Evaluation - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

 

 

For my AS media course I had to complete an opening sequence to a thriller. I have realised that an opening title sequence is a very important part of a film as it has the job to grab the attention of the audience in order to keep them watching the whole film. From research my group and I realised how much planning was needed to do this as not only was there a narrative you had to plan but also sounds, the titles and mise-en-scene.

I find that our opening titles show many challenging forms and conventions of real media products. For instance we included point of view shots and panning movements to help identify what a character is looking at helping the audience understand the characters point of view and feelings and a panning shot is used to follow a character as he is riding his bike along an establishing shot. The effect of this was to get the audience to follow the character and almost care for him and to make the audience feel almost as they’re there with the characters and I find that these two types of camera shots worked really well because I feel that the point of view shot from the man on the swing helped the audience see the bigger picture by putting the audience in the characters shoes making it even more mysterious.

 

Also editing shows many conventions of a real media product as it uses editing, a form used in our sequence is transitions for instance. Transitions are used between shots to make the shots come together smoother and making the outcome not jumpy. An example of this was when we included a cross dissolve transition to put together a shot of the young lad ans the swing which is shown on the left in the screen shot, this helps drive suspense. The effect to the audience was to be that the title sequence is easy to follow as for our first attempt which was ‘Lost but Found’ we realised that our dissolve transitions didn’t work with the narrative so we also had to take this into consideration. But we found that our transitions such as cross dissolves worked really well as our target audience said that the outcome was very smooth and easy to follow.

Sound also help show conventions of a real product because we used a backing track which played pretty much throughout the whole sequence. We involved sound to hopefully create suspense and tension throughout the film; we hoped to also do this by altering the volume of it to also add more mystery suspense. We were overall impressed with our sound as we noticed that the strange music went with the plot. We also involved titles, which is another convention to a real media product. The narrative of our titles was to inform the audience of the actors and the different people who played a role in making the sequence. We hoped that the titles would also drive tension as we added many effects onto them, which added even more anxiety, and after showing our target audience they agreed with us and said the effects definitely added tension.

Our whole sequence also involved a narrative which is another form and conventions of a real media product to help set the scene of our narrative we used establishing shots to establish the scene and location for instance to establish that the location was in fact on a park we helped show this through not only establishing shots but point of view shots as well. This is shown above in the screen shot. Establishing shots are used in many opening sequences to help set the scene and point out to the audience where they are in fact this is shown also in the film taken which i shown in the print screen above.  The effect we hoped for this was that the audience would know where the location was and they could add tension by using their own imagination and we found that the outcome was impressive as our audience agreed that it helped show the narrative. We also used mise-en-scene which is another convention of a real media product for instance we used dark colours for the clothing of the man which helped represent danger and threat which helped cause suspicion for the audience.