Evaluation Q1

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

Our media product is an opening sequence to an original film that we came up with, it uses develops and challenges the forms and convention of an opening title sequence in many ways. Initially when looking at the conventions of other opening sequences we realised that we needed to stick to these, in order to keep it recognisable as an opening sequence
Conventions of an Opening Sequence:
- Intro to main characters (‘The Magdalene Sisters’ Mullan 2002)
- Intro setting (‘Maid in Manhattan’ Wang 2002)
- Indication of genre and style (‘Mean Girls’ Waters 2004)
- Title Credits and Film Title (‘Juno’ Reitman 2007)
- Music (‘The Shining’ Kubrick 1980)
- Main themes of film (‘Scream’ Craven 1996)
- Symbolic/iconic images (‘Halloween’Carpenter 1978)
I feel that we have completed all of these conventions, making our sequence obvious as an opening to a film.

However I do think we challenged the conventions quite a lot as well. Firstly within 30 seconds of our film there has been a time twist. The camera takes us into the world of the hostage, whilst the mother is watching the hostage video. Additionally just as the audience starts feeling sympathetic towards Samantha, there is a role twist as we realise she is the true villain. Most opening sequences do not have this amount of twists, if any at all. Also there is usually not this much of the storyline in the fist 2 minutes –we have tried to grab the audiences attention by taking them straight in. The style of our film comes across with the beat driven, hip-hop style soundtrack, fast pace - as a lot of story is told in very little time - , and brief, snappy dialogue. We have used interesting camera work such as point of view shots, zooms and pans as well as sharp, modern editing with effects to give our film a really modern, cool feel to it.

When looking at genre we almost immediately decided we wanted it to be thriller, as we were all keen to move away from slasher-horror which could have easily ended up looking fake and clichéd.
· Conventional characters in thrillers and very similar to those in horrors; the brave male hero (Jason Bourne ‘The Bourne Identity’), weak female victim (Marion Crane in ‘Psycho’), the ugly villain (Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’). We wanted to move away from most of these stereotypes, but did still ended up choose a white, blonde female as our victim to conform to the convention, and make her role very clear to the audience, where other aspects of the film are not clear. The role of Samantha Harris is a fake hero as at first the audience presumes that she is the ‘goodie’, but we soon find out she faking being kidnapped, and that she is actually the kidnapper.

· In the narrative and themes we have also stuck to conventions with sly, devious actions of double crossing and betrayal. Our opening also sets up enigma, as we presume a flash back will follow it, so we can see what provoked the characters into this situation.

· In addition the mise-en-scene of our film strongly connotes that of a thriller. There is low key lighting, a dingy basement hide-out and costume and make-up to make the character look rough.
· There are many sub-genres within thriller. Our opening fits best into the sub genre of crime-thriller as there is usually and emphasis on psychological aspects. Central topics of these films include murders, chases and double-crosses. Some examples include ‘Seven’, ‘The Godfather' and ‘Resevoir Dogs'.

Nevertheless we also challenged some of the genre convention. This is mainly shown in our choice of two females in the main roles. This includes a female villain, something not often found in Thrillers.

Although our storyline is in our opinion highly original our narrative structure actually follows a classic narrative pattern. Ours follows the ideas of narrative theorists such as Todorov, as ours starts with relative equilibrium; peaceful road, making tea. But there is soon a disruption in the form of the hostage video. The whole film follows this pattern as well because the calm, normality at the beginning is followed by the disruption of the tape, leading to a flashback and a chase as the police track Samantha Harris at the climax of the film. Then equilibrium is restored in the resolution of her being caught and the money returned.

We used many different narrative techniques to achieve the look we wanted. Our sequence is not in real time, because as the camera takes us into the room of the hostage, we are going back in time a few hours to when she filmed it because it is not a live link. This gives our film an edgier, more independent feel. We also used ellipses, and cross cutting between making tea and delivering the tape.