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

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

 

 

I think The Captive uses props appropriate to its genre, so that we can add realism. We have used realistic props, like the guns and blood, which are typical for gangsters as in every gangster film you always see them carry their guns on their body, so in this aspect the fim looked professional to the audience due to our props aswell as our creation of location. We wanted to go for the whole warehouse type look for our location, so it would have a feel of isolation from the outside world. So the characters would here no sounds indicating where they were, no light to tell them what time of day it is, nothing. We went for a more compact warehouse look, so its claustrophobic and very intense, giving the feeling of imminent death. In our location in the beginning of our film you see a woman tied up, as a hostage, this is generic for gangster films, as they kidnap people to get information out of them that will benefit them.

 The hostage situation can be seen in a Tv show called Chuck, however chuck is a Tv show, its also a Spy show, though i think they are very similar, you can also see another hostage situation in Burn Notice, being a Gangster/Spy Tv show.

In The Captive our 2 male characters are in smart suits, we know this is a convention of gangster films, from the films we analysed, and all maled are always in suits, whether they are having a shoot off, running away, in a buisness meeting or off killing rival gangs. Alexis in our film is dressed up in a dress, and we know in other films the women are normally in dress to how off the wealth and to distingush between the masculinity of the males and her obvious femininity, to show shes from an upper class background not meant for the gangster world. This can also be seen in Gangster Squad, as it exhibits the same type of Mise-en -Scene as us. It can also be seen in Public Enemies.
 

Through lighting you create the sense of danger, in our opening we filmed in a dark container, which we hoped added to the mystery of our film, by adding snipits of light in the flashbacks, so it maked the audience question lots of things like, what's going on, who are those people, etc. This type of lights can be seen in the Godfather several times.
 

 



The same type of light can again be seen in Gangster Squad

Our music also builds tension, as it has a hertbeat in the background, we decided it symbolised the woman's life thread, so when the gun gets shown her heart rate speeds up and when the film goes black at the end the beating continues for about 4 seconds before it stops, leaving the audience wondering is she's dead or its just the end of that scene. We also have one main piece of music which has a fast beat rythm to it so it can cause suspension and momentum, so it links with the building up of fear.

 

 

 Overall our final piece used the stereotypical conventions of Gangster films in terms of the costume, props, though we did slightly change the gun type, as instead of using tommy guns, we used hand guns.