EVALUATION QUESTION 1

In what ways does your opening sequence use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real opening sequences?

Characterisation – Jordan

In this scene our main goal was to try and show Jordan as being an average person, a person who would not be expected to be involved in the criminal activities portrayed in crime dramas such as this, we wanted to make it clear that this character was the victim in this plot, in one respect this goes against many racial stereotypes often perceived by people, generally people would automatically perceive Jordan as the criminal, whereas we have gone against the conventions and made Jordan our main protagonist. I believe we were quite successful in making Jordan appear to be the victim, in this shot there is nothing that would convict him of being a criminal.

Characterisation - Maddy

In the shots involving Maddy, prior to the appearance of the criminal, we tried to portray Maddy as a very innocent character, we did this through shots involving her doing stuff around the kitchen, which unintendedly follows a very bad sexist stereotype of the wife being in the kitchen. Though unintentional, in one respect it does help people understand that this character is a person’s (presumably Jordan’s) wife, she also does not have anything that would give off any sort of impression that she is in some way a criminal. I believe these shots would’ve been better if we had made it more obvious that this character was Jordan’s wife, we could’ve done this by giving Maddy a ring to wear and put a lot of emphasis on the fact that she was wearing a ring, for example if we had done a close-up shot of her ring.

Characterisation - Criminal

In this shot our antagonist is clearly depicted as such, he is shown putting on his balaclava, obviously gearing up for some kind of criminal activity, this follows a very cliché stereotype that criminals wear balaclavas whenever they are going to do a robbery or attack in order to conceal their identity, I believe we made good use of this stereotype as our antagonist is clearly about to be involved in some sort of crime, and the balaclava is used in order to hide his face – as any stereotypical criminal would do. One thing which I believe we should alter is the fact that the criminal not only rings the doorbell for the house, but does so without wearing gloves, not only would this logically leave fingerprints, it also isn’t the sort of thing a criminal would do as they would easily be caught if doing such a thing.

Comparisons with Other films– Welcome to the Punch

The criminals wear masks to hide their identity, much like the criminals in our

opening sequence.

The criminals are wearing dark suits which connote evil/darkness and shady

activities.

The protagonist is wearing casual clothes – much like our opening

sequence.

Setting

Our setting was a quiet suburban house, shown in the a previous blog post titled “Location Recon” and at the link below, this house is situated in an area which drastically opposes the inner urban stereotypes of crime movies, most are perceived as taking place in the centre of cities, whereas ours takes place in a quiet suburb which wouldn’t be expected to be subject to crime, that is one of the reasons we chose this setting, it creates the concept that Jordan may have moved to such an area on purpose, to get away from his criminal past and live a good life in peace, without any reminders of his past. To improve the way we showed our setting, I believe we should have included some establishing shots of our area, rather than opening with a shot of just the window of the house, I think we did quite poorly in the respects of creating our setting.

http://slide.ly/view/00c025308359f7e9a25f7de28e7e2b17

Genre

Our genre was quite obviously crime, in that sense I believe we portrayed our genre well, the use of the balaclavas, prop guns and dark clothing for the criminals really followed the common conventions which would be expected of a crime film, on the other hand, we did oppose that convention later on in which part Luke is wearing a green jacket and blue tracksuit bottoms, we did this costume design in order to create an idea of an impromptu criminal, one who was not an expert in the field of robberies, or shooting a weapon for that matter, this could create the idea that, in his clumsiness, this inexperienced criminal had accidentally shot his partner in crime, as opposed to shooting Jordan.