Anaylsis of product- Representation & Narrative

For AS last year I created a film opening following the genre of thriller. The film followed a young girl who's boyfriend had split up with her and she has become slowly obsessed with him and things take a drastic turn when she is seen crushing pills and walks out the door. She is frequently seen rubbing his face out of pictures and constantly crying. The scene ends with the main character walking out the room with the mixture in her pocket. The mise-en-scene represents a typical teenage girls life, set in a suburban house with a pink bedroom and messy which represents our character well. Also the blonde hair and feminine clothes represents the typical conventions of a teenage girl. Gaye Tuchman's theory can be related to our character because Tuchman found that men were always portrayed in an authorative position and the story revolves around her upset about a male which also relates to this theory showing that women are weaker and emotional because of  a man. Facial expressions used by our female character were also important because it was important that we kept the 'emotional female' stereotype. We continued to represent females as the dominant way we see them in society. Trevor Millium's theory of female expressions can be related to the change in the protaganist's character from over emotional to narcissistic showing that although what we saw as a passive woman we now see as this powerful character subverting what we saw in Prom Night.

The conventions we followed are from typical american thrillers. We studied 'Prom Night' and 'Obsession' to look at the conventions including lighting, mise en scene, camera work, sound and editing. We looked at the female characters in the films. In Obsessed the character of Lisa is blonde and pretty but becomes slowly obsessed with her boss. She conforms to the stereotypical woman being pretty and submissive towards a man but then taking subverting this stereotype as she becomes a dominant force in her bosses life, in a negative way. In Prom Night, the main character Donna is a young teenage girl who is pretty and a typical young girl looking forward to her prom. Although she did not play the obsessed character the story line followed ours somewhat. The theory of the male gaze can be related somewhat to the idea of the conventional character more so in the actual trailers, but our main character was blonde and wore feminine clothes which could appeal to a male audience as she conformed to a stereotype. As well as Laura Mulvey's theory, Tessa Perkins theory that stereotypes are simple and shorthand ways of a quite complex relationship can be seen, on face value our character looks like a upset teenage girl over a boyfriend, nothing unusual but as we delve deeper we see a twisted and dark personality slowing creeping through.


In terms of lighting we found that it was very 'american' in the trailers we watched which was hard to recreate. From the title of 'Prom Night' we immediately know it is an American film. Although the common factor we found was that they focused on a female protagonist which we made sure we included. Rather than using lighting as much we focused on the colouring of our trailer in editing. In the trailers we watched there was a lot of dark lighting used when something bad was going to happen, we subverted this by using black and white for the past and colour for the present which gave it a good effect that was easy to understand. In editing also we used an effect to portray the main characters state of mind which involved there being a slightly frenzied shot showing her anger and mentality. We looked at the camera shots used in the trailers we were studying and found that were many close ups on the main characters face when something was going to happen and shots from an outside perspective as if they were being watched. We used a shot similar to this when our character was crushing an unknown mixture, this created a sense of enigma as we had no idea what she was doing. Extreme close ups and close ups were used frequently which we implemented in emotional scenes such as when she is crying. We studied many conventions of thrillers, some we were able to recreate and use others such as the typical American conventions we couldn't.

In terms of Narrative theories, our product following one female protaganist who is becoming obsessed with a boy. Roland Barthes theory can relate to the ending of our trailer as all the audience see is the character walking out of her bedroom door with the unknown mixture in her pocket. As an audience we are left wondering what was in the mixture and where is she going. There being one main protaganist and two other characters featured throughout, being the ex boyfriend and our main characters best friend. Todorovs theory can be applied to the three characters. The protaganist, the antagonist can be perhaps seen as the ex boyfriend as he causes her to become this way and the friend could be seen as the helper as she tries to talk her out of what she is doing and help her. Although our trailer does also subvert this theory as it could be argued that the main character is a victim as she has been hurt and the consequences of the hurt make her become villianous. The whole story revolves around a loss of love and hate which relates to Levi-Strausse's theory of binary oppositions. We see a love/hate relationship because she loves him so much that she hates him because he has hurt her. This is conventional to stereotypes as it is usually assumed that when a break up occurs the woman is always left hurt and emotionally un-stable whereas the man gets on with things.

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I didnt know whether we had to write a seperate post with the narrative theories so I have included it with my representation.