Lockdown Content 2

As the first episode begins, the main character Nira is introduced by seeing her talking to the camera saying 'I finally know who's behind all this' but we don't know what has happened. Nira looks scared as she is filming this at night in the dark which symbolises the genre horror/thriller. Nira's four friends are then introduced briefly as short clips from the series are shown so the audience get's a few hints of what is going to happen in it. These clip's introduces the characters as scared and worried which ties in with the genre. 

After the introduction has been shown, the episode starts of with Nira introducing herself to her camera for her diary during Lockdown. She attempts too introduce herself a number of times as she is not happy with the way she done it. This shows that Nira is a perfectionist and likes too have fun as she introduces herself in some comical ways. The episode then goes onto showing her and her friends dancing to a TikTok dance which implies they are all active on social media as it was a 'trend' during Lockdown to do that dance and post it. One character called Emi, soon says on the group call they are all on that a guy she likes has commented on her recent post. She acts all exited so us audience gets the impression that she likes attention. However the character Chris gives off the impression that only the audience can see but not the characters that he likes Emi. We can see this because he makes sure he looks his best when she video calls him and he asks a lot of questions about the guy she is into which us audience can detect a hint of jealousy from him. Chris seems like a very sweet guy as he does check up on Emi at one point in the show so he cares about others a lot. The character Aiden isn't shown as much as the other characters because he is busy playing video games. He clearly cares more about playing video games than helping his friends out which is very different to Chris. Lastly, the final friend of Nira's is Sam. She comes across as a cool, calm and collected person that is up for a laugh but also there for her friends in serious situations. All these characters seem to come from a fairly wealthy family that can afford a lot of technology for them as we see them on laptops, computers, phones and PlayStations. 

As this series was filmed in Lockdown, the friends that created it couldn't meet up to organise or film so they had to adapt to how they could do it. This resulted in them having to film it all on their phones/webcams/cameras inside their homes and sometimes outside on the street they live in due to the Lockdown rules. To show the characters interacting with each other, they used video calls to talk to each other which us audience could see them all on the screen at once talking to the camera. Video calls is a normal thing to do with this generation as people would do it even before Lockdown happen as new technology is getting better by the years. There are no non-diegetic moments in this episode as it is all shown through: webcams, phone cameras, messages, social media and zoom calls. This makes the viewer feel relatable to the characters with how they have too keep in touch with each other because the only way they can talk to each other is through Zoom calls, phone calls, messages etc. This is what the audience has to do as well with the Lockdown in place. 

This episode uses Thriller, Crime and Horror conventions to set up its central mystery in many ways. One of them being with the use of lighting. In horror films/TV shows, the lighting is dark most of the time to make the audience feel scared. As this series uses dark lighting at some points when something scary/freaky is going on, they clearly want the audience to fee scared. The use of sounds also represents horror and thriller conventions because the actors scream and whisper at some points. The screaming happens once in the episode when the screen is completely black so the sound is the only thing the audience focuses on which will make them feel worried and slightly scared as the audience doesn't know who it was or why the scream happened. With the whispering, it is a very common tone of voice to happen in horrors and thrillers because when the characters are trying to hide and be quiet from whatever they are getting away from, they whisper which makes the scene feel even more tense. In this case, the character Nira whispers to the camera after she hears the scream because it happened in the middle of the night so she probably don't want to talk to loud in case she wakes anyone up. On the other hand, Nira whispers in this scene to make the audience feel more tense and scared so the horror and thriller conventions are used here. Crime conventions are also used in this episode to set up it's central mystery by having the main character Nira speak about all her thought's as she is the one character mainly trying to solve who screamed and why. 

I think the way in which Lockdown play's with our narrative expectations is by us all knowing that the characters can't meet so they communicate through messages, video calls (e.g. Zoom) and phone calls. The Lockdown rules are that you can't meet up with anyone outside your house hold so with this series being about a group of teenage friends solving a mystery, it's fairly obvious they all don't live with each other so us audience will have to watch them communicate with each other through the ways I previously listed. As I just said the Lockdown rules are that you can't leave your house too meet anyone, the location is expected from us audience that it will be filmed in the characters houses most of the time. This means that the locations are going to be the same through out the series but as there are a number of characters, we expect to see a few different houses for the locations.