Group 2 AS Film Opening: JR 6245: Evaluation Question 1

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

Our film opening resembles real media products in a number of different ways because of different techniques we adopted in the filming and editing of our clip.

We used several different editing affects on our footage for the generic purposes of the clip, for example the short shots of weapons on the wall in the antagonist's secret location is shown very quickly with a jaged and raged affect.

We liked, and chose this affect after seeing a similar technique used in the film Seven (Fincher, 1995). In the opening sequence of that film similar things are happen in ours where the antagonist is observing pictures of people, or in our case names of people, and crossing them out to imply getting rid of them.

The picture shown is a fast paced clip with fast cutting rate which is done for the generic affect of creating panic and unease similar again to what Seven uses around the crossing our of faces, like our crossing out of names.

Jump cuts, jagedly, to the picture fully crossed out

Shot of pen putting a single line through the eyes

We also took the use of a faded affect over shots which represented flashbacks as to make it clearer of what they were and so the audience could understand the difference in shots. This affect is similar to that used in other films like Green Street (Alexander, 2005) where there is a flashabck with a hazed affect over the top and in slow motion to clarify that it is not the same time period as the rest of the film.

Without affect

With affect to connote flashback

The characters that we show as victims in our film opening are similar to the protagonist shown, being young, white and male. This may be important in captivating the audience that will prodominantly represent these characteristics and can relate to these characters. This can also reinforce the tension that our protagonist is in danger as previous characters, the victims, have had similar characteristics to him.

The mise-en-scene and locations of our film opening are also very fitting to the genre as the location of the woods is very dark and mysterious, the location and set design of the antagonists lair are also generically appropriate. Lack of light and shaded darkness are a common feature in most Horror products, we also took this approach when filming and editing ours to reinforce these generic features. We also used a red tint over some clips through the eyes of the antagonist to connote danger and increase the viewing intensity.

Red Tint

Aspects of the costume we chose to use for our antagonist killer were similar to other classic characters in successful horror films such as Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) with the killer Mike Myers and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel 2003) with the killer Leatherface. In both of these Horror films, similar to the style that we adopted in filming our product, both antagonistic characters wear some kind of mask that is a face which creates enigma. We also involved the idea of the mask used by the killer Jason in Friday the 13th (Marcus Nispel 2009) which is a hockey mask that also hides the identity of the killer creating tension. The antagonist in our film opening product shares aspects from these famous characters such as wearing the hockey mask like 'Jason' and wearing a bloodied apron like 'Leatherface' and taking the posture and stiffness of 'Mike Myers' to add to the effect of enigma.