Evaluation- Question 1- Amy Homewood

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

In my thriller research, I looked at, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Usual Suspects, Lovely Bones and Pulp Fiction, which all follow the usual conventions of the thriller genre, using the technical codes, creating enigma, using unrestricted or restricted narration to attract the audience. 

For our thriller, we wanted to take a few aspects and base the foundation of our thriller on the opening to lovely bones, which creates mystery but is contrasted with normality making the audience almost confused to what is going on. Using familiar locations, you could say these are stereotypical locations to a typical thriller film. It creates danger and apprehension within situations. Typically being filmed at night causing the audience to feel scared and on edge. 

Lovely Bones uses restricted narration throughout the whole film leaving the audience knowing less or the same than the characters, which leaves the audience on edge. Within lovely bones, they use a voice over with the female child character speaking, which automatically makes the audience engage with that specific character like they are telling them a story. 

We used this specific example in our thriller, we used a voice over (a female, sounding like the mother figure that is dead) to give the audience more information about the characters past and the foundations of his childhood and life that he is living. We used a similar type of script also, very restricted and simple to avoid any details being given and ruining the film.

In my titling task, I again chose to analyse lovely bones again. Click here to read that blog post. Below is the short analysis I have done of the whole opening sequence:

Lovely Bones 

The name of the film suggests it is a thriller genre as the name used is very mysterious, therefore automatically engages a character with questions about the film, as well as juxtaposing the theme of death with bones. The name creates a sense of psychotic and creepy atmosphere due to that specific juxtaposition within the title. This suggests that it is used to un-nevre the audience. As well as this, again, typical for an thriller sequence, San Serif is used to be seen bold and easily read within the beginning of this film. Again, the font is placed in white as it slows purity as well as standing out on screen.

The size of the font on the screen is very large, placed within the middle of the scene. This suggests the importance of the title sequence and that the editors want the viewers to know what this film is having connotations of. However, the beginning of the opening does not fit the title so far therefore viewers are going to keep their attention and keep watching the film to see why the film is called Lovely Bones. 

The actor included within the titling and opening scene of the film is a female character - guessing a child of the male figure within the scene also. The identity is shown throughout the opening sequence that the audience will automatically get to know and recognise as the main character. This typical opening does not fit a typical Thriller opening as it starts out with a voice over followed my non-diegetic, major key music about how this girls life is progressing. 

Within the sequence, the relationship between the title and credit information and the background of the frame is linked as the font is put in whatever space is clear when the shot is taking up a long space of time. This particular thriller does not do the same as The girl with the dragon tattoo. It does not automatically introduce the names of characters. However, I do not think it does till much later within the opening sequence. This suggests that what is going on within the opening is far more important than names of actors. 

The sound used throughout the opening is non-digetic, placed within major key and are wrapped around a voice over of what seems to be a first person story of the girls life. The non-diegetic music only occurs in the middle of the titling sequence, only to when the 2 adults are shown within the sequence. Creating enigma to who they are and what is going on.

As for titling, from the analysis above, we took a few titling ideas to place within our final task,  In the screen grabs below you are able to see how similar both are however to avoid copyright, we tried to change ours so that it would include our names, as well as the college. We tried to make ours bold and fit within the middle of the screen so that the audience can easily see it.

Left- Lonely Bones | Right- Ours

As for lighting, our film we went against the typical conventions of the genre, as we didn't de-saturate the colouring in the film, which is commonly used to create a duller effect. We wanted to go against this convention, as we filmed at night, it helped to automatically create a lot of enigma anyway, but the way in which we lighted it was more saturated than unsaturated. Creating a sense of mystery and darkness within the whole opening.

We created enigma in our opening in a typical convention, we did reveal both main characters almost straight away, (commonly used in the thriller genre, e.g. the Usual Suspects) . We had all of our characters presented to the camera, as we wanted to show the audience who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist.