For our A2 media my group decided to make a short film.

We chose the genre of our film, ‘Sommer White’, to be a thriller because this allowed us to explore many different forms and conventions and decide how to use develop or challenge these in order to make our film interesting and engaging for our audience.

In our pre-production stage, we researched many films such as Kill Bill and Hard candy.

We looked at the conventions of these films and how the directors used these conventions, for example; in Hard Candy, David Slade used a lot of red in the poster and in the film which represents evil and blood, he also uses the convention of using male and female characters.

However, he challenges the typical convention of the female being the victim and instead the male is the victim. In Kill Bill, Tarantino uses mainly woman who are all portrayed as powerful strong women. 

We followed the conventions of a thriller based on Todorov’s theory of narrative structure. His theory states that a film starts off with equilibrium, followed by a

disruption of the equilibrium and then restoration of the equilibrium.

And finally the restoration of the equiblrium which was Sommer being put away in a mental hospital.

In ‘Sommer White we started the film with everything seeming normal, the equilibrium…

Followed by the disruption of the equilbrium which was Sommer getting bullied and killing Alexia ….

Unlike other 90 minute thriller films, our film only lasts 5 minutes therefore we had to follow most of the forms and conventions of a thriller because we had to introduce the action faster than a normal film would, make sure the audience would stay interested throughout the 5 minutes and make sure we didn’t waste time on unnecessary shots

We developed forms and conventions of a thriller film mostly by the Mise-en-Scene

We looked at the Mise-en-scene that was used in most thriller films, for example; the costume, lighting, locations and so on.

We noticed that most thriller films use the conventional colours; red, black, grey in order to represent death, blood, danger or to give the movie an eerie feel; the

characters costumes usually being black or dark colours for example in Hard Candy, the girl wears a red hoodie and the man wears mostly dark colours.

However we decided to not challenge, but develop this convention. For example, Sommer’s costume; instead of having her wearing black and red, we decided to have her wearing blue and yellow and incorporated a but of red into her costume; this was not only to the develop the convention of the dark gloomy clothing characters wear in thriller films but also to show the audience clearly that Sommer is representative of Snow White.

We were inspired by Tarantino using intertextuality in Kill Bill as he incorporates comic books in the film to tell part of the story in an interesting and creative way which is a clever device to engage and attract a wide audience. In our film, Snow White wears a blue and yellow dress with a red bow so we modernised her costume to incorporate traits of the character Snow White, into Sommer White.

We showed this mainly by using intertextuality; we incorporated a lot of things from Snow White into our film; the poison apple, the evil step-mother who is Alexia the bully, the costumes and the basic storyline.

  We also looked in more detail at the film Kill Bill by Quentin Tarantino. One thing we really enjoyed from this film was the sound. Tarantino uses a lot of folly in relation to sound in Kill Bill, for example in the fight scene between ‘Black Mamba’ and ‘Copperhead’, when ‘Black Mamba’ jumps over the table there is a sound effect of a jump that almost reminded me of a cartoon. Another interesting sound he used was whistling; When the woman, also the villain, in the nurses outfit is walking through the hospital towards ‘Black Mambas’ room, there is a loud distinctive whistling sound following her; it is very eerie and puts the audience on edge, almost giving them a clue that something bad is to come. We decided to incorporate something like that into our film as we wanted to create the same eerie on edge effect on our audience.

 We developed this idea into our own and found a very low pitch, deep humming sound that would follow Sommer as she was walking home from school; we were hoping this would give the audience some clue that Sommer was not as innocent as she seemed and also make them feel on edge.

We also layered the sound by having her dragging a stick over the school gates which created a loud effective sound. By layering these sounds we not only created the effect we had wanted to create for our audience but we also successfully developed Tarantino’s idea of sound.

We challenged the forms and conventions of a thriller film based on Laura Mulvey’s theory of feminism.

Mulvey states that in films, woman are seen as inferior, mainly to a man, or used as sexual devices/ seen in a sexual way. We challenged this theory

using not only 1, but 2 female characters.

Typically, in a thriller film, there is the main character; a woman who is typically the victim of the villain; usually a man. So, by using 2 female characters we already challenged this convention

In ‘Sommer White’, the audience are fooled into believing that Sommer is a sweet innocent girl who is inferior to the bully, Alexia. However, later on in the film we see that in fact both of the girls in the film are strong, powerful and even sinister characters that are not portrayed as victims or in a sexual way, therefore challenging the theory of the ‘inferior’ woman.