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

When we began researching into different genres and looking at lots of different opening sequences, we knew pretty much from the start that we wanted to a horror opening. From basic knowledge I knew major conventions that our always included in horror films e.g.: dark lighting, murderer (usually male), victim (usually girl). We began to focus our attention on finding horrors that we were able to draw inspiration on. We found from this that it was quite hard to distinguish between a horror film and a thriller film as they shared common conventions such as the dark lighting, victim, murderer as well as the horror music. Examples of film that really made me familiar with the forms and conventions of horror films were


• ‘Psycho’ (1960- Hitchcock)

• ‘Scream ’ (1996 Craven)





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Overall we managed to stick to a lot of the horror conventions making it obvious to the audience that it was in fact a horror film; however we used original twists to make the opening more exciting and to make it stand out.
Our opening sequence did useTodorov’s classic narrative Pattern. The beginning of our sequence started with an equilibrium as we had the normality of the house and the normality of his usual routine, however we also added a small disruption in the first 2 miuntes. This is because we wanted to make impact straight away so that the audience were hooked. The small disruption was only to introduce the narrative and we would have the major disruption later on.

In order to make our piece look professional we looked at the conventions of an opening sequence and included some of them for example:

• Titles (The Ring 2001-Verbinski)

• Introducing main characters (Legally Blonde 2001- Luketic)

• Music (Panic Room 2002-Fincher)

• Introducing a story plot ( Blair Witch Project 1999-Myrick)

• Themes in the film ( Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974-Hooper)

 

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• I believe we used all of these in our opening sequence as we used blackouts with titles on them.
• We introduced 2 key characters that will be throughout the film.
•  We used music to create suspense.
• We introduced the story and the key themes of OCD, murder and stalking.
• This made sure that the opening followed a function and looked like a real opening sequence

• The overall style of our piece is quite scary and weird, we only have the small dialogue from the radio and instead we just see the characters actions to telling the story. The pace of our piece begins of slow and then becomes faster to create a build up. We used classic continuity techniques such as match-on-action, cuts, shot-reverse-shot and 30 degree rule. We used binary opposites such as dark vs. light, dirt vs. cleanliness, good vs. evil, murderer vs. victim and calm vs. fear.