Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The genre of our film 'Femme Fatale' is a thriller and with thrillers suspense, tension and mystery is created through the sound and we have used these typical elements of a generic thriller in our film. Our music is repetitive but it keeps the audience interested as it is parallel to the action and has an underlying tone of tension to it which keeps the audience on tenterhooks as to what will happen. We didn't want to go too overboard on our music and have frantic screeching high pitched strings like in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), we wanted a suggestive piece of music which could be put to other visuals and mean something completely different.

Psycho is one of our biggest inspirations for music but a lot of our creative plot ideas came from Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) and I think this is because it was one of the first opening sequences we studied before choosing a genre. This is why I think it is our main influence because for example our film is a thriller and is about a murder and the time jumps around, just like in Memento which was nominated for two Oscars.

As Memento is one of our biggest influences, the director Christopher Nolan is one of our group's inspirational directors because he is the mastermind of confusion, complexity and successful thrillers, for example his other films include Inception (2010) which won four Oscars and three BAFTAs and The Dark Knight (2008) which won two Oscars and a BAFTA to name but a few. He is a successful generic thriller director and felt that he would be the right person to direct our film because of his success and because of his ability to develop and understand complex plots.

Our group's influential director is Christopher Nolan but my personal influential director is Darren Aronofsky, his films include Black Swan (2010) which won an Oscar and a BAFTA as well as many other film awards. He is known as being a successful psychological thriller director and I feel that his work, such as Black Swan has inspired me with our film genre.

Our film is a thriller and has conventional aspects in it but it has experimental aspects in it as well, for example our thriller has a female killer and our victim is male and we fetishize the man's dead body. What I mean by this is that in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) both male and female victims are murdered but whilst the men's deaths are short and sweet, the women's deaths are slower and are dragged out more. We changed this by focusing and concentrating on the man's body by showing the floor shot of him before each flashback sequence and this conveys that he is powerless to the woman because he is on the floor and is literally lower than her.