Evaluation Question 1

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

The main character in our thriller is a seventeen year old girl named 'Rihannon Hayleys' (short Ree).

This name was inspired by the main character Hayley Stark in the 2005 canadian indie film 'Hard Candy'.

This film shows a 14-year old girl who meets a 32-year old man on the internet,  suspecting him to be pedophile. She therefore slips an anaesthetic into his drink, ties him up to a chair and when we awakes, starts to torture him. 

Rihannon's first name shortens to 'Ree'. This name is a reference to the lead girl character in Winter's Bone, also named Ree.

Our girl's costume was also inspired by the Ree in Winter's Bone, being slightly used up and dirty. Ree Dolly's clothes reflect her hard upbringing and broken family situation, she dresses not to impress but to survive, with clothes that keep her warm and protected by the cold, rather than make her look good. The costume our girl Ree Haileys is wearing beach scene in Voyeur is heavily influenced by this. However it is also a reflection of casual slightly american-urban-streetwear inspired casual teenage clothing.

One of the locations we used in our thriller is a beach very similar to that in "The Piano".

An important generic thriller convention we approached in our thriller is the scenes taking place in unglamorous locations and locations with wide open spaces. As my teacher explained to me, the brooding sky and sea references the pessimistic and threatening mood associated with the film noir. Personally, I think we have managed to mirror the dark atmosphere of the film noir times nicely in our thriller, mainly during the beach scene, using effects like the 'vignette' to blacken the edges of the shot and adjusting the saturation and contrast to create a perfect greyness.  

A shot from Jane Campion's 1993 'The Piano'

A shot from West Runton beach in our thriller

 Its mysterious atmosphere is set through the fog and clouds in the early hours of the january winter's day. The grey sky and gloomy surroundings helped add a quite sad, but dreamy effect to the scenes we shot out in West Runton beach.

A shot from the sea in West Runton from our thriller

A shot from the Essex marchers in Terry Windsor's 'Essex Boys'

A similar location which inspired us are the Essex Marchers in the 2000 thriller "Essex Boys", when Jason Lock leaves a man behind in the middle of nowhere in the marchers after having beaten him up and showering his face in acid. 

The West Runton beach we used alternates between areas of cold, wet sand, big, strong stones and hard concrete.

It is quite hard to walk on barefoot, like Ree is doing. This mirrors how hard the path is that lays in front of her int he next few days according to the rest of the plot, when she finds out the she is being stalked by someone very unexpected. 


Parallel to the fact that we live in Norfolk and we chose to film our thriller close to home, so if we needed to add some scenes (which we actually also ended up having to return to and film some more), we could easily access our filming location, we were also inspired by the 2009 film 'The Scouting Book for Boys', which also takes place on the Norfolk coast.

Another thriller in which a woman is alone, vulnerably seeking help on a beach is "Jeopardy",  which also helped inspire our initial idea of the girl in this particular location.