HOMEWORK: Questions

01. In what way does your film mimic or defy typical conventions of your chosen genre?

‘Desire’ is very typical of its genre, sticking closely to conventions of a thriller. This can be seen through our main and ancillary texts (teaser trailer, film poster and website). Starting with our main text, the teaser, we follow our genre very closely – focusing on suspense and enigma throughout our trailer. We knew that the ‘real media’, ie. The films in the true film industry, would focus on these elements and would rely heavily upon them for the audience to be satisfied with the text.  The basic storyline itself is thriller-esque and contains a strict narrative. We watch the protagonist being stalked by someone and use conventions to point the blame towards her boyfriend, such as the protagonists DVDs being ordered in a way the boyfriend would arrange them and use a flashback to emphasises this, forcing the audience to think its him. We also played with ‘Voyeurism’ and in many ways made the audience feel more involved with our story. Voyeurism was vital to our text, as the whole idea of being watched was pivotal to our storyline, and so it would emphasise our film even more so. During our editing process, we made many shots shortened to speed up the trailer as seen in the ‘Primer’ trailer, and used conventional music which, apart from speeding the trailer up, made the trailer seem much more action packed. We realised that this was of great significance, as the slower the trailer, the more the audience would loose interest as it didn’t seem to have that same impact.  We in some ways defied our genre though by having a female protagonist, as this is more common in films of the horror genre, although in today’s media, many films are more common with female protagonists such as ‘Enough’, a thriller which we used as one of our influences for the teaser and poster. The poster is also quite similar in terms of genre, mimicking the ‘Enough’ DVD cover with the protagonist turning her head, but we exaggerated this. Another convention we used was through connotation, using the mise-en-scene of the home to denote safety, although this is breached in the story. Finally our website, uses motif like many thrillers with our ‘desire’ font in cut-outs from newspapers, as are our links and this is repeated on the poster and trailer. The colour scheme is black and grey – just like the James Bond and Bourne series along with various other thriller trailers as they are the conventional colours of the genre. So overall, you can see that our texts do generally slot into the ‘thriller’ genre as we tried to make them fit our genre as much as possible, and I feel that we have managed to integrate this successfully. 

02. Coming Soon!