In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In our group of two, we each researched three title screens, to gain greater knowledge of how they work. I researched Skyfall, 500 Days of Summer, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I researched Perks of Being a Wallflower, Donny Darko, and Oblivion. To get a better idea of the order of titles, Lucy looked at Slumdog Millionaire as well, as we decided we did not want to religiously follow the title order of such a large-scale film as Skyfall. We studied their use of sound, editing, camera, and mise-en-scene. There are two clear genres protruding from the films we researched: Horror or thriller, and individual or independent. This is because we have always wanted our film to be a mixture of these genres, and have a unique psychological horror film.
The horror or thriller films showed definite typical sound conventions such as having very bold opening music. We challenged this convention with our own film as we had subtler music that sounded quite sweet but was verging on creepy, and progressed to become louder and more chilling.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower has influenced our mise en scene and camera as our lighting and costume is all incredibly low-key. Our speed of editing is inspired by this film as well as it is quite slow-paced, but definitely not prolonged more than it needs to be. We have challenged all conventions seen in the opening of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as it is simply a collection of pans of dark and curious objects, and this was not the way we wished our film to appear. In most of our researched films, in fact, use of pans was incessant. However, we challenged this as we did not think this type of camerawork would be sufficient for our style of film, and instead often kept the camera steady.
We believe that in terms of mise en scene, we both challenge and develop conventions in our film, entitled Delta. Lucy played the part of the main character, and we consider ‘Delta’ to be an anti-stereotype of a horror film protagonist. This is because they are typically very pale, with very dark and eerie features – the complete opposite to Lucy. An example of a character of this sort would be Samara Morgan from horror film, The Ring.
However, I would say that Lucy is the epitome of a girl in an “indie” film, due to having wavy and long, blonde hair, and a quite natural look. Additionally, Lucy is wearing large, old-fashioned glasses and a white vintage shirt which further enforces the “indie” connotation. The mise en scene seen in the background follows conventions of horror films as it is a dusty and unsanitary lair, surrounded by curious implements and a partially obstructed ‘Danger’ sign. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of brightly coloured liquid, maintained in several glass jars. This is more of an independent film convention, rather than horror or thriller. In our own film, we have layered many different sounds to create the perfect realistic soundtrack for a film of our type. This is evident by the way that the non-diegetic sound evolves from being amiable and simplistic, to eventually become incredibly sinister and menacing, which embraces both typical genre conventions.
In order to create a credible film opening, I noted the title order from the films Slumdog Millionaire, and Skyfall. Lucy researched two films, instead of one, in order to compare them. We originally only looked at Skyfall, however I realised that there were far more titles than necessary due to it being such a large-scale film. After assessing which titles were really required for our independent film, we omitted a great deal of the titles that Skyfall included, though we generally developed the titling conventions. We also each researched another three openings, focusing purely on the aesthetics of them. I noticed that I particularly liked the titles in ‘500 Days of Summer’, as they are small and sweet looking. I wanted to incorporate this style into our film, and luckily my partner agreed. This style and size of titling is very typical of a small independent film, which is harmonious with our own production due to us wanting to have a unique, independent, psychological horror film. Additionally, the titles were white in these films openings, which is something I definitely wanted to copy over to our production, Delta. This is because I feel that white lettering would be significant, and stand out against the morbid colours seen in the background. It also helps to create an eerie looking contrast through juxtaposition. After re-watching our sequence, we decided that the brilliant white of the titles looked too profound, and so decided to model them on the titles seen in the Harry Potter films. These are quite murky, and textured, which adds depth and professionalism to the sequence. Additionally, they foreshadow the plots of the films as they are twisted and hazy. For this reason, I decided I would like to use this idea, and foreshadow events in our film. In order to create this effect, we overlaid an image of our friend, captured by myself, onto the text.
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