Question 1

Script:

Hello everyone, I'm My Linh and in this screencast presentation I'm answering question 1 in the critical reflection requirements in component 1, media studies: How does my product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups and issues.

Firstly, I'm going to talk about the genre conventions. My movie: The Murder That Never Happened falls under the crime thriller and mystery movie genre. Here are some conventions of the genre that our group has followed in the process of making this movie. First, is the red herring narrative: This is a very commonly used storytelling technique to keep the audiences curious and engaged. To make it seem more convincing that our main character, Khue, is the killer, we used mise-en scene like showing Khue waking up next to a knife, blood scattered everywhere and also the character's actions. Next, an indispensable part of thriller movies is sound. For the first half of the opening, we used 2 elements: dissonance and silence, to cause an eerie and uneasy feeling - indicating an unfortunate event. In the next half, we switch to a soundtrack with fast beat and heavy bass to show the character's panic. For the lighting of the scene, we used smart side lighting technique to insinuate that there are things that are undiscovered by both the audience and the character. Then we incorporate cool temperature lighting with mise-en-scene to show that the character is in an isolated setting - a classic setting in thrillers. Lastly, we used a wide range of camera angles and compositions like dutch angle, symmetry, extreme close ups to create suspense for the opening scene.

However, there's still a convention in thriller movies that we didn't follow. A gender stereotype clearly shown in the thriller genre is that men are usually allocated to heroes/villains roles because they are viewed as stronger and more dominant, while women play the roles of victims and damsels in distress. We challenged the convention by depicting the main character as the villain (the murderer) and also let her later on solves the crime and be her own hero. 

Apart from the genre, we also follow and challenge the representation of nerd characters in media. We follow the representation of nerds in terms of clothing and created an outfit for Khue with brown as the main color - creating a very sterile and boring look. Oppositionally, we challenge the representation of nerds as antisocial by showing that Khue can still make friends and have fun like other people.

Another representation that we follow is the representation of the youth as rebellious and chaos causing individuals. This is mainly seen through mise-en-scene, showing teenagers drinking and dancing under the flashing colorful lights. Lastly, the action of the character hits her boyfriend with a bottle of soju indicates that alcohol is both the direct and indirect cause of the murder, therefore raise awareness for teenagers about how dangerous alcohol can be.

And that is the end of my Q&A session, thanks for listening!

From the last representation, I want to raise teenagers' awareness about drunk crimes. Researches have shown that 86% of homicide offenders were drinking at or before the crime time and 37% of assailants in assault cases were drinking at the time of the offense. So with the increasing rate of underage drinking, I created a scene that could warn the youth to stay away from alcohol. Some techniques that we've used to indicate the character's drunken state are: Using low shutter speed camera setting and Capcut effects to create blurry, shaky shots; showing of the character chugging alcohol and smudged makeup. Adding a green lighting in the background to imply intoxication.