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.

Tweaking Our Cut

Now that we have a basic cut of our opening sequence we could begin tweaking it to make it exactly how we would like it. To begin with we showed our basic cut to our teacher to get some feedback. Once we had the feedback we began working on the sequence to improve it based on it. To begin with our teacher raised a good point which was that although the actually suicide shots were good, if the main character were to kill himself this early on in the film, the audience may not have a great deal of interest in watching the rest of it. Even if the film focuses on the month leading up to this point they would still know that the character was dead at the end. for this reason we decided to put in another shot just after the suicide shot. It was actually part of one of the previous shots that we slowed down and put in reverse, so instead of bringing the knife to his wrists and cutting them it looks like the whole suicide shot was him thinking through his death and then snapping out of it, hesitating and pulling the knife away slowly, leading to the audience wanting to know if he has decided against it or if he is purely putting it off. We felt that his was a far better end to the sequence and then moved onto some other minor sections so we began those with cutting certain shots out such as the cereal part. We did this because, although it was a part that we liked and thought was good, it was unnecessary and once deleted it made the sequence look smoother. With this in mind we thought about the rest of the sequence and how it did go on for longer than we would have liked it to. We felt that it if it was shorter then it would look and feel more like an opening sequence so we set the goal of bringing it down from 3 minutes to between 2 and 2 and a half. This was not going to be easy as we wanted to keep all of the main parts of it to convey the story, however we felt that this would be possible.

We decided to start by editing everything extremely precisely and not miss any opportunities. This meant trimming anything we could of each clip, every half a second matters. So that is what we did to each and every clip, cutting of as much as we could (without making the clips look to fast or too jumpy, we cut as much of as we felt we could without ruining each shot). As well as trimming we also cut out a few more unnecessary shots, including two of the transition shots in the drug deal.

With this all done we decided that we were happy with our opening sequence and that the length, now roughly 2:20, was much better. At this point we changed some transitions, partly on our teachers advise (the cross dissolves between the shots as the character wakes up and making the colour effects appear earlier as the character takes cocaine the second time), but mostly on our own decision (some flashes here and there, mostly where the character takes drugs).

With all this in mind we showed some classmates and and teachers who seemed to be impressed and decided that we were happy with our work, and with the positive feedback we had got from others

Issue Research: Suicide

Our idea for our opening sequence so far contain a lot of important issues that are very serious and must be treated with respect. These issues include Suicide and drug use which are both subjects that must be treated carefully and must be represented accurately and fairly in order for them to have their full effect on the viewer. These issues have been included by us for a reason, mostly because they are key to our plot, but also because they help to make our representation of the character as accurate as it possibly can be. Because of these issues and the level of respect they must be treated with i have decided to some research into them and find out how they really affect people in real life in order to make our portrayle as accurate as it can be. The most serious issue we are dealing with is suicide. Due to how serious this issue is i decide to got straight tho the NHS website for some facts and figures on suicicde. I went to this website because it is credible, government run website and the information there is very reliable.

“Suicide is a leading cause of death, particularly in young people, both in England and worldwide. It is estimated that around 1 million people will die by suicide worldwide each year. During 2008, there were 4,282 suicides in England.

Attempted suicides are much more common than actual suicides. There are at least 140,000 attempted suicides each year in England and Wales.”

From this i have learnt that suicide, no matter how uncomfortable an issue, is more common that people would think and that altough our character is in an extreme minority, it is not as extreme as we thought.

“Women are more likely to attempt suicide or engage in other types of self-harming behaviour. However, men are more likely to succeed and die by suicide. Suicide rates are three times higher in men than in women.

Men under the age of 35 are particularly at risk of dying by suicide. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in England and Wales in this age group, after accidental death.”

This information lets me know that our choice of character is a very accurate representation of a real life suicide victim as he falls into the age and gender categories that are most at risk of suicide. This is helpful for us because now we know that our concept is accurate to the real life issue which helps it to maximise its effectiveness.

Source: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Suicide/Pages/Facts.aspx

First Meeting

For my course work I have been given the task of producing a 2 minute long opening and title sequence that could be used in a film along with this blog to document the process. To produce this sequence I am working in a group of three with my friends Sam Holt and Toby Broughton.

After some of the research into title/opening sequences of some films the next step is to come up with an idea about what are opening title sequence will consist of, ie. Genre and plot. Today around lunch we had a meeting where we brainstormed some ideas about what kind of film this opening sequence could be for and what the opening sequence could consist of. After a few ideas we decided that we would produce the opening sequence for a drama set in the present day. The opening sequence would show the character of a man who has a reasonably sad life go about his everyday business from him waking up in the morning all the way into the evening where he will then take his own life. While all this is happening titles will be appearing on the screen. The sequence will conclude with a title that takes the viewer back in time to some point in the very recent past where the man wakes up again except this time he is happy. We feel that this idea is strong because we can use a wide range of creative and technical production techniques as well as it being a plot that could be easily built on meaning that the audience will be gripped and want to know what will happen next if it were in a real film.

This was an extremely productive process as now we have an idea to base all the pre production work around, meaning that we can now start to get everything else we need to sort out before we begin production.