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

Throughout the course of filming “Abduction” we knew that in order to create a media product which we felt was of a high quality we would have to address the forms and conventions of other real media products within the same genre as our media product, In our case this was the Psychological thriller genre, Through our research into this genre we had to establish some key elements of this genre and also of Short films in general in order to create a media product which was true to our task. In order to do this we began to look at various different psychological thrillers such as Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”

Through looking at this film we established that psychological thrillers very much deal with the protagonists sanity this is an idea we begin to explore within our media production and is mainly done through our protagonists friend, an ancillary character who in many respects, represents society and how they would view a man in our protagonists situation as crazy and would not believe him, whilst we incorporate this convention within our film we also challenge it. We challenge this convention as in the end our protagonist is in fact abducted highlighting to us a viewer that he was in fact sane and did not need to question his own sanity near the climax of the film, this was conveyed when he began to tear down his notice board.

Another convention which we use within our film is that of using filters to convey different mental states, this is a convention which we use within our media project with the dark blue filter used to highlight our protagonists bleak outlook and mental state, this then stands in contrast with the natural lighting of our ancillary character and also with our protagonist after he has sought help from his father. Our film however is not only a psychological thriller but is also a short film and as such following research into short films we established a series of forms and conventions for short films, One of the most notable conventions of short films would have to be the incorporation of a plot twist usually in the climax of the film, this is a convention which we strongly adhere to within our media production as we have our protagonist denounce his belief in aliens only for the twist to be that he was right all along although he finds out through his own abduction.

Another Convention which we had established within Short films was the minimal use of characters and also locations, This convention in some aspects we do adhere to however we also develop it as rather than have every character reside on screen as we have not only our protagonist’s father reside off screen with the only contact being through a phone, we also have our alien the primary antagonist for the film preside off screen allowing us to create a sense of mystery within our film working in tandem with the convention of psychological thrillers that there must be a sense of mystery which we further expand upon by having our film begin with an ominous opening sequence which feels almost separate from the narrative which we are telling.

Through having our Alien reside off screen we are also challenging forms and conventions of traditional modern science fiction films which place these elements at the forefront and boast large special effects driven sequences, another convention of science fiction films which we challenge is that they do not necessarily have to take place in “a galaxy far far away” with outlandish futuristic societies we instead adopt a more grounded approach similar to smaller science fiction films such as “ Ex machina” where in the science fiction element is very much subtle for the most point with the main focus being on the character interactions rather than large scale sequences.

Our film however does play into the convention that many science fiction films such as "Terminator 2" have, which is that the person who believes in the existence of the science fiction entity  is lauded as being crazy or mentally ill by those within society until they too see it at which point the protagonist is accepted into society, however where our film differs is that our protagonist never receives recognition from the society that he in fact was correct but rather he conforms to societies belief that he is troubled mentally and therefore in a way we challenge this convention.