Sunday, 1 May 2011

Post 12.1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Genre
The genre of the film is crime and we used all of the micro elements and conventions we studied previously to create this. We saw that a good number of films on IMDb's Top 100 list were crime films, so we thought that a crime film would be ideal because prviously they have been popular.

Style of Presentation
Within our opening sequence we used a lot of close ups and faces, this is to show the emotion of our actors, showing distress whilst running our one of our characters crying so the audience could begin to share empathy, Also we jused vlose up on legs to emphasise the importance of the amount of motion taking place. We also captured a lot of long shots so we could show quick shots with both characters in them, show the difference, one with a gun and chasing the other to show ferocity. We shot our film in 4:3 where as it should have been shot in 16:9. This is an error that we made during filming. To rectify this problem we could crop our shots to appear letterhead but would have cut out some of the action on screen

Style/Colour of font
The colour of the titles sticks with the conventions we studied, simple white typography against a black background, This doesnt distract or drasticly change from the action shown so it blends in well with the simple, relevent information shown. It also mirrors the life style of a criminal.

Narrative Engima
The main enigma of our opening sequence the mystery behind what is going on. We reveal very little about what is happening on screen, We use music to create a dynamic scene and hope the audience remain interested enough to not lose interest and find out what happens. This method is used constantly in our chosen genre from conventional research.

Introduction of Characters
In our opening we only showed two of the characters in the film. We started by only showing one character running (Nick) then introducing the other (Raoul) chasing him. This sets up the dynamics between the characters, by what is happening on screen. This imeadiatly tells the audience the relationship between these characters. But by using no dialouge, we create a sense of mystery around our characters and what our film is about, a common convention in the crime genre.

Camera
As most of the shots in our opening sequence are a chase scene, we used a lot of different camera angles., Capturing both people running, sometimes on their own our in the same shot, runnign towards, away from or even ipast the camera.  The most difficult shot was the tracking shot, whilst the characters were running, which we managed to achieve by sitting on a skatboard, with one person pushing and holding the camera man for stabilty, and the other pulling a rope attatched to gain speed. Shots like these we were influenced by one of our studied conventions 'Trainspotting' in the opening sequence.

Editing and Sound
The film uses fast pace editing with an equally fast sound track to match the action on screen to create a tense and exciting atmosphere. This sets the mood fot the audience so that they can feel the fear of the main characters and the tention between the two characters. This follows the conventions of a crime film as it opens with fast pace action, such as 'Trainspotting'. We also followed our conventions with the titles, in the film 'Goodfellas' the screen was black with the names in white, we thought this would be a good convenetion to add to our piece, but making it our own by having music running through.

Special Effects
We didn't use any special effects in the conventional sense of the word, other than the editing sticking the realistic shown by other crime films we had studied.

Mise en Scene
We had our characters wear suits, sticking the the conventions from old and new crime films. We also used prop guns in our piece, which is a popular convention in crime films.

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