Hello and welcome to my blog, this is for my slasher film opening, Liar. The blog includes all research and notes. Enjoy!

Thursday 27 March 2014

Evaluation Q1; Conventions

This is one of the evaluation questions for our film opening.  "In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forums and conventions of real media products?"
after extensive research into slasher film openings, general film openings, and the slasher genre in general, Poppy and I found what conventions to expect from a typical slasher film. We researched a mixed variety of film openings such as, Love actually, The matrix, Four lions, Friends with benefits, Napoleon dynamite, Withnail and I, and Ferris beauller's day off. What we found was that in the majority of these films they use similar conventions, despite the genre difference. For example about 5 out of these 7 film openings included an audio bridge of a non-diegetic soundtrack from idents to titles, and which were carried on for about 30 seconds-one minute into opening scenes. We adapted this convention to our own film opening. We produced a soundtrack on garageband to start as soon as our titles start, and to end when our intertextual "film within a film" ends. However, after recieving a number of comments on this from audience feedback, we decided to extend this non-diegetic soundtrack further to play throughout the whole of our film opening. We realised this was much more effective, and fit in with some of the horror film opening conventions we looked at. For example from watching and researching into Trick or Treat's film opening, we saw that the non-diegetic music soundtrack played for a total time of 3 minutes 32 seconds, which 42 of it was played just over the titles. Another convention we found and used from Trick or Treat was the way in which the representation of the main "vunerable" character was portrayed. For example in Trick or Treat the main character is represented through his, bedroom mise-en-scene, hairstyle and clothing. We tried to signify our scream queen character's vunerability through her teenage, pink girly room and long blonde hair. However we also used a tight strappy top, and revealing pink shorts for her costume, which also signifies she is sexually active to really emphasise the scream queen character.

Another convention we researched and developed was the idea of having a phonecall between the scream queen and the killer, and also how the communication is represented through a television screen. After researching into any unique conventions we could find used in horror films, to help give our film opening a more modern appeal to it, we found the idea of the killer phoning the scream queen character from Scream , and decided to develop this further.  We decided to warp the voice of the killer by recording our own voices and using an app to give it a deeper, sinister effect to it. We got the idea of this from Saw as the character Jigsaw also does this.We also adapted  from Saw the idea of having the killer on a television screen, to really give a post modern appeal and attract an audience of teenagers to young adults. 

Our titles and title card were inspired from research into the opening titles from Scream. The title cards in scream are represented with a white coloured serif font, highlighted with a suttle red effect, placed on a black background. When the title card in scream is shown there is non-diegetic sound effects played over the top of noises from a phone and screams. We decided to adapt this idea as it seemed very effective. In our film opening we tried to use very similar effects for the titles, and found effective phone sounds and a scream in final cut pro which we layered over the title card. However for the title card lettering itself, we developed the idea further by animating the lettering of "Liar" so that it looked like it had been written with blood on the screen, and animated blood dripped down from the word.




1 comment:

  1. this is very good, very precise in the linkage between existing examples and your work, with highly relevant images to illustrate the points made
    you could/should get into some other areas in more detail: narrative (use the link to the post on Nowell's book I gave you, and other narrative concepts you already know, espec narrative enigma for the 1st part); could say more on editing and shot types - re-read my list for 'STEP ONE' at http://asmediafilmopening.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/eval-q1-use-of-conventions.html
    NB: you've misspelt forms as forums!
    Needs an overall summary to clearly answer the Q: have you wholly reflected conventions, or do you think you've added your own touch/es at times too?

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