Evaluation - Question 1

"In what ways does your media product use, develop or challange forms and conventions of real media products?"

Our brief stated to make an opening sequence so we researched into the conventions of an opening sequence and how they do the following:

• Give the film a farmilar form for the audience to follow.
• Set the scene.
• Introduce the film plot and lure the audience in.
• Make the genre clear

Our opening sequence follows forms similar to 'The Descent (Marshall,2005)' opening, with credits fading in and out for the duration of the opening sequence before fading to the main title, 'Reservation', at the end. This is the farmiliar form of a film opening sequence.

Click link for The Descent clip.
(http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=WWF6_rSyYcY&feature=PlayList&p=762617D7BA39EF4B&playnext=1&index=21)

We set the scene of our film well by introducing the eerie basement location with the first three shots (pictures from left to right - flickering lights, cracked brick walls and dripping pipe), with the murky darkness of the basement remaining vital to the chilling atmosphere we wanted to portray.

We set up the film plot gradually, although the outline of it was quite obvious from the setting. The minute of dialogue between the two main characters did not give the plot away but introduced important traits such as the killer's apparant politeness, but sudden streaks of anger (an example of binary oppositions used in Levi-Strauss's narrative theory; good and evil). The reasons for this temprement remains unknown to the audience, creating an enigma (we researched how enigma codes are used in opening sequences to lure the audience into watching the rest of the film - Roland Barthes's narrative theory), as does the reason for the capturing. All the audience know is that the killer is keeping multiple victims in and abandoned basement.

Example enigma from 'Reservation': The killer picking up the crow-bar provoked the victim to fear him, but he returns it to its place. What is the killers intention? Is he actually going to kill him?

The genre we focused on most was horror.

To introduce the genre, our opening used the following conventions of horror to appeal to horror fans:

• Moody, mysterious, unsettling music, rising and falling with the dramatic action - loud parts accompanied the killers anger whilst quiet parts gave a lonely, silent feel (e.g. the dramatic music in 'Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)' is only used during the killings, otherwise it is silent).
• Typical horror mis-en-scene; dark and murky location, low-key lighting, dark-clothed killer, shadows, night-time (e.g. the lake location and night-times used for the killings in 'Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)'.
• Fade transitions to give an unknown time period, with the cross-dissolve montage of our victim waking up being confusing (e.g. 'Hostel (Roth, 2005)' uses this to introduce its first victim, tied to a chair)
• The classic horror narrative pattern - an adaption of Vladimir Propp's character role theory but using villain and victim roles instead of villain and hero (e.g. Mike Myers in 'Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)' killing teenagers who are his victims).
• Consistent use of continuity in real-time (except the opening montage of location and waking-up clips) including a shot/reverse shot dialogue scene using MCU's with establishing shots of the conversation at LS, and then a sequence following the killer out of the basement strung together with good matched on action.
  A shock/twist ending to the scene - a bloody hand smacking the door glass showing there is more than one victim (e.g. a car crash at the end of the opening scene to 'The Descent (Marshall,2005)').
• Typical themes of revenge, evil, violence and death - these are not obvious at the start but it is clear the killer has some sort of motive, which could be pure evil or revenge, and it seems as if he has a violent manner. The life of the victim could be at stake but we do not know enough about the killer yet (e.g. killer driven by pure evil in 'Halloween' but revenge is the theme in 'What Lies Beneath (Zemeckis, 2000)' - ours could be either).

A special convention we used to introduce our subgenre as torture, was the dark but brightly-lit basement location for a cold, metallic feel - used in both 'Saw (Wan, 2004)' and 'Hostel' - the most successful torture films to date. This subgenre is part of a newer breed of horror films, so some classic conventions we broke:

• Our character appeared friendly rather than the favoured stereotypical evil killer.
• Blue filter gel gave a unique blue-look rather than favoured black darkness.

The first point gave our film an original plot, with the twisted hospitality of the killer being unique. It allowed for subtle irony in his dialogue and the main title (the hotel-like hint in 'Reservation'). This is much like in 'Saw' where the killers intentions of giving his victims the chance to escape by changing their sinful ways is some what admirable.

The second point could be considered a convention of modern niche horror films. 'Saw' (left) often had a blue or green tint and 'Hostel' (right) was more yellow.

The last convention of a real film we broke was the classic narrative pattern (Todorov's narrative theory - equibrium then disruption then resolution). Our film opening did not begin at equilibrium but began with a disruption, the victim having been captured. Our film could go back to an equlibrium point after this opening and work its way back to this disruption point before offering a resolution - a technique used by many films in some forms of the horror/thriller genre (e.g. 'Severence (Smith,2006)' from the comedy/horror genre and 'Goodfellas (Scorsese,1990)' from the thriller/gangster genre).

As well as breaking conventions, our film opening tries to create its own unique style similar to that of the 'Saw' films:

• Slow paced and heldback information.
• Moments of faster pace for dramatic, jumpy effect and to highlight key information revealed.
• Cold, metallic feel to the basement location because of the blueness of the image.
• Confusion points that delibrately unsettle the bye use of cross-dissolve , stop-start rhythm and feel, scrawly uneven credit font and size, flickering lights (although many people commented on how this did not unsettle but more disrupted them from what was going on in the scene).

To summarise, our opening sequence used a mixture of opening sequence conventions, horror genre conventions, enigma codes, modified modern horror conventions and a unique style specific to the torture subgenre as to provide a farmiliar form for all audiences to follow but give them something new and unique - like most real film products do.