Evaluation Question 1 – In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? By Chloe Sheppard

A thriller opening usually consists of clues as to what the film is going to be about. For our thriller opening we used had no dialogue, apart from in the home movie clips in which a little girl speaks. The lack of dialogue was used to create a sense of mystery and anticipation. The main character is identified in the opening, and also a victim as the audience see flashbacks of a dead body. The main character we see throughout the opening is a teenage girl, who has a major flaw - memory loss. We used shots of a little girl in our opening saying "How old am I?" to try and help the audience realize that the protagonist is flawed. To create a more distinctive link between the two characters, at the end of the opening there is a sound bridge. Having a flawed character is conventional as it makes them more believable as people, and is easier for the audience to relate and identify with them. For example in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, we see the main character Luke using a pipe cutter to cut heads off of parking meters. He appears cheerful, drunk and we see he's wearing a GI Fields Jacket. As two officers approach him, he uses the bottle opener on a chain around his neck to open a beer, and drinks it, smiling. The frame freezes on his smile, immediately proving that Luke suffers from a drinking problem.

Title For the name of the film we used Blackout. This links to our main characters flaw - memory loss and forgetting things. The font we used for the title could have been more sinister to add to the opening, but as we went for a simple bold font it didn't create that much effect. Compared to the opening title font for Se7en, ours was plain and weak. When editing our title sequence though, to match the light turning on, we changed the from the white font on the black light, to the black font on the white light. We thought this would be more effective than just having one font colour throughout as it also emphasises something changing. Fades into

Credits For the credits we used a typewriter like animation, so we also used 'Courier New ' as a font, as it looks dated and similar to the fonts used on typewriters. In the Panic Room opening sequence, the titles overlap the background images, however in our credits the titles appear in between shots. This proved more successful, as some of our credit sequences contain a lot of text, the shots looked too busy with the titles on top as well. We also used the same credit structure, having the cast and producers names in the same order as Panic Room.

Location Our opening contains three locations; an interrogation room, a house in which someone was murdered and a house which the home videos were filmed. We tried to contact a real prison to ask for use of their rooms, but as we never heard back from them we had to come up with a location that would look just as good. We filmed inside a drama studio, and to add to the 'interrogation' look, we filmed against the mirrors, and had the dark curtains and white walls surrounding. In interrogation rooms normally, the light is extremely bright, so we tried to show this in our shots of that room. This type of room is typical of a thriller as an interrogation room is associated with crime and police. This is a screen shot from a Batman movie, which is a scene shot in the interrogation room. You can see that very bright lighting was used, although ours looks slightly ‘yellowy’ as we desaturated the colourings in our clip.

Location continued.. The other locations were both houses, but one is represented to be more 'homely' than the other. One of the house locations was filmed inside a classroom, hence why there isn't any furniture shown in the flashbacks of the dead body. However this is effective, because in comparison to the shots of the young girl - where there is a lot of furniture surrounding, adding to the safety of a home - the bareness of the flashback house emphasises how unsafe the person living inside it was.

Sound To build up more anticipation in our opening we used a different type of music for the flashbacks. The sound is a lot more tense as the note drags out, and as it differs from the type of music in the previous scenes, it helps to show that it's a different situation. We used sound effects for the ticking of the clock, footsteps and door opening as the original sounds weren't loud or clear enough. We shot a lot of close ups to create mystery. To lead into a flashback, we zoomed in on the main character's hand, and then had the next shot zooming out, to create a continuous effect and show that it was the same character in both scenes. We intended to use a piece of music that resembled the dubstep genre, however the music we ended up using was still ‘bassy’ but not as much of dubstep as we’d liked, due to us not getting authorization. We planned to use a dubstep track as this although this is breaking typical thriller conventions, we thought it would work well in our opening.

Editing In an opening sequence it is not necessary for the editing to create a whole understanding of the narrative. Instead, it sets out to intrigue the audience in the same way that a trailer does. Cross cutting from one location to the next leaves a question of how the locations are connected. This is exactly the method we used for our thriller opening, as we have some scenes in an interrogation room, and then cut to the next scene in black and white at another location. These were meant to be flashbacks, and hopefully the quick cuts and change in colour/location/character would help the audience understand this.

Props Some of the props we used included tic tacs (to look like pills) and the toys that the little girl is playing with in the home movie clips. The pills are typical of a thriller movie as they have a connotation of drugs and crime. Crime is a sub-genre of our thriller opening, so showing the ‘drugs’ works well. They are also there to help explain how the body we see on screen died. We used them mainly as a clue for the audience.