EVALUATION Q1 - How our media product connect with conventions of real media products?

Kellie Ward

There are specific conventions that film openings consist of to achieve a successful opening, these are;

Firstly music is inco-operated into majority of openings; both diegetic and non-diegetic can be used to set the overall tone of the movie and also accompany the pace of editing to ensure that a specific atmosphere is set to prepare the audience for the rest of the film.         Our thriller followed the convention of using music, however it had a twist because it wasn't music as such - it was a low bass TONE, as silence is also an effective way to create suspense and tension which thrillers are meant to do. 

Location (part of mise en scene) is another important element to give the audience opportunity to see, because it establishes the setting or at least one significant setting of the film and therefore also creates the overall plot. Environment and other parts of mise en scene can also set the time/year of the story. Location is inevitably shown through camera visuals, but may also be accompanied with special video effects, or audio effects to give a more specific, clear approach of the plot.      An establishing shot is alway used to introduce location at the beginning of the movie/scene, an establishing shot is a wide shot covering the whole room, building, or general environment. 

(Embedded via YouTube)

 

(Made with www.createagif.net)

We challenged this convention - as the Pathogen opening shot is of water pipes, it relates to the plot and story of contaminated water but doesn't reveal too much about character or regional location too early on.

A main goal is to introduce the main character or pre-plot within the opening, this literally gives the audience direct information about either the previous experiences and type of a character (e.g. gender, age, class),or previous events and situations in order to reduce confusion with future events and the rest of the film/story. Narration and on screen text can help to make situations exceedingly apparent.

Pathogen followed this type of film opening and showed a significant character 

Film titles appear in every typical film opening for practical reasons of informing people of the crew members, main roles and general co-operates involved with the movie. Of course, we included titles in Pathogen to give credit to all departments.

In film openings, there is also a typical conventional order of which the title sequences appear, this order usually consists of;

1. Production Company opening Ident 
2. Production Company title
3. Distribution Company title
4. Director/Writer
5. Actor 1 (Lead)
6. Actor 2 (Lead)
7. Film Title
8. Actor 3
9. Actor 4
10. Casting
11. Costume
12. Music/Music supervisor



We decided to follow this specific order of titles exactly for our thriller opening as we did research and concluded that uncountable highly successful films had also used this and had a good result.







(Created with Camtasia)

EXAMPLE OF SUCCESSFUL THRILLER WITH CONVENTIONAL TITLE ORDER
The girl with the dragon tattoo for example; used the exact recommended order of titles and proved as a real life example that this sequencing professionalises the opening.

Intertextuality is something that we took into account during the very first stages of planning the thriller. We did not use many intertextual elements as we wanted to strike the audience in the most unique and individual way possible. 

However, there was one element that we extracted from many other movies (Psycho 1960 in particular) - and this was the idea of a main female character's death in the opening scene. To show a clear reference to this film we placed our actor in a similar death position and also used a close up shot = intertextuality