In what ways does your media product use, develop

or challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

Evaluation

Characters

In my opening sequence I stuck to the conventionalcharacters normally seen in a thriller film. This characteris normally a young male who is a police man or exdetective. Although at first I wanted to challenge thisconvention, but I thought it was best to stick with a maleyoung lead because this would help my film appeal tomales and as well as this we wanted a vulnerablecharacter, and this is stereotypically a female. ThisWorked out well in our opening sequence because ourmale needs to be strong and powerful enough to stick upfor himself, plus the relationship between the male andthe vulnerable female creates an interesting storyline. 

Characters

On the left is our main character, and on the right is the vulnerable girl. You can also see the change in colour here. How we used brighter colour on the vulnerable girl, and the darkness to portray the mysterious male.

ThemesIn my research, I found out that a key theme that runs in a thrillerFilm is romance because this gives the audience something else tofollow and relate to. I kept this convention in because it addedanother situation to the opening sequence. We used this in ouropening sequence by including a flashback of our main characteron a date with his girlfriend. In our audience feedback we hadsome people getting confused between our main storyline in thepresent, to the flashback. So from this feedback we felt we neededto make the flashback stand out more from the rest of thesequence. We achieved this by changing the lighting to somethingbrighter, and brightness connotes happiness, so this helped tomake a distinct difference. In our final draft of the openingsequence our flashback looks well edited, and fits into thesequence well and hopefully Our audience will be less confused by

its position in the sequence now.

Themes

This is a screenshot of our flashback scene. As you can see it is also slightly blurry and this helps create a difference between this scene and the rest of the opening sequence.

MusicAnother convention of a thriller film which I found out in myresearch was that the sound in a thriller film is non-diegetic music.This helps to create tension. In our opening sequence we kept tothis convention, by using a piece of parallel music, so that itwas relevant to the scene. The music definitely helps our openingsequence because without it, it doesn’t look very professional andthe sequence is boring.  I got the idea of using music over the topof our sequence from the film ‘James Bond’. This is because eachof the films has a different soundtrack which helps had tension tothe opening sequence and I thought our opening sequence couldhave done with its own soundtrack to.

Click on the speaker to listen to a preview of the music we used.

Introduction of CharactersThe conventions of an opening sequence include titles and anintroduction to the characters. Our opening sequence follows bothof these conventions by including titles throughout the openingsequence, and introducing the majority of the characters whichwill be in the rest of the film. The narrative in our openingsequence follows our main character through a calm action ofmaking a cup of tea, which people do everyday, to then hearingthe news report and his world turning upside down. We alsointroduced his girlfriend in the opening sequence because she is akey character in the rest of the film and then the family as wellbecause they add setting.

Continued…

Titles… The titles we used were the production company logo, which

we created ourselves, and the names of the director, producer and actors in the film. These are conventional of an opening sequence because similar titles were used in all the films I looked at during my research. At first our titles did not look so good, because we could not get a font which reflected the thriller genre, however we managed to find one and now the titles look acceptable. This font is bold and in capitals this makes it stand out, but is not distracting from the story. Also, they have shadow on them, because shadows connote mystery which is a convention of a thriller. As well as this, we spent a lot of time getting our production title and logo to look good because we thought this was an important element of an opening sequence. We also added a beeping sound to our production titles because this was something that a lot of production companies use for example 20th Century Fox have music whilst their titles move.

TitlesTo the left is an example of one of titles displaying an actors name. I think they look well presented.

To the left is two screenshots, one of our production titles and the other of the title with our production name on it, which is also our

logo.