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

Using conventions: 

From the very beginning of our title sequence we wanted to show a powerful establishing shot from the location where the filming was taken place, this shows the audience the concrete surrounding we wanted to connote. As our sequence is filmed in theater we wanted to show a jazzy art deco mood as well as its initial location, so we researched theatres in Worcester and landed with “Northwick” theatre. This establishing shot very much mimics the shots in the opening sequence of "Manhattan" however we don’t focus on location as heavily “Manhattan” does but we wanted to connote the same effect.  Although, unlike 'Manhattan' our film is not titled 'Northwick', from the start of our sequence until five seconds in we feel we have used a common convention from a real media product successfully.  When studying in our research we noticed that Alfred Hitchcock uses this in such films like 'Psycho' He uses a slow fade-in to reveal the first location of the film, this creates tension and empathises the location. This is very much like our opening 30 seconds; we use the convention of several long and short takes of varied images of our location and ominous, connoting objects.

Sound is a very important part of our sequence; we wanted to connect our sound with the cinematography. This makes the cinematography a lot more meaningful when matched with appropriate music which enforces the genre. This is very much shown in the opening sequence of 'Seven 'with a screeching synth, this sets the
psychological genre perfectly however we twisted this convention to suit our sequence. After realising this when creating 'Hurt', knowing that editing would not be enough to create a successful title sequence. We knew we wanted from the beginning a long take that would establish sound and film together efficiently to have full effect on the audience.  

 This is the convention of souned we adapted off 'Seven'.

This is our first 30 seconds of audio for 'Hurt' is very similar.

Developing conventions:

As I said above sound is a very import important for our sequence, our use of sound uses common conventions of the psychological genre, then developing it to create something that allows us to differentiate and individualise our sequence and allow us to include what we wanted. To do this we used http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ to find suitable clips. For the first 30 seconds of 'Hurt' uses a raw, screeching synth  to  agitate the viewer, when researching before the task, we discovered many films of the genre, such as 'Seven' which share this convention of using sound to unsettle their audience, connoting danger from the beginning, this will also connotes the genre and mood of the film. The second peice of audio we used was a trademark free version of Tschakovsky's 'Swan Lake'. This is a very unusual sound choice for this genre but helps to build the story line greatly, also we developed the sound track of “Manhattan” to connote a sophisticated, jazzy mood.

This is our final soundtrack.

When studying fonts for titles in other films of our genre, we came across galvanised styles of text, to differentiate our film from others in genre, we had to use a font that would array the normal font. So we didn’t use a fancy font, instead simple, capital lettered font underlined with the title of the film(Hurt).(Right) compared to 'Seven' on the (Left).

Challenging conventions:

A run of the mill title sequence contains many titles which establish the actors, producers and directors. We refused to this so will challenged this convention, refused to do this, and simplify a title sequence by showing only the film title, this makes the audience focuses more on the film delvoloping infront of them and the realisation of the location; instead of information on who made it. It would be unique against a genre, that uses titles to such an extent that the audience's attention levels would decline. In my research I found only one other film to keep informative titles hidden, as to remain focus on the film not the titles - this being Capello's 'Apocalypse Now'.

Mise-En-Scene was a convention of film that we immediately was effected by our choice of genr, instead of morbid, cold instruments seen in Seven, we aimed to challenge the use of objects on stage by connoting person attributes towards the character. Such props as mannequins, masks, suits and red roses.