Conventions of an Opening

Sequence

The purpose of an opening sequence is to establish the mood and visual character of a film and introduce the viewer to all or some of these elements: Characters, Locations, Narrative/Plot, Themes, Visual, Genre.

In an opening sequence we have found our that it is conventional to include the name of production company, the director, the producer, the executive producer, the top billing actors and not forgetting the movie title.

The opening credits are usually shown as text superimposed on a blank screen or static image but sometimes it is shown on top of action in the show. It may or may not be accompanied with music.

Conventions of Genre -

Thriller

The aim of the thriller is to create suspense and excitement for the audience, it should keep the audience engaged and on the edge of their seats. The plot normally builds towards some sort of climax.

Thrillers include numerous, often overlapping sub-genres.

Fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes characterize thrillers. The heroes must put a stop to the plans of more powerful and better-equipped villains.

Literary devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers are used extensively.

Technical Elements to the Thriller

Genre – Editing & Sound

In Thrillers we would usually see editing/colour correcting that would make the picture darker and more low key, this would help hide the villain. In addition we normally see a lot of changes in the camera angle.

Quick cuts

Flash backs, in some thrillers you are made to feel sorry for the protagonist with the use of flashbacks.

Editing shots together, which when juxtaposed creates a single. This would be montage editing.

When there is a lot of tension building up we usually hear orchestral non-diegetic sound, on the other hand when the pace is sped up we would hear rhythmic music, atonal music reflects enigma.

Diegetics sounds, are there to create an enigmatic narrative.

Conventions of a

Psychological Thriller

Due to our opening sequence having the sub genre psychological, we had to consider the conventions that would portray the genre that we wanted with our film.

Reality – The quality of being real. Characters often try to determine what is true and what is not within the narrative.

Perception – A person's own interpretation of the world around him through his senses. Often characters misperceive the world around them, or their perceptions are altered by outside factors within the narrative (see Unreliable narrator).

Mind – The human consciousness; the location for personality, thought, reason, memory, intelligence and emotion. The mind is often used as a location for narrative conflict, where characters battle their own minds to reach a new level of understanding or perception.

Existence/Purpose – The object for which something exists; an aim or a goal humans strive towards to understand their reason for existence. Characters often try to discover what their purpose is in their lives and the narrative's conflict often is a way for the characters to discover this purpose.

Identity – The definition of one's self. Characters often are confused about or doubt who they are and try to discover their true identity.

Death – The cessation of life. Characters either fear or have a fascination with death.

How we applied

Psychological Conventions

Reality – The use of an innocent terrorist created questioning of the truth within our production. The use of modern stereotypes to represent a terrorist which made the audience question whether he was the villain or the white man was.

Perception –Our production shows how white people can misjudge those of different races, and from modern stereotypes that have been created over the years has formulated opinions towards those of Muslim race, that those of Muslim race are terrorists. The white man Rory assumes Omar is a terrorist from the way he looks and his religious beliefs.

Mind – In the opening sequence of our production, you see the interrogation scene which is a location of the protagonists mind which shows that we have used these psychological conventions.

Existence/Purpose – Rory the protagonist uses conflict to find out his true purpose in life. The conflict from terrorism shows him what he believes his purpose is.

Identity – We have applied this to our production as Rory, the white man, has doubts of the way he wants to live. His investigations into terrorism is how he discovers his true identity, which makes him follow the path of terrorism.

Death – When our protagonist turns to terrorism later on in our production, he becomes fascinated in the way in which terrorists take their lives in such violent ways and we would later find out that our protagonist takes his life because of the person he becomes.

Conventions of Narrative

Structure

These are conventional narratives…Linear, omniscient, non-linear and restricted.

When we were structuring our film, we had to consider our institution. Due to our film being distributed by an independent distribution company, Focus Features, which is owned by Universal will have a lot of financial support when marketing the film. However the independence must still be obvious in how the film is structured, and therefore the conventions must be considered. Thrillers are usually made up of a complex narrative structure, with false paths, clues and resolutions. This will have an effect of leaving a strong enigma by keeping the audience questioning the film and keeping their full attention by having them trying to solve the questions.

A narrative pattern of establishing enigmas are present, which the viewer expects to be resolved. This keeps the audiences concentration as they will not want to stop watching the film without finding out what happens. The audience will sometimes enter their own world within the film whilst watching the film and will tends to put themselves in the characters shoes.

Our films narrative was not typical of a studio production as we didn't’t use a typical and traditional narrative structure. You would commonly see a narrative which consists of an Equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium, where the new equilibrium would resolve the bad happenings of the disequilibrium. We used an equilibrium and a disequilibrium because of independent nature of our film. We thought that this would create controversy.

Institutional Conventions

Independent Films typically have a low budget. This is based on the fact that most independent distribution company's have sufficient backing in terms of funding. They will use below the line marketing and will heavily rely on the use of web 2.0 and social media. However our distribution company is owned by a conglomerate distributor and therefore this will increase the marketing budget. Thus making the marketing of our film better than the marketing of traditional independently distributed films.