Researching for CCR questions #2!

Hey Cambridge peeeps! My day was great today! Quick update on my movie intro and OMG I’m actually really excited about how it’s turning out. I got SO MUCH editing done and I finally see the end!!! For today's blog post though, I'm gonna be answering  one of the four CCR questions: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? 

My product is an edited psychological thriller movie intro and I used a lot of conventions from that genre. For example it starts in a therapist’s office which is pretty common in psychological thrillers because those stories usually focus on a character’s mind and emotions. The main character is telling the therapist that she has been seeing things and feels like she might be going crazy, which already creates tension for the audience. Then when the therapist asks if she has been taking her medication and the main character stutters saying uhhh and the scene cuts to her house, but it is actually a flashback showing what happened the night before. I like this part because it challenges the normal way stories are told since the audience has to slowly figure out what happened before she got to her therapy session. 

In the flashback she is alone in her apartment eating cereal and the tiny sounds like the spoon clinking and the fridge humming feel way louder than normal. Then things start getting really weird. A random actor on the TV suddenly says you were not supposed to hear that like they are talking directly to her. The TV fills with static, the doorbell rings but nobody is there, and her spoon somehow appears outside and then back in her cereal bowl but bent. After that the TV fills with static and the movie title appears before she panics and calls her therapist. My intro also represents the social issue of mental health because the main character feels scared and confused about what's happening to her. It also shows how isolating it can feel since she is alone when everything happens. To make things worse, although her therapist is showing support, her loud pen scribbling is judgmental enough.

 So overall my intro uses psychological thriller conventions like suspense, sound, and confusion about what is real, but it also challenges them because the audience does not know if the events are supernatural or really just happening in her head. And honestly that mystery is exactly the vibe I wanted. This is pretty much it!