Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media

product use, develop or challenge forms and

conventions of real media products?

Jess Marshall and Lauren Key

Before we planned for our project, we first looked at a number of film openings, such as Se7en and also some unusual openings that we wouldn’t have usually watched to give us some ideas and also to note the kind of thing they include and in what style, particularly those in the thriller genre, as we were aiming for our opening scene to look like a real film, abiding by structural forms and conventions.

We took note of a number of things that we otherwise wouldn’t have noticed or thought to have included in our work, such as studio idents, how the sound is constructed over the ident with the sound of the action on screen and in what order credits appeared during title sequences. We soon realised that there is a lot more to the opening two minutes of a film than introducing the storyline. Although we did try to structure our opening as a real film would, there are some things that we felt that we wanted to do slightly differently.

Real Media Products

During our research we realised that there were three parts to the first few minutes of a film that we definitely needed to include in order to make our project look like the first few minutes of a film:

• Studio Idents – In all cases we saw idents right at the beginning and opening the film before any action is shown.

• An introduction to the storyline (or lack of) – The action that takes place during the opening usually explained what the plot of the film was going to be about, or in some cases did the opposite to leave the viewer needing to keep watching to find out what is happening.

• Credits – Either text in the corner of a shot or as a separate title sequence, this lists the names of actors and actresses and also directors and producers.

What are the forms and conventions of an opening

scene?

The first thing we saw in most cases during a film opening was a studio ident, in some cases there was more than one. For some films in the horror genre, looking at the Saw series in particular, we noticed that a recognised ident was often adapted (usually with a change of colour) to fit the more sinister storyline. We felt that we needed our ident to have a darker, mysterious feel, so we began thinking about the colour palette, name and image.

We noticed that the studio idents didn’t usually contain sound, other than the major production companies such as Paramount and Universal. Although we felt that in order to show the progression of our patient’s release, we wanted to add a sound bridge that came in before the action was shown, which helped to show a journey rather than mis-matched shots where our patient was packing one minute and walking away the next. It also helped to introduce sound to the scene without it being too sudden or out of place.

Studio Idents

Obviously, we were unable to create an ident as complex as Universal Studios, so we looked into more simple independent production logos and found that many lacked colour and contained a simple outlined shape and said for example ‘A ___ Production’ or ‘___ Entertainment’. So we tried to adapt this form of ident, making it our own, but still using the same text format and image sizing to ensure that what we created still looked like a professional studio ident.

Here is a screen capture of our ident (DreamCatcher Studios) and also some that we looked at to help us develop our own.

StorylineThe first few minutes of a film often explain what is going on and let the audience know what the rest of the film is going to be about. They also tell the viewer what genre the film will be in. So we decided to keep our opening quite mysterious, with the voice over being the main indicator of what is happening on screen. This puts our opening scene into the thriller genre as hopefully our

To add to the mystery, we decided not to show our patient’s face until the last shot, neither is the doctor, who show’s the patient out. Unlike in an opening such as Reservoir Dogs, this would mean our audience is unaware of the identity of the character, and therefore unaware as to what her personality or mental state is, which would help the rest of the plot to unravel as being quite unexpected (if we were to make the rest of the film).

audience won’t fully know what the story is going to be about, as the last shot before the title sequence is left for their own interpretation following what is briefly shown in a previous shot.

Title SequenceWe watched a few film openings and realised that nearly all showed credits of the main characters or directors/production company. We noticed that some showed their credits in a title sequence as opposed to having text popping up in the corner of the shot. We looked particularly at the titles of the film Se7en and decided we really wanted to have a go at creating something similar.

Most of the shots in the title sequence of Se7en seemed to be quite static and included a lot of close up shots. The editing, text and sound really drove the credits, fitting together incredibly well. We adapted the form that we saw and made it our own by creating a police desk and shooting close ups of different parts of the desk. We didn’t use still shots because we wanted the shots to have movement and shake a little to give a sense of unease.

FormattingWe were aware that we needed to ensure that all of our text was the same size, colour and font so that it was all uniform. This is the case in most title sequences and we decided that in order to maintain a professional quality we had to keep everything the same. An example of a film that doesn’t do this would be ‘Pulp Fiction’, which uses about three or four different fonts and colours. However I don’t think this would work for us until we make a film at the standard of Tarantino’s and want it to look a little more independent!

We feel that we have look at enough real film openings to know that we have created a film that looks realistic, conforming to the conventions and structures of opening scenes. We have took inspiration from a number of films however we have added in our own ideas to make it our own.