, and therefore, suggest he didn't belong there. This meant that from the start, the audience was wary of Adam's character which added to their sense of disgust around his character, helping the audience to engage and become involved in the film.