Evaluation Question 1 Samuel Storey Evans

Evaluation Q1

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

Dream State follows the key conventions of a Thriller film/opening, however it goes against the minor less important conventions of a Thriller opening, this is so the audience is familiar with the key parts of the opening but are thrown off by other less prominent parts of the film, helping to create enigmas around the film which is a key part in a thriller.


We researched many thriller openings in order to get a good idea for what works well and what doesn't work well in building tension and an enigma within an opening. We took a lot of inspiration from the Mad Max opening and the Inception opening.


I liked the way Mad Max changed pace very quickly from calm to dangerous and we also like the way that mad max used setting and lighting to create enigmas and tension, we wanted to use these techniques as best we could on our opening. We did this by using a very unique and strange location to film our action scenes, and by having a long and slow paced build up to the action seems like "the calm before the storm".


The majority of my inspiration came from the inception opening, this is because I liked the way that the audience wasn't told very much, creating a big enigma around the plot of the film which is a key convention of thriller films. I also thought that the camera work was very good and used close ups to guide the viewers eye to key important parts within a scene and to show the actors emotions clearly, I tried to use close ups to primarily show the emotions of the actors when waking up as that features a key part to the story, and so we wanted it to stick out in the viewers mind so that they knew it meant more to the story then was first entailed.

We also didn't feature much dialogue like Inception's opening in order to help build/create an enigma around the plot of the film, which in turn helps to build tension throughout the opening as the viewer is left with minimal knowledge. As well as this we wanted the plot to be complicated like Inception's plot so that the viewer would have to be sharp and focused throughout the opening in order to follow what was happening, we did this in order to ensure that the audience were fully engaged throughout the entire opening, and therefore the entire film.