Wednesday, 4 May 2011

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

The opening sequence we have created has the genre of psychological thriller. The plot line is based on a young male student who is very spooked about his surroundings, seeming like he is going insane. The idea came from the film's Shutter Island and The Butterfly Effect where the main character is also very spooked, wary and unaware of what is really going on. These are real media products and both their story's have young male's as protagonists. We decided to look further into shutter Island after looking at both of the films, we thought our opening sequence would look better by looking into this film. We decided when we looked at the structure, it was best not to work from it, as it is too long and takes quite a while to get into the story so we decided to start differently. To quickly get the audience engaged and gripped we decided to give more hints behind what is going on the story and added much more things to the film. Therefore, we were able to pack lots more excitement into our 2 minute opening sequence and make our audience want to watch more.

In Shutter Island the main character thinks he is somebody else, it is only revealed later on in the film so we could not have this as the main idea of the film because nobody would know it was a psychological thriller. We still decided to make our main character misunderstood in some way, we decided that we would make him have hallucinations so it seems he is seeing a ghost, the audience however do not know whether these are hallucinations or if he is actually being haunted by a ghost. This keeps the audience involved and gripped.

At the end of our opening film, we how a midshot of the back of the main character swinging on a swing with the swing next to him swinging by it's self. This creates the illusion that there is somebody there, however the audience do not know whether they are just viewing the main characters point of view.


An important prop in our media product is the ketchup we used, without this nobody would know that the secondary character is dead or not, so we decided to spread the ketchup underneath his face to create the illusion that he is bleeding from the brain. To make this even more haunting we decided to do a worms-eye shot, this makes it seem more horrifying and real - more like he is dead.

In one moment of the film opening there is a high angle shot of the main protagonist character Matt walking past after he believed there was some sort of spirit behind him. We edited this in a way which made it look a lot like CCTV camera footage. We did this by adding a timer at the bottom of the shot and adding a black and white filter to the high angle shot. With additional incidental music from the sound bridge we were able to create an interesting creepy shot. This also makes the viewer question Matts sanity and informs them that he is paranoid that someone or something is watching him.

In terms of sound, we we did not know whether to use music or not. The quality of diagetic sound we captured was not very good so this really made us think we needed to add something different over it. We used a piano instrumental type of soundtrack to the video, so it would seem much more haunted.

The mise-en-scene in our media product is very simple, we only really had to look at a few props and we didnt really have to change our characters clothing to their clothing in reality as their characters were very similar to themselves. The locations are very juxtaposing like by the water at Salford Quays, this makes the film and what is going on in the film much more realistic as well as much more scary too as the audience can compare the beautiful scenery to the not so beautiful storyline.

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