Alex

Thriller Film

Childrens Film

Music Video




Plan for thriller essay.

Introduction - Grab audiences attention, thesis of hypodermic model, talk about what the essay will include.

Camerawork, how our group used this to create different meanings and angles which showed the audience how we were percieving our teenager

Main point is another teenager in the boot.

To what extent did your media product conform or challenge genre conventions?

In our music video we are conforming to the conventions of rap music by the way the characters are dressed, for example big hoodies, hats, baggy clothes. The way we also perform and act throughout the video follows the conventions of other rap videos for example when we are playing basketball we edited it to make it seem as if we were from america.

The camera work throughout the video makes the video seem quick. There are a lot of short shots which give an upbeat vibe to the video. Also the tracking shots we decided to use are quite consistent throughout the video which is also what a lot of rap videos use. We also used low level shots as well which made harvey look like the bigger man whilst rapping.

As when we filmed it, the weather was not very good, so we decided when editing to add colour to the video so it seemed as if it was hot and sunny like you would normally find in professional rap video

Eloise and Dom - Question 1

How can narrative theories be used to understand your media product?

We are going to use Stuart Hall's theory in relation to our Music Video. His theory is about 'Reception Theory', where the producers encode a meaning behind the product, leaving the audience to decode it themselves.

For our video, we wanted to portray youth in a different way from the majority of stereotypical television shows and films. Most forms of Media show youth as menacing, rebellious and generally a menace to society; this could be for many reasons. One being that the producers want to stir up moral panic about youth, as a lot of adults feel threatened by teenagers; the media industry saw this and decided to prod at it.

We felt that this stereotypical view of youth is incorrect and so we chose to portray our characters the opposite; each of our characters display innocence with no ill-intent to their surroundings. Steven, the first character introduced in our music video is shown doing homework/studying in school. This is often linked to hard-working individuals and doesn't show any threats.

Q2: To what extent did your media product conform to or challenge genre conventions?

Genre: Thriller
Common conventions used:

• The bad guy is generally masked or hidden until near the end of the film
• Use of the dark is quite conventional as fear of the dark is quite common in people and thus used quite commonly in thrillers
• Black uniform is also quite common to represent people like burglars
• Knife's and guns or generally weapons are often given the main focus of a scene in thrillers
• Silence is often used for building suspense in films
• Editing is often slow in scenes to build up tension

Challenged Conventions:

• Alleged bad guy killed off in the beginning
• Editing is often fast in thriller films

Practice question

Which issues or social groups did you represent in your media products?


Our music video represents gender as in the people in our video are all males. However, they are represented in a way which is not necessarily seen as typically 'masculine' as they are singing (miming) to lyrics about feelings and love etc which is not what is expected of males.

Another social group that our video represents is young people - this is shown through the mise-en-scene as our video is shot in the college - showing the ages of the individuals (students) also because they are in a college the audience would expect to see a range of different people from different social groups and this is something that we have tried to incorporate into our video by approaching different people from the college - not just our friends - to be in the video.

Young males have been representated in our video, we have used the same camera angle so everyone was represented as equals but we also used a different variety of people, so there was also difference in the video. The males are singing about love interests and girls, which is a representation of a typical male interest.

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist born on august 15th 1941. She was educated at st Hilda's college, Oxford. She is currently a professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck University of London, but has previous experience working for the British film institute.


 Mulveys main theory is called 'the male gaze', this was to show that the female actresses in the 50s and 60s were to be looked at (to-be-looked-at-ness).
She suggests there are 2 modes of the male gaze of these era, 'voyeuristic', for example seeing women as 'whores' and 'fetishistic' seeing women as Madonnas. 
The theory is to show that women were there to be seen and to entice men into the film.

The 'male gaze' theory can be applied to contemporary music videos particularly in genres such as rap and pop. Here is an example of voyeuristic tactics used to entice men into watching the candy shop video by 50 cent:






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Female artists also use their assets, exploiting themselves. One example of this is Rihanna, from her early career she has used voyeurism to attract a certain type of audience: