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.
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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.
Willheart 