Our media product is an opening sequence of a fictional psychological thriller film. We had to consider elements such as genre, narrative, characters, music and style of real thrillers, in order to appeal to our target audience and produce an opening sequence that is unique, yet recognisable as a thriller film.
Brainstorm of Genre Conventions:
Iconography:
● The fallen wine bottle, wine glasses, vase and flowers, the messy room and the dead body make up the mise en scen and signify that a struggle has taken place...
Similar iconography appears in:
'Se7en' (1995, Fincher)
...and 'Memento' (2000, Nolan)
● The dead body is usually, visually, the main focus of the scene. We developed this by making the body a part of the mise en scen. The focus is on Dawn's reactions and what she is going to do next.
● The lighting and location break genre conventions as the sequence is set in an average, well lit house at dawn and not in a dark, eerie location:
The cell in Silence of the lambs (1991, Demme)
...contrasts greatly with our location
● Some typical murderers and villains in thrillers are:
We go against these conventions as our protagonist, Dawn, is the murderer:
Being an ordinary young adult, the audience is is more likely to identify with her and put themselves in her unfortunate situation to ask themselves ‘What would I do?’.
● The narrative of our sequence takes place in real time, the morning after the crime or event has taken place, similar to 'Se7en' :
This opposes the Todorov's classic narrative pattern, where a state of equilibrium is set up at the start of the film.
● The story is introduced through the sequence of images which introduce the characters and establish the setting, generally conforming to the function of opening sequences...
...however, it leaves the viewer to piece together the events of the previous night (which will be revealed directly later in the film).
The out of focus shots and CUs also enforce Barthes' enigma code, often used in thrillers to make the viewer question what has happened and what will happen next.
● The arthouse visual style of our sequence breaks genre conventions. We used a warm colour scheme (yellow and orange) as opposed to a conventional cold colour scheme (blue, black, grey):
Inspired by 'Eternal Sushine of the Spotless Mind' (2004, Gondry)
The pace is slow with fades and dissolves between shots, many of which are out of focus and CUs. This opposes quick cutting and is conventional to psychological thriller openings, such as Seconds (1966, Frankenheimer)
Titles are a typical feature of opening sequences. Thrillers usually have added, weird effects on the titles to reinforce the eeriness of the genre:
'Insomnia' (2002, Nolan)
The titles for our sequence are superimposed onto the shots, fade in and out, are lower case (except the names) and our final title 'dawn' has the blur effect on it:
Although the visual style goes against conventions, the soundtrack to our opening sequence, 'Exiled' from freeplaymusic.com, is slow, sad and quite creepy (similar to 'Insomnia', above). We minimized the dialogue in our sequence which allowed the music to reinforce the genre.
● Our opening sequence had to follow the narrative and genre conventions of psychological thrillers in order for it to be recognisable as a thriller and for us to reach our audience however, we broke visual and character conventions to make it unique and appealing.
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