Question 1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Weapons The first type of convention that my media product uses is weapons, the use of weapons is very prominent in my media products. There are many reasons to why weapons is a convention of an action movie one of them being they allow the audience to know there is a sign of peril in the scene to the point where the character has to use a life erasing weapon and in my piece an example of this would be the knife and the gun, even further the effect of the gun being used in my piece is that it is being used for a good cause and it works alongside the shardem pleasure because Victor is the antagonist in my media product meaning the audience will seek pleasure through him dying and the gun and knife helps achieve this.

Protagonist vs Antagonist The second convention in my piece is protagonist vs antagonist and the effects that this has on the audience is that they witness the first ever face off in the movie between the good vs bad, many movies like to set context to a movie by doing an establishing shot or a big build or lead up to this but in my media product the very first shot is a long shot of the antagonist punching the antagonist so instantly the audience are brought into this convention of protagonist vs the antagonist. This convention is also supported by Levi Strauss's theory of binary opposite, this is a theory by a French anthropologist which he identified the way we understand certain words depends not so much on any meaning they themselves directly contain however but by understanding the different of the word and it’s ‘opposite’. He then produced the theory binary opposites. Binary opposite is used between the character’s Jay and Victor to represent the binary opposition between good and evil.

Dangerous Setting The setting of a scene in an action movie is vital convention in order to create the right mood for the audience and the character within the movie, the setting in my media piece is a forest which is abandoned with many trees and abandoned houses in the background this setting makes the audience and the character feel helpless because it is just Jay and Victor who are there and Victor has Jay tied up and has full power over him.

Editing Editing is a convention of an action movie which needs to be considered properly when producing an action movie. Editing is used to show the intensity of the scene, in a drama film you would see a slow paced editing with many shots lasting a long while to capture and take in the actors emotion. In an action movie you would see a lot of fast paced editing to build tension and excitement within a movie. For example; in an action movie where there is a ticking clock scenario you would want to crosscut between the traveller and the destination repeatedly to build up tension. In my media product there is a mixture of medium and fast faced editing, during the conversation there is medium paced however after Victor gets stabbed It is all fast paced and there is many fast crosscuts between characters.

Camerawork Camerawork is also a key conventions within action movies, cinematographers within the production of a movie use certain camera angles and sizes to show the power a certain character has. In my media product this is very evident as I use many camera angles which emphasises certain characters characteristics and their motive. An action thriller movie/franchise that I am constantly inspired by is the Fast and Furious franchise, the latest instalment Furious 7 also includes a white male antagonist who has evil motives, and the cinematographer Stephen Window, likes to use many close ups of Deckard (antagonist) to show that he is the antagonist with evil plans and who constantly wants to cause harm on others and these close ups are very effective in terms of showing that he does not fear the good that will most likely empower him. Here are some examples from the movie Furious 7. These technical conventions really helped inspire my technical decisions whilst making my media product because it was an effective way in which it separated the protagonist from the antagonist other than the dialogue and the costume that was worn. In my media product there was also many close ups used on the antagonist and more medium shots used for the protagonist like in Furious 7.

Other Conventions There are many themes which this movie explores from the action thriller genre. The theme of revenge, in the opening scene we can see that there are many plot reveals to what the movie is going to be about and one of the big reveller's is that he isn’t going to seek revenge on the people that have betrayed and hurt him and his family. Killed loved ones, is also a theme and convention of an action thriller, this links to revenge, a soul reason behind why anyone wants to seek revenge is because of a killed loved and in my media product this is presented through Olivia, Jay’s partner who Victor admitted to kill. Spy divisions, a convention of action movies, whether it is a non fictional one like M.I.5 or MI6 or fictional one like S.H.I.E.L.D or Treadstone it is a convention of an action movie which drags fans straight into the movie, in my product the fictional agency that I constructed was a private organization called ‘Sector 17’ who handle cyber terrorism. Love is also a theme which is not touched up on a lot these days and is under estimated a lot within the action movie genre, love is the central reason to why Jay wants to seek revenge as he has lost a child and his partner in the process of protecting the codes.