Evaluation Questions – 1

This is where all the planning and production side of it ends, The sequence is made and all the planning is documented, posted online and done. This means that from here on in its time to start evaluating the media product. There are seven questions that i will be posting, the first of which is this one. I hope its all good and you enjoy it!

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

There are many conventions of real opening sequences in our work, but we have also left some out, not because we forgot, but for a reason. But before we can identify these we must first identify why films have opening sequences and what the purposes of these conventions are.

There are many reasons why a film would have an opening sequence at the start of it; in fact it is actually quite a crucial part of most films as it can tell the audience quite a lot about the film. It gives an early look into narrative giving the audience a kind of idea about where the storyline might go as well as displaying an early idea of characterisation and genre. This can give the audience a good idea of whether this film is going to one that they are going to want to watch, making it very important to get the opening sequence of a film right. It also says a lot about the possible setting of the plot; the visual style that will be present throughout the film and even sometimes the ideology that is present, protagonists and antagonists are often identified in the opening sequences of some genres such as action.

I believe that we have kept to some of these conventions in the creation of our opening sequence however some of them we have challenged. To start with we haven’t really kept to the convention that the opening sequence shows the chronological starting point of the narrative, although it is questionable whether this is actually a convention because although most films do this, there is also a large amount of films that don’t. Our opening sequence begins at the chronological end of the narrative showing the characters supposed final day (although it may not be). It does show some narrative and hooks the audience’s interest by not revealing too much about the characterisation. They want to know who this guy is and why he is so depressed, what has happened to him that has put him in this position and is it really that bad. The opening hints at this but it doesn’t make anything clear. This leaves the ideology to be discovered along with the story behind the character; are we wanting him to die or are we on the edge of our seat hoping he decides not to? The Film ‘Pulp Fiction’ directed and co-written by Quinten Tarintino also uses this idea of a non-linear storyline. Pulp Fiction has many elements of this, displaying different parts of the film at different times but similar to our opening sequence in the way that it starts mid-way through the storyline, and not at the start.

The begging of puple fiction is set just before the start of the robbery in the dinner that is chronologically about mid way through the story.

The Start of our film is set just as the character wakes up sometime after his girlfriend has left him, towards the end of the chronological story line.

A convention of the opening sequence that we have conformed to is that the setting has been established in the opening sequence. It is easy to see where the rest of the film would be set from our opening, the transition slowly between the house being clean and tidy to the total mess that it is in at the end. We can also see that the house is in a large village/small town from the shots that have been shown throughout his day giving quite a clear idea of the location that the storyline takes place in. This is important information for the audience to know, as without it there is no kind of bearing and elements of the story can become confusing.

A good opening sequence will also normally show a good representation of the visual style of the film. I feel that our opening sequence has established this well, showing the audience that the films themes are slightly macabre and that the visual style of the film is reflecting that in the use of the effects put onto the camera and the titles. Another film that similarly does this is one I have already written an analysis on, the opening titles of ‘Se7en’. The whole visual style is representative of the themes in the film and they are all displayed extremely well within the title sequence.

The title sequence of se7en gives a good representation of the visual style that will be present throughout the film through the use of titles, the shots and the clour filter applied to the clip.

Our opening sequence shows the visual style that will continue throughout using titles and camera effects to reflect the themes in the storyline.

Taking all of this into account I feel that our film has both developed and conformed to conventions of an opening sequence, Conforming to the conventions of establishing a clear setting and visual style that will be consistent throughout the film and not conforming the rules of a chronological narrative, rather building on the ideas of a non-chronological narrative in films such as Pulp Fiction. We have also broken a few by not establishing any ideology or much of a characterisation, however I feel that this is to keep the audience interested, not giving to much away to make them want to see more.

Research: Conventions of an Independent Film.

Something that we have been thinking about almost since we came up with the first idea for our opening sequence is what genre it falls into. At the begging we had no idea, however as our idea developed and at the end a policeman appeared we started to think that it was veering off towards the side of crime drama, however as the storyboard began production and was completed, the police officer was cut and we were back to simply ‘Drama’. Drama is a genre of film in it’s self, but it covers a vast amount of sub genres to a point where we cannot use it on its own to do research. So as I was walking home from school today i was trying to figure it out, and there really is no real way to narrow it down into a clear sub genre of drama, and then it hit me, this opening sequence fits into the sub genre simply of Indie.

I needed to do some research into the codes and conventions of an indie film, partly because of the blog, put partly to make sure we could call it the opening sequence to an “indie” film. Considering Napoleon Dynamite is an independent film and I have written an analysis of the titles to that film I had some kind of grounds on this.

According to the AboutFilmSchools website the codes and conventions of an indie film are as follows:

• Author’s movies, the director plays a preponderant role and it almost always uses its own scripts and takes charge of other aspects like sound and photography allowing him to express creatively and to capture its feelings and restlessness.

• Thematic, it faces a series of topics that conventional films don’t take in consideration such as prostitution, drugs, homosexuality, the family decadence, etc.

• Financing, the independent film directors consider that, the more relationship with a study, the smaller independence, for this reason, its filming doesn’t fall inside the rigid schemes of the big film studies.

• Aesthetics, it includes different formats and ideas, they use different techniques such as black and white, shiny colours, etc.

• Beyond these characteristics, an independent film director should possess an own artistic vision that takes him to be free in the creative process.

Considering that there are only three of us working on the film (excluding acting) i think we fall into the first point because we are all directors and are sticking to our own idea, script and plot. As I have pointed out before we deal with important issues like those described in the point so we are following that convention. As for the third point, all the props we have already and the ones we will buy can be purchased for under £5, our camera is borrowed and we have free access to editing software. The fourth point describes aesthetics which we could include in our final media product in order to follow the codes.

I have also looked at a famous title sequences from an independent film to learn more about them. I used the opening from reservoir dogs:

This title sequence deals with a few of the same ideas as ours; the idea of menial everyday tasks building up to a major event involving death and the idea of some kind of time jump. This idea of using a contrast between everyday tasks and something more macabre is one that fits into the third part of the original list.

Source: http://www.aboutfilmschools.com/study/independent.asp