Media Evaluation Question 7

Question 6

Evaluation Question 5:

Question 4

Evaluation Question 3

Question 2: How does your media product represent social groups.

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

Genre:
This video explains the genre is our film.


Narrative Structure:
 The idea for our opening sequence was about a mother who believed she

Black and white: Tilted Flashbacks

was responsible for the death of her daughter, in the opening sequence she starts to have flashbacks to the playground where her daughter was happily playing before she died. The story would then go on to the mum retracing the steps of the day she died. Her ex-husband would actually be the killer and would have been responsible for turning the wife mad due to her believing it was all her fault, his motive for doing this would be in revenge for the wife flirting with other men while they were still married. The story would follow the classic narrative pattern as suggested by Todorov. The equilibrium is shown in the opening sequence, she is washing dishes, she here is depressed and clearly troubled, but is still relatively sane in the way that she is trying to live a normal life this is shown through her clearly have eaten recently and watching TV etc. although these are acting as distractions from what has happened. The distribution then comes from her flashbacks and the electronic devices being interfered with by something. The recognition of the disruption would come later in the story when we see the male character and realize he is causing the problems, an attempt to repair the distribution would be the mother trying to work out exactly what happened. The final equilibrium would be the realization that the father caused the death and the reasons he was doing it. Our film in this sense conforms to the typical narrative structure of Todorov. However, you can also apply the other narrative theories that I looked at in my research. The hero was the mother, the villain the father, the daughter is loosely the dispatcher as she triggers the mother into working out exactly what happened. There are also binary opposites of good vs evil and supernatural vs natural.

We also used specific narrative techniques such as ellipsis to cut out the daughter’s death and used flashbacks to show her at the park. We also used retardation to create enigma for the audience, for example we don’t know how the daughter died but we see clips of her in black and white which suggests she is dead and a shrine on the table as well as the mother’s general depression.

C: Form.

Examples of Openings

The job of an opening sequence is to show the most important members of the production for the motion picture. Since the 1980s they present all the major cast and crew while the closing credits list the extensive cast and production crew. The typical order is: Name of Production Company, Director, Producer, Executive Producer, Top billing actors, Title. Our credits followed this for the most part. We used  the Production Company and the distributor first then the we moved onto billing actors and then on to credits and sound, then directors and producers  and finally the title at the very end of our opening sequence. We felt that doing the credits this way round made more sense, as we wanted to finish on an enigma and we did that by not showing the protagonists face at the end and then cutting to the title. The idea would then be that she would wake up in a different setting e.g a mental hospital and the story would continue.

On the left: Our titles. On the right: Se7en's titles

D: Style: I think our the beginning of our film with the credits has a Se7en feel to it as it has slightly tilted typewriter font. I designed the credits and I was greatly influenced by Se7en. I think from this you can tell its a horror movie, along with the sound in the background as it is quite spooky and eerie. We used black and a textured background as this looks classier and more professional, the black is unisex and also connotes evil and danger. I used the swirly textured background as it reminded me of a cartoon drawing when someone is all confused, and as she is mental and this a psychological thriller I thought it fit really well.It also suggests a confused story.  We used no dialogue in our product as we didn't want to complicate any of the emotion with her talking, we wanted her actions to make the maximum impact.The music we choose we wanted to be relatively calm along when see is washing the dishes but build and cut out before and after flashbacks. Using the sound to really maximize the drama and scare the audience, plus the sound is part of their senses so they feel anxious because of the sound matched to the character feeling anxious. We used fast editing to create pace in our movie and also used jumpcuts for the flashbacks, we did this as it gives her a jumpy feel and you don't know when she is next going to be closer which keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. We also used tilted camera angles for when the flashbacks are happening we did this as we noticed this in other horror/thriller. This shows that something is not right.We also kept to the 180 degree rule as we didn't want our audience to be confused.