Q1 - Ways my media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Conventions of film openings


As us, group 44 created our own thriller, before we actually created our thriller we needed to understand the conventions of film openings, title sequences and thriller sub-genres.

Firstly, in order to come up with a successful thriller we needed to get through the conventions of film openings. This includes things such as setting the location, introduction of characters and introduction of titles. We have looked at films such as Arlington Road and My brother the devil, this as helped us dramatically as one major idea that we used in our thriller was from Arlington Road, as the beginning of arlington road was very mysterious, we liked this and this helped forward us the idea that we want to do a psychological thriller - this leads on to us the thriller genre, the thriller genre tents to include things such as the protagonist, tension building, quick cut shots and many shots such as OVS, CU, POVs and high, low angels.

The thrillers i looked at were Orphan and Dorian Grey. When i saw these two, i expected there to be very intense and dark scenes, i was correct as these thrillers did consist of that; these are almost the stereotypical assumptions that are thought of when talking about thrillers. By researching other real media this enabled us to have different perspectives of making our thriller, the real media helped us gather up our different ideas - we all researched different types of thriller which helped us combine all of them to come up with a final thriller of ours. The sub-genre we used for our thriller was psychological; we thought this type of thriller is also very popular and relevant to the audience nowadays. The conventions of our psychological thriller is mainly things such as the shots, one main shot used in these type of thrillers are Point Of View (POV) shots, this shot is usually used to represent the protagonist. Another convention is the titles, the title for thriller tend to be dull and mysterious which has certain effects on the audience, the shots are very quick as the thriller is to be kept sharp and simple therefore the effect of this is for the audience to try keep up with the shots whilst struggling to think the whole sequence through. One thriller i looked at which the same sub-genre is Paranormal Activity, this was also a psychological thriller, one thing i learnt is that the protagonist isn't shown, this is used to create tension, for me personally this worked therefore this helped me to pick our sub-genre easier, watching paranormal activity helped me notice that the titles came from a black background with a white title which created a contrast between the two, we then decided to use a familiar method.

The main conventions of title sequences is the sequence of the the credits and font to create a certain effect. The credits i expect to see in the titles were the actors names, music by and a few more, however this was wrong as the class activity proved to me, now i know there is a certain sequence for the title and that there are many more credits that i didn't know before for example 'costume by'.

The correct order for the titles is :

1. Production icon
2. Distributor icon
3. Production in title sequence
4. Distributor in title sequence
5. director executive producer 
6. Actor 1
7. Actor 2
8. Film title
9. Actor 3
10. Actor 4
11. Actor 5 etc..
12. Casting
13. Costume
14. Music supervisor
15. Music by
16. Edited by
17. Production designer
18. Director of photography
19. Executive Producers
20. Written by
21. Directed by

These are what we tend to expect from the titles on the screen generally. The titles are normally 3 seconds long each, it is short in order to not lose the attention of the audience, also if it is longer than 3 seconds the audience tend to get bored. The titles match the image and sound of the opening as things such as the font could create the same effect you intended to, a mysterious and dull font would usually match a psychological thriller.  

Conventional openings for thrillers

This is a collage i created using http://pixlr.com, the first two titles are from Arlington Road and the bottom two are from our thriller - The Withdrawn, all of the four are from the actual sequence that is also shown above but with different fonts, size and location of titles.