1. IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

1. 1. IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA
PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR
CHALLENGE FORMS AND
CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA
PRODUCTS?

2. Our film's opening sequence challenges the forms and
conventions for the introduction of a film in several ways. For
example, in the majority of films there is dialogue at least
within the first minute. However, we chose not to include any
dialogue throughout our opening sequence and relied on our
chosen soundtrack. We felt that this added to the
mysteriousness of the film and it also encouraged the
audience to pay more attention to the character's actions,
clothes and surroundings since the viewer is not distracted
by dialogue.

3. We also broke the conventions of a typical film opening
sequence by making the decision to hide the main
character's identity. Usually a few of the main
characters are revealed during the first few minutes of a
film to give a greater insight into the genre of the film
and what's to come. We thought that keeping the
character's identity a secret would intrigue the
audience more and make them want to continue
watching the film to find out who the killer is.

4. On the other hand, our film's opening sequence uses
the conventions of other films of the same genre. For
instance, in films such as Se7en we noticed that the
titles in the opening sequence were written in a
'scratchy' font. We decided to incorporate this idea into
our own opening sequence since it adds to the creepy
effect we were aiming to achieve.

5. Another example of our opening sequence conforming
to the conventions of other similar films is the use of
our soundtrack. We found some unlicensed music on
the internet and had it playing over the top of our film.
Most horror/mystery films feature music that builds
suspense which is something we also wanted to do,
therefore we made sure that the music we chose was in
a minor key to reflect the mood and it had a steady
tempo to build tension with instruments such as strings.

6. In addition, our opening sequence develops on the conventions of a
typical horror/mystery film. Through our research we discovered that
the lighting and colour scheme of the film has a large impact on the
tone of the film and also added to the miss-en-scene. A good example
of this is in the opening sequence of True Blood; there is obvious
colour grading throughout to give it a darker, more cinematic feel, and
there is use of the colour red and things that look like blood. To get a
similar cinematic feel in our own opening sequence, we chose to use
colour grading too. By increasing the contrast and filtering the colours
red, white and black, we achieved this. We also added a glow overlay
to the centre of our film which gave the effect of a spotlight. This
helped establish the scene and almost felt like the main character was
being interrogated by the camera.

7. In True Blood there are many shots showing teeth and
fangs which are all references to the theme of the
series, vampires. In our opening sequence we made
sure to include lots of objects to infer that our main
character is a serial killer. For example, we used a knife
and kept using the colour red which has connotations
of blood.