2. 1. In what ways does your media
product use, develop or challenge
forms and conventions of real
media products?
3. All opening sequences should have a clear establishment of: characterisation, setting,
genre, narrative and visual style/ideology. In the next few slides you will see examples
from the work that my group has done of each of these things:
Characterisation: Representation of a character or characters on the screen by
imitating or describing actions, gestures, or speeches (costume)
Setting: The place/type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an
event takes place.
Genre: A category of artistic composition, as in film which is characterised by
similarities in form, style, or subject matter.
Narrative: A spoken or written account of connected events; a story.
Ideology: A way of showing a certain view in order to give the audience a side to
choose.
Some films tend to do this better than others but all openings should contain these
things ^
First impressions are the one of the most important things about films, the opening
needs to give the audience some information but without giving too much away, it
needs to still be able to intrigue them without being too complex, it needs to be the
start of a storyline rather than being an actual storyline within the first two minutes.
Some good example of a film openings are:
Superbad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlX_O4s67Dk
Lord of war: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RgH5eDbCLU
Seven: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k2gsEI34CE
4. This is a clip that is in the start of the opening sequence. This scene establishes
characterisation due to costume. We can see that she looks quite dark and creepy, she
is wearing a red dress and the colour red can mean many things, on one hand it can
mean love and passion but on the other hand it could mean hate and danger. Here we
have used the forms and conventions of a real media product like seven as we
characterise the person without showing their face that much. We have challenged the
forms and conventions as we have done something different by having a main colour
(red) that will stand out more than the rest, the colour can help to characterise the
person due to the different meanings of red, most thriller movies just use red for blood
and to show the darker connotations of red whereas we have used red quite a bit
throughout to express different emotions like love as well as hate.
5. Our opening sequence establishes the setting throughout
many different clips, we used quite wide shots in order to get
a good view of the setting being shown in each of the scenes.
We decided to get some shots that establish the setting as
throughout quite a few horror films you don’t get shots that
show you the full setting. For example in seven you never
really see the place where he is in the opening you just see
close ups used of his hands so the audience can’t tell where
he actually is.
6. The opening sequence for ‘Beautiful Psycho’ establishes the genre which is a
thriller. Every film that you see should clearly establish the genre of the film in
the opening as well as throughout the film. The use of blood and creepy shots
can imply to the audience that our genre is a thriller. This follows the forms
and conventions of most real media products like seven as you can clearly tell
what the genre is going to be even if there is not much of a storyline.
7. Our media product establishes the narrative in the opening. In the titles there
isn’t much of a narrative as it is just clips but when the opening scene starts you
can see the narrative. Openings like catch me if you can show a narrative
without giving much away and they do not
even use people, its just graphics which
is a good technique. Our opening does
use actual people but there is more of a
focus on the characters hands but the
narrative is shown.
8. Our media product uses and develops on the forms and
conventions of real media products but it does also
challenge them in some ways. Our media product is quite
like other real media products but our work is still unique, we
took the thriller genre in a different direction and made it
about the empathy towards the girl and how she was just
looking for love. There are not many thrillers like this but we
also wanted to have the use of iconography as a convention
in thrillers is that you don’t often see the criminals face and
when you do you don’t see it for long so we went through
doing clips with iconography and Sabrina’s hands, there are
a few clips where you can see her face as we didn’t want the
audience to think that you do not see her face at all
throughout the film but we just wanted to intrigue them so
that they continue to watch the film.
