A title sequence and the opening few minutes of a film is imperitive- this is the part of the film that needs to capture the audience. If they are bored by the opening, it is likely that they will not care about watching the rest of the film. The opening of a film establishes character, location, and era and lays the foundations for the plot of the rest of the film.
In our opening few minutes, we utilise several conventions of the thriller genre. For instance, commonly in thrillers, the narrative is split between the hero and the villain. Although the majority of the opening is told from Matthew's perspective, the very first shot is shown from the unnamed villain's point of view.
The character of Rachel also fits the damsel-in-distress stereotype, which is central to almost every thriller, although we also break this convention by having her die early on in the film- usually the damsels are rescued at the last minute by the hero. We wanted to do this so that the film was harsher and grittier, and we also wanted to reveal her sordid past.
Traditionally, thrillers include dark lighting and a muted colour palette. We wanted to go against this convention to add a sense of the surreal to the opening- so instead of having Rachel's body be discovered at night, we opted to film on a sunny morning.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our product depicts a seemingly average working-class couple being followed by a sinister-looking man, although you cannot gather what class this man is from his brief appearance. Had we filmed the entire plot we constructed, it would have depicted men in the field of organized crime, as the woman who dies in our opening sequence is revealed to have been entangled with a drug running operation.
Our protagonist, Matthew, is presented throughout as an everyman. We tried to make him seem as ordinary as possible, particularly through choice of conventional clothing- a black and white, if unironed, suit for the scenes in which he has returned from work, and a T-shirt and jeans combination for when he is relaxing at home. We thought it was of utmost importance that he wasn't seen wearing anything that would stand out too much. Other examples of the everyman archetype can be found in the characters of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) from American Beauty and The Narrator (Edward Norton) from Fight Club.
We wanted the female character, Rachel, to seem innocent in the beginning, so that the twist at the end would be a surprise, but we wanted to include very subtle hints that she was not as innocent and wholesome as she seemed to be. We did this by showing her smoking a cigarette (an indication of her weakness for drugs, albeit legal ones) and wearing a Bruce Springsteen t-shirt, indicatnig a slightly harder, rockier edge than the colourful bracelets and purple butterfly-print top we have seen her wearing previously. Another example of a female character who is thought to be good throughout the film and then proves to be a villain is Ruth Lang (Olivia Williams) in The Ghost. However, these characters are more commonly male characters- portrayed as everymen to begin with until a sordid past is revealed, for example, Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) in The Number 23, or David Calloway (Robert De Niro) in Hide and Seek.
For the sinister character who is following the couple (played by Leo Smith), we decided to very traditional and adhere to conventions when establishing his role as a villain. We had him wearing a heavy, dark coloured coat, because this reminded us of villains in old 1940's detective movies. We also backcombed Leo's hair so that is covered his face to make him seem more mysterious. We chose Leo to play the part partially because he is reasonably thin in build, and we wanted someone who could look emaciated and appear as though they were on drugs and were not eating properly.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
After some research, my group came across the New Line Cinema studios. We found them because they distributed The Butterfly Effect, a film with a similar premise to our own that we researched during pre production, and found that they have distributed numerous thriller and horror movies, including the A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises, Se7en (on which we also did an evaluation during pre-production), and The Number 23. For this reason, we decided that this would be the perfect studio to distribute Blackout. However, this is a ideal situation; realistically, a film like ours would be distributed by a much smaller, British production company, as it is low budget and filmed with basic equipment, and would likely not fare well in the Hollywood industry.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
We tried to draw our audience in immediately by using asynchronous sound- the first image on the screen is a happy couple walking in the sunshine, yet the music in the background is an ominous jarring chord. Disregarding the convention of having sound that fits the clip was intended to make the audience question this decision, and therefore becmoe personally inovlved in the film. The image of a young couple is something that our audience would be able to relate to, being either the same age or slightly older than our ideally aged viewer, immediately giving the audience a sense of understanding regarding the characters. Also, the setting- a park or field- is familiar and easily relatable as a place where a young couple might take a walk in the sunshine, increasing the relatability factor.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Throughout the construction of our product, I have learned a huge amount about technologies involved in film making. The most prominent of these is how to use an editing programme- prior to this course, I only had minimal experience of using Windows Movie Maker. For this project, the editing software we used was Adobe Premiere Pro. We struggled throughout production with technical errors- things like files going missing and sound disappearing. The programme was also very temperamental and crashed frequently when we were editing, and we found that simple processes were relatively complicated. As our group have been the first to take Media Studies as our school, we are the guinea pigs for the software, and have been learning to use it as we went along. We also had some problems with the school cameras- the microphone did not pick up any sound, so we had to use the one on the camera, resulting in poor sound quality, and we had difficulties in converting the files to the correct format. We also had to use YouTube in order to be able to display the videos on this blog- none of us had uploaded videos onto the site before, so we all had to work out how to do this.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
In our preliminary task, we did not consider what meaning we wanted to convey. At that point, we were simply focusing on learning and corectly using shots- while shooting our main product, we gained knowledge about how to use them in context with the action on screen. The point of the preliminary task is to get acquainted with the camera, and we found ourselves experimenting with different shots, angles and movements as well as framing and positioning. We learned how to correctly use the 180 degree rule- making certain that the characters were looking in the right direction at all times- as well as match on action. We later utilised both of these techniques in our main production, as well as the technique of shot/reverse shot, which involves shooting one character from the front while there is a part of the character they are speaking to in the shot.
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