Convention: A widely used and accepted device or technique, as in drama, literature, or painting. Giving this a media application, conventions are the audience expectations whilst watching a movie, for example the tension in a thriller film or danger in an action-adventure movie. Conventions are similar in similar styles of films, giving meaning to the genre of the film and allowing the audience to know what to expect when seeing a movie. We researched similar thrillers in our genre, such as 28 Days Later and I am Legend, seeing what conventions they used and seeing what similar conventions we might use in our thriller.

We used music conventions in our thriller to creating meaning, and conform to audience expectations. We used a dark, ominous single note throughout the first half of our thriller. This immediately gave the audience a clear indication of what to expect in our opening sequence, they knew it was suspenseful, and that something would happen soon. We teamed this music with distorted images, and added spot sounds of TV Static, and loud distorted sounds to make the audience feel uncomfortable and alert, taking an influence from the American Horror Story TV Series, using distorted sound, colours and images to create a sense of suspicion, tension, suspense and danger.

"Futura" font

The font we used was similar to that used in many other opening sequences we saw, it remains neutral and doesn’t contain distracting features which we researched from rom coms and comedies we should stay away from stylised and ‘girly’ fonts. It was Futura, a sans serif font, which reflects the modern, technological style of the film; computers mainly use sans-serif fonts as they display better on the screens.

Conventions ensure that the audience has a sense of familiarity, pleasure and makes certain there is potentially going to be success made from the film. Conventions cause there to be an expectation of what is going to happen, and when a convention is broken, it either causes surprised pleasure, or shock or it may not work. You can subvert audience expectations which becomes a selling point and creates a different type of pleasure for the audience.

We developed a conventional sound for the first part of our thriller and distorted it to challenge the convention which we feel worked very well. An example of challenging conventions is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction - using the ending at the beginning is not what the audience expects which means tension and suspense builds and reaches its peak right from the start, then has to build all over again.