Conventionally, when looking at other horror-thriller films, teenagers are presented as violent, thuggish and intimidating. We thought this would be a good convention to use, as it is also a widespread stereotype of young people.

We kept a stereotypical viewpoint on what our criminals would really look like, to make the opening seem less staged and make the viewer feel more on edge, due to the naturalistic feel created.

Teenagers were used as the criminals, because they are often stereotyped to be dangerous, villainous and more violent in comparison to other age groups. Furthermore, the teenage age group is feared by older people as they are seen as unpredictable and worrying for people around them. It is often thought that younger people are more likely to commit crime and injure others – like in our film opening – and so the use of this stereotype also helped to add to the realism that we aimed to achieve.

Costumes of young people are stereotypically and conventionally dark and dangerous looking with things like hoodies. These are intimidating to the public, as they hide most of their identity. Therefore, by using hoodies, we are showing the teenagers to be scary and intimidating to the viewer. This makes the audience feel uncomfortable. This costume also makes our film opening more realistic, as dark concealing clothing would make them more discrete whilst committing crimes – making them less likely to be caught.

We used low-key lighting to present the antagonist teenagers to the viewer. This made the teenagers seem more dark and evil in personality. Furthermore, the presence of the darkened scenes makes the viewer feel anxious as it’s more difficult to make everything out – they are unsure of everything, making the teenagers seem more suspicious and worrying.

To present the teenage group as being the more violent and powerful group, we used blocking to show them standing over people or generally being above people. This showed them to force their dominance upon people by being intimidating and frightening. This makes the viewer more anxious as the stereotype of violent and dangerous teenagers is being projected.

Throughout our opening, we used male antagonists. This portrays the convention that males are the more violent gender. At the end, we also used a female victim, which represented the convention of females being the weaker more vulnerable sex. This made it more believable for the audience, as it is stereotypical for the roles to be this way around.

We used handheld camera techniques, to make the videoing seem less professional – as though a young person picked it up just to convey the group message. This shows how rough and violent the teenagers are as they want people to see what crimes they are committing and how they are attacking people. If we had used a tripod for example, the film may have looked too perfect to be realistic, as teenagers are often thought to not be perfectionists, and do things as quickly as possible.

We often used fast paced editing, to make it seem less organised and neat, like teenagers stereotypically aren’t. By making it fast paced, it also shows the irrationalism of teenagers, presenting them as unpredictable and alarming for the viewer. By doing this, it made the film seem tenser as the viewer didn’t know what the teenage antagonists would do next or when it would cut to it.

The use of fades and straight cut transitions shows how variable teenage actions can be, again showing their unpredictability.

We added ambient sounds and special effects, like weather conditions (rain, thunder) and sounds like sirens. The sirens show that teenagers are often stereotyped to always being in trouble with the law for doing something bad/illegal. In our film opening, we represented this by showing the violent behaviour of teenagers, paired with the sirens suggests that they are being hunted and will get into trouble for what they are doing. The fact that they are filming their actions and persist with them shows they don’t care about getting into trouble, which is what most people generally think about teenagers. By adding in weather conditions, we created a pathetic fallacy scene, where rain and solemn weather represents the moody, violent, not bothered personas of the characters being shown.

We chose to use a more sinister, scary, tension-building soundtrack for our film opening, as it was synchronous with what is happening in the scenes. It also represents the feeling we wanted to be associated with the antagonist group as they are all male and teenagers. By presenting them as scary and violent with the soundtrack, we had a bigger impact on the audience because music can make the audience feel on edge for what will happen. The use of crescendos and the score becoming louder at certain parts can shock and panic the viewer, as they are unexpected and unnerving events.