AS media studies Evaluation

1. In what ways does your opening sequence use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of other opening sequences?

CharacterisationOur opening sequence presents the characters using the costumes in the mise en scene. We have a stereotypical detective and his accomplice of the 19th and early 20th century both wearing a suit and fedora whilst the inmate wears striped clothes supposed to resemble the striped clothes inmates sometimes wear at prisons or concentration camps. The camera takes high angle shots of the inmate which suggests that he is of lower status than the rest of the detective and accomplice. At the same

time low angle shots are taken of the accomplice, which suggests that he is of higher status than the inspector and inmate contrary to other films of the same genre which aims to present the detective as superior. However in the movie Sherlock Holmes Sherlock and Watson are seen as equal in terms of class and often Watson is seen as higher than Sherlock which is the same thing that we do in our opening

sequence.SettingIn our opening sequence we have no shots of the outside world which is a huge contradiction to other film opening sequences like dirty harry where it has several wide shots of the city as an establishing shot or even downtown abbey which usually has wide shots to establish location. We do however use mise en scene to our advantage to establish the inner location of the prison, for example we use a close-up shot of the tape recorder to establish clearly that this is an interrogation room.

GenreOur Genre is a psychological crime thriller which and our aim is to use subtle approaches to thrill the audience as well as give them an intelligently designed crime story. In our opening sequence we went for the simplistic subtle approach by only using music to build tension at certain times and we used the lack of music or dialogue sometimes in order to build tension. We decided to go for a psychological crime thriller so that we wouldn’t go too far into the unknown experimental side of film genres but we still wanted to interesting and independent in our style.

Narrative & visual styleOur Narrative was based on the detective and accomplice looking for a murderer and interrogating a mad suspect. It is a very typical story among other films of the same genre like “silence of the lambs” or “taking lives”. The rest of the story after the opening sequence follows a chain of deaths which leave the victims mad just before dying which is why it is called Insanity. In this way we were able to link the title to the narrative well and intelligently like other film titles.

One thing that was unique in itself was the visual style of the credits and title. The font and colour of the text was meant to symbolise disorder and bloodlust. I feel this worked well and the popping in and out also worked well for being unexpected and bold.

Conclusion

In conclusion our opening sequence doesn’t challenge much of the well-known stereotypes of psychological crime thrillers but we do manage to adapt and take well known elements and use them to our advantage such as taking subtle approaches to our film.

2. How does your opening sequence represent particular social groups?In our opening sequence only two social groups are represented, the criminals and the detectives.

Our detective, Kamil wears a striped suit and fedora. He is a white male with a growing beard. From the offset we can already see that he is of a higher social class with his suit and fedora and calm manner. The mise en scene and screenplay keep this character looking upper class. The camera shots are always eye level keeping the character more apathetic to the audience as he should be as the main character. Our actor Kamil is ideal for this role as he is an average height white male. These are most likely the same characteristics as the people who are going to be watching this film. His calm manner also makes him more apathetic to the audience.

Our accomplice, Daniel also has similar attire in the mise en scene, to our detective suggesting the same class. However throughout the opening sequence he actually seems to be of slightly higher class. This is shown in the low angle shots of Daniel in some scenes as well as the fact that he remains standing up during the interrogation. The screenplay has him bash the table to get answers from the suspect which asserts his dominance.

Our suspect wears completely different attire with striped clothing and scruffy hair. This costume is meant to establish a clear difference between the detectives and the suspect. He is also black which in the era presented a segregated minority was. Being a segregated minority the camera shots were high angles most of the time to establish inferiority. We also didn’t have any females during the scene which could be seen as the segregation of women from that era as they were not involved.

In conclusion our opening sequence uses mise en scene and camera shots to represent social groups in our film which are well associated to the era we are trying to present.

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our film is a low budget film created by a small team. The kind of distributor would have to be a low costing distributor which probably only releases locally at first. The first place to show this film would be at a place like a film festival where many other films with the same kind of content are shown.

But to get the film out to the greater public would be a completely different endeavour. Because we don’t have enough money to advertise for our film like large firms do we would need to use things like social networking or word of mouth to distribute our product. One very good example is how Monsters used foursquare social networking to have “infected zones” which made each enlisted city an “infected zone”. This worked very impressively and was able to advertise the product well.

If we were to do something we could use a more popular social networking site like instagram to advertise our film or similarly to Paranormal activity, we could show our films to various events become successful by being bought out by or invested in from a larger distributional firm. Either way we would have to start sharing our work in the social media and most importantly film events.

4. Who would be the audience for your opening sequence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TsPFhLRz_Q&safe=active

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

To grab the attention of the audience we wanted them to feel immersed into the film which is a reason we used silence to bring tension, because tension immerses the audience into a film with anticipation of a climax. If the audience is feeling anticipation then they will direct their attention toward whatever the tension is coming from. From people who have watched the film I have asked what drew them into the film and one response was the use of silence during the interrogation when the detectives were asking questions and the suspect kept silent. Apparently it built tension which I believe was enhanced by the use of sound from all the parts before the interrogation.

As well as feeling immersed we also wanted the audience to feel involved which is why we included them in the naming of our film. Our choice of name was between the name Insanity and Cold case. In order to choose we went around asking people around what name they would most like to have for the film after we told them the narrative. Doing this means that the audience had some involvement in the film before it had even been made which made it in a way their film. The idea of being part of the film attracts the audience because they want to see something that they have been involved in. This was a very clever idea that I believe had worked. Here is how the tally eventually came out.

One side effect of this technique is that some of the audience may feel worse about the film if their chosen name wasn’t used for the film. In this case the scores were very close which suggests that it is possible that this technique worked somewhat to our detriment however because the name “Insanity” won by one vote we have in fact won over the majority keeping them feeling like the film is partially theirs and therefore attracting them in.

To make the content accessible we uploaded the film to You Tube which is an easy way to distribute film content, because it is a free popular website. Uploading it onto a site like YouTube also lets the community communicate with us and helps the filmmakers keep in touch which means the site can be used to address the audience. This again lets the audience be a part of the film community which means that they can become more involved with the film thus attracting the audience more.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?In constructing our product we have used technology in varying and interesting ways. In particular we were able to use the computers and their software to edit the film and insert the title and credits.

Using the computers we found that you can add a lot of different effects to change the film slightly in different ways which you couldn’t do before our current age of technology, for example adding a colour hue to suggest different emotions in certain scenes, like red to display a mood for romance or bloodlust. Sound can also be enhanced by adding diegetic or non-diegetic sound in order to emphasise a moment, for example squashing a bee can be enhanced by adding a loud scrunch sound when editing. Another good example is the kushelov effect which uses editing of frames to give different meanings to expressions in film.

The camera also allowed us to take many different takes so that we could get a perfect scene. We could also use cameras and keep the files as a good suggestion for the location for one of our scenes. Because of the rise of technology in the world we are able to make better quality films on lower budgets which mean smaller teams of filmmakers and people who aren’t part of the large film industries can make and sell good quality films without being too far behind the bigger firms.

Using technology helped us plan our film by using the cameras to view different locations and researching various techniques. For example whilst planning we looked at the site “art of the title” which had shown us examples of other title sequences and what they had done to grab the attention of the audience and give a good first impression.

In conclusion I think that technology has granted the film maker greater opportunities and access which we can use. It helps with research and planning for the film, with the generation of pie charts and access to reviews, as well as enhancing the film with sound camera and editing.

7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN-JDiu_63k&safe=active