In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?(ie of film openings)
We have print screened nine distinct frames from the opening to our thriller project.
The first shot, showing the title of our film, is a typical name for a thriller genre film and allows the audience to automatically become aware that both the film will be a thriller, but it also gives a small insight into the narrative of the film.
The second shot shows the location of our opening scene - a cemetery. A cemetery is a typical setting for thriller films due to its' connection with death, ghosts and other dark goings on. Due to this setting there can be no confusion to the genre of our film, and we consciously chose this location as one which fit in with our narrative but was also typical of the genre of our film.
The third shot shows a car, which is our main prop, driving away. The car is a main feature in our film opening, with the narrative heavily revolving around it, although it was very difficult to film and get the right shots as the roads were somewhat busy. It is difficult to say that using a car as a prop is typical of only a thriller genre as they do feature regularly in all genres of film, however, when looking at our title, you can see that it is obvious a car will be prominently featured.
The fourth shot shows group member Saul at a computer using editing programs. We used iMac computers and the main program we used was iMovie, but photoshop was also used to edit photos. We considered the typical conventions of the thriller genre when editing, and we used a lot of quick cuts, adding in eerie, dark music and we also used video effects such as one named 'bloom' to create a blurry effect to symbolise the characters' past.
The fifth shot shows the title of our film once again, displaying the type of font and style we decided to use. We chose to use the standard arial font in block capitals and make it quite large to emphasise our title. We used a black background, which is seen commonly in thrillers, with black being a dark, ominous colour. We also used a special effect whereby our film is shown through the words in our title allowing the audience to preview our establishing shot of the cemetery through the words.
The sixth shot shows a scene from a flashback in our opening, in which our main character, who is also our antagonist, is in a cemetery, visiting her young daughters grave. We chose to create our opening this way as we believed that it was a simple and interesting way to attract the audience and set up the narrative. This is a very typical opening of a thriller film, due to our creative decisions such as the flashbacks (commonly used in thriller films), the quick camera cuts and close-ups and the overall narrative.
The seventh frame is also a shot from a flashback section of our opening, establishing the setting of the cemetery, once again portraying the 'bloom' effect used in our flashback scenes. This is typical of the thriller genre as mentioned before. Also, establishing shots in thriller films regularly feature nature, which we consciously took into account and included in our film, making our opening a conventional thriller.
The eighth shot introduces the main character in our thriller, who is crying at a gravestone. This is once again a flashback scene and due to the connection with graves and cemeteries, and the thriller genre, this makes our opening a conventional one. A medium shot was used to express the characters emotions and feelings towards what the audience will know as the death of her young daughter.
The last shot shows another character from our film in a close-up in the midst of a number of quick-cuts to give effect to the car accident at this point. We were able to include special effects with the use of iMovie included a 'flash effect' which is shown in picture above, allowing us to make our production more realistic and effective at attracting audiences. This is once again typical of the thriller genre.
This picture above shows the preliminary task we have learnt how to edit a video and new camera shot techniques. During this task we have learnt the following: 180 degree rule, match on action and short/reverse shot. The image above is images that have been screen grabed from our preliminary task showing the 3 camera work tasks. The image below shows 9 frames from the opening to our thriller "Hit and Run" and the type of shot that was used to create meaning and attract the audience.
As a group and individually we learnt a lot about editing and filming before our first preliminary task and our end product. Although we did not use any of the 3 shots used in our preliminary we did consider using them as we grasped how to film them in the continuity editing task. We did use a wide range of different shot types and camera movements as you can see in the image above. As a group we all felt much more confident in filming after our first preliminary task as we all had a go at using the camera, this made it much easier for us to film our actual thriller as we had previous experiences with using the cameras and equipment.
