Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In order to tackle this question, I have broken it down into four parts:

Genre
Narrative Structure
Form
Style

Genre: Action/Thriller

In order to create a sequence of the action/thriller genre, we ensured that we followed conventions of the genre.

Iconography seen in action/thriller movies such as The Godfather and Kill Bill

Throughout our sequence we include iconography such as cigars, knives, whisky and a gun, which are conventional icons of the action thriller genre.  They are used so that our audience can immediately begin to understand what the film could be about and how it may progress.

Our sequence also includes an assassination, along with themes of good vs evil and murder, which are more conventions of our genre.  Although there are now several female assassin movies out following the success of Kill Bill, I still think that by creating a strong female assassin as our main character we are challenging the convention of a strong male lead.

Narrative Structure

Through our research, we grasped the understanding that films are conventionally structured in  Todorov’s three part narrative theory .  When applying Todorov’s theory, we can clearly see that our sequence follows this structure.

Equilibrium- Man in house, classical music playing in the background, preparing himself for relaxing drink/cigar

Disruption- Music becomes tense; Shadow of a woman holding a gun appears through the glass of the door behind the man, who is completely unaware of the situation.  Assassin points the gun at his head and the man becomes uneasy as he understands that he is about to die.

Resolution- Assassin kills the man by shooting him in the head, leaving the gun in his hand to cover up her tracks, while then taking the briefcase of money and exiting dramatically from the room.

In order to create a conventional and engaging sequence we ensured that our opening was in real time.  This ensures that our audience could engage with the characters on screen and the events and actions taking place.

Characters

Villain/Victim- Man in Sequence- There is a lot of focus on the man; he is shown washing knives and pouring whisky, which presents the type of person he is and what kind of film it is.  However his insignificance in the film as a whole is shown when the camera immediately shifts focus on our assassin upon her arrival through the kitchen, suggesting he is simply another target.

Heroin- Assassin- Her slow and dramatic introduction, followed by her killing the man by shooting him in the head immediately presents her dominance and importance within the film.

Form

I believe that our sequence does follow the typical format of an opening sequence and achieves what is necessary for a successful sequence.  The opening introduces our assassin in a way that is typical and conventional of her type of character.  It also tells us the institutional information; who distributed, produced, directed and starred in the film.  Our sequence also creates a binary opposition between the calmness of the setting and the relaxed man to the assassination, emphasised by the change in pace of the sequence, going from slow at the beginning to fast after the murder. 

Titles used in sequence

Our titles in comparison to those of 'The Kings Speech' and 'Saving Private Ryan'

We decided to use cut-away titles so that the audience wouldn’t be distracted from the shots by super-imposed titles.  Our titles are very much imiliar to those of 'The Kings Speech and 'Saving Private Ryan' 

Style:

Tense, Slow, stylisation of shots/abstract CU’s, cold colour Grading, Low-Key lighting

We used a lot of close-ups of objects in the beginning of the sequence; we used the camera to create stylised shots to engage the audience into the narrative of the sequence.  We aimed to create several contrasts in our film.  This can be seen in the music track we chose.  The first part of our sequence is TRACK NAME which suits the slow eeriness of the shots and their duration, whilst the music after the headshot is the same track but an enhanced version, complimenting the fast pace and drama of the assassination.

Similiar opening sequence- 'Dexter'