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

Our main convention that we challenged was that we used a woman as our main protagonist. An example of another film that also challenges this convention would be Monster.


This challenges conventions from most major films as well as thrillers because women are not seen as strong or clever enough, to be capable of murder and things associated in thriller films. A professional/working class woman would normally be seen as a victim.



A normal convention that we use is our flashback scene. It is not an obvious shot as we didn't want the audience to realise that the rest of the film was in the past. We wanted to confuse the audience by quickly showing the shot of Lily dead, then bringing in both twins.
Twins aren't that common in most films so they are very rare in thrillers. I have found two thrillers that do use twins and are similar to ours using anger and revenge as their main themes.
Another convention that we used was Lily being a 'damsel in distress'. In nearly all thrillers there is a victim, Lily is our victim and her twin sister Ivie plays the role of dominance over her. Ivie tries to poison her sister and the audience are made to feel slightly worried for Lily as she has no idea that her sister is trying to kill her.

The film 'Monster' compares to our film as it also challenges the main convention by having a female protagonist being the killer. The main character is also strong willed and dominant which is like our main character. Another film similar to ours is Dead Ringers, our titles are similar in the fact that they are the same name and that they conveniently portray the film. A dead ringer is another word for a twin, there is no difference between them. Our titles contrast as they have a darker tone than David Cronenberg's psychotic thriller although David sets the tone further into the film.