The document discusses conventions used in the media student's film opening project. It begins by establishing genres like thriller and urban drama that influenced the project. Scenes include a female character crying over her deceased fiance and being comforted by a friend. Camera techniques like tracking shots, point-of-view shots, and high/low angles are used to develop meaning and power dynamics. Locations, costumes, and props also reference conventions to imply shifting genres from social realism to thriller. Sound is used to build tension during an attack scene and convey emotion in other scenes. Overall, the film opening draws on a variety of cinematic conventions to construct its reality and communicate genre.

1. In what ways does your media
product use/develop or
challenge forms and
conventions for real media
products?

2. • When the media produces meaning by using conventions the
audiences learn to understand the meaning from the
interaction of the conventional material in the text, and their
understanding of conventions. In media there is a history of the
use of conventions. Conventions are something that had been
learnt naturally but they are cultural not universal.
• Firstly I started to look at the range of film genres to start
constructing our film opening. Our film opening was based in
the Thriller genre but it was also connected to urban drama this
usually includes crime but we had also included paranormal,
because the female character is warned by her dead fiancé that
she is in danger. We don't know this because we don't make
this obvious that it is linked to these genres as our film
opening went over the time limit to have a hold on one certain
genre, so we felt that this will add to the mysterious air.

3. The media construct reality. Our Film opening follows the tradition
conventions of the female being weak as she is crying over her fiancé. Women
are often presented to be fragile and victim-like. This caused Bryan to ask if
she wanted him to come in (to comfort her.) This suggests that a female may
not handle being alone.

4. The technical codes, which include camera techniques, framing to help
develop forms and conventions. We started off with a black screen and
our male and female characters had a conversation and we use this
convention because it is used in films in the thriller genre and also the
title sequence order shows the importance of each character.
We made our production title and film title larger then the other titles to
empathise that it is obviously more important.
We also used the tracking shot to take in the surroundings as Josh left
his house, it then Pans to keep that character in the frame.

5. • A Point of view shot is used when Josh gets attacked because we wanted
the audience to see the events through the (attacking) actor's eyes, as if
they were experiencing the events themselves. and also to focuses on
Josh and his wound.
Often films in the thriller genre use
high angle shots because it conveys
the significance of certain
characters, and who empowers who
so when the attacker stabbed Josh
we made sure that Josh had looked
smaller then the attacker by using
the camera to film a low angle shot.

6. We filmed in the style of social realism but our genre tilted toward
thriller, how we done this is by focussing on the backgrounds and
characters. We filmed in a estate, this helped our media product use
forms and conventions to imply that our film will be relating to social
realism to first but will change. This is similar to Eddy Murphy’s film
‘Trading places’ because you can't tell what genre it is from because
of the montage shots, a montage shot is numerous short shots with
special optical effects such as (fades). This is also what we used in
our film opening.

7. Our first symbolic shot consists of both male characters in the shot, the
attacker is looking at Josh from a distant but Josh is more dominant in
this shot because it signifies that he is the more important character.
The attacker shouts out 'Oi' to josh and this is symbolic because its
british slang. Stairs are a convention of thriller movies , so we had our
character run away from the attacker on a few flights of stairs.
Other props of importance is the
characters clothing. Both male
characters are dressed in black to
forewarn what is going to happen, also
wearing a black big jacket or hoodies
with jeans while being a male teenager
is rather intimidating. Wearing a hoodie
meant you were keeping a low profile,
and perhaps up to something illegal it is
also claimed that black teens often wear
hoodies for two reasons: to remain
obscure and undetected, or to project a
“don’t mess with me” image. Our female
character wears a cream jacket with a
black dress and a brown side bag and a
black scarf. Her boyfriends bag is in the
background of the shot to show how
she wants to feel close to him still.

8. The sound started as the black screen had showed up and it stopped while the couple
were saying bye to each other and we added dialogue in our film because we wanted
to show a relationship through a conversation as most films do. The other sound we
had was through the attacking scene, we had tension building music to slowly make
the audience realise that something bad is going to happen and lastly when the
female is crying at the grave yard and then when she enters her house slow sad
music is played to portray her feelings.