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

Our opening in many ways conforms to the forms and conventions of real thriller openings. The use of camera is conventional for a thriller film, and at times is voyeuristic, for example when Ruby waits at the train station, the camera zooms in to focus on her, the camera is also slightly shaky which gives the impression that it's a handheld camera and she's being filmed by someone.

The music is typical of the genre and helps to create suspense and an eery atmosphere throughout the opening.

Another convention we use is the protagonist having a fatal "flaw" in which the antagonist exploits, in this case Ruby's "flaw" is her naivety and her trusting nature.

We think the use of conventions in our opening is quite broad and so it would be hard to identify a specific sub-genre, however the opening is quite ambiguous and so audiences can predic the narrative in various ways. This helps to add to the mystery of the film because audiences can compare what they thougjh was going to happen, with what actaully did happen, amongst other audiences, creating a word-of-mouth effect.

The conventions we used did relate slightly to that of Hard Candy. In saying this the ideas we used from Hard Candy were mainly taken, not from the film, but from the films trailer and so the way we sequenced our opening was completly different. Therefore there are not distinct parallels between our opening and that of Hard Candy's.