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

For this question I will split my answer into four sections so that I can cover every aspect of forms and conventions of media. I will be looking at; our chosen genre conventions; typical narrative structures conventions of movies; forms of conventions and functions of media; and the form of style real media would have.


Genre

Our primary genres of our film is action/thriller, along with our sub-genres such as mafias, assassins and crime. My group researched into the primary genres making sure our opening scene contains conventions of these genres straight away. Thriller contains tension and suspense; we did this by having a lot of close up to build up enigma with in our audience. Action brings challenges, and exciting activity of the unusual; an assassination to our opening sequence brought climax and action.  

Here is one of our main inspirational opening sequence with similar genre and conventions:

Elements that our character "Lotus" have with Leon:

• Silent killer,shadowy assassin.
• Targets bad organisation/ mafias
• Cold and doesn't connect with people well
• Brought up in the business as a professional assassin

One of our main sub-genres is assassination but particularly female assassins. We have noticed how popular they have become, as there have been a number of these genre films. It breaks the normal convention of an assassin action film, as usually the protagonist would be a male. My group loved the idea of a female assassin as it would attract more audience; mainly more females. Here are our main female assassin films: 

In particular we had our main inspiration from "Kill Bill".

Narrative Structure 

Conventions of an action/drama film: - Todorov’s theory of narrative: equilibrium – disruption – resolution - restoration 
- Barthe’s theory of enigma code
- Levi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposites


These are all conventions and theories you would find in every single movie, this is how we included them into our opening sequence:

·    Todorov: It’s impossible to show a full consistency of Todorov theory in our opening sequence of only 2 minute. However we are able to show the equilibrium as we have the normal life of Lotus as an assassin.  Although we didn’t need to make the rest of the film my group had in mind of the whole film.

·    It is very important to follow Todorov theory as it builds the story structure in a simple clear way, which every film has to have, to help not only the production team but the audience to understand the film. Our story line is similar of  "Haywire"where she is let down by the people she worked for.


      Barthes: We have really followed Barthes theory by having enigma codes straight from the beginning to keep the audience interested and engaged.  At the start we have a quote from the bible relating to our film to get the audience to start thinking and working their brains. We then have many close ups so the whole picture isn’t clear but they can understand and focus on few things to think about. all the iconography of the drink, cigar and drugs all relates to a crook, a baddie which we want the audience to think of the man. We do not see his face until the end making the audience wonder who he is and what is he doing. We then see he is a relaxed man enjoying his riches. However we make sure we continue the enigma by bringing the main character Lotus in a shadowy form. This keeps the audience engaged as they know want to know about this character and why she has come to kill him? 

·     
      Our main inspirations for this style of convention was from "Dexter". This is an opening TV drama with many close up shots of normal daily life images making them look horrifying building enigma to the audience. 



      Levi-Strauss:  We have clear distinct binary opposites of male Vs female. We have the man who seems to have it all and since he is a male you would think he has the upper hand, however lotus comes in and kills him showing a twist, of female power. There is a clear difference in moods in our opening sequence with the different characters: the beginning is calm, with classical music and the man is relax. We see a binary opposite when the main actor comes in Lotus and disrupts it building tension, with a faster pace music. We don't have a clear distinction  of binary opposite when it comes to good Vs evil as our hero presents herself as very cold. However we see some good as she kills the villain, who is obviously a crook as he has a lot of money, has drugs and indulges in cigars and drinks. We would call her a flawed heroin. This is similar to "Salt" where from the beginning we believe she is the bad guy, who will assassin the Russian president, she doesn't help herself by running away and killing others. Until the end we see she is a true hero. 

Form

Here are few conventions, functions and typical features of a film that we have done our best to incorporate:

• To introduce the main characters
• To introduce the main themes/ establish what is going on the film
• To engage the audience, and make them want to carry on watching it
• To show the credits to the audience, e.g. distributor, director, producer, main actors...etc. 

We mislead the audience at start by thinking the man is the main character, however he doesn't even survive till the end of the opening sequence. However, he introduces the coldness and power of our female assassin, "Lotus". We was going to have the title the name of our main character (just like the film "Hannah", but we wanted to make her more mysterious, so the audience are engaged by her; wanting to know more and we only reveal half of her face at the end of the opening sequence, to build a climax of suspense through out.

We have a very distinctive theme of stylised connotation, making sure our music and our titles fit into this. We use classical music to set this and our titles are quite simple but fancy and pleasing to the eye. We also have made sure we have set up the genres and themes of the movie.

We have clearly set up enigma from the start to keep the audience engaged so they continue watching as the are curious about our characters. We  have added action as it is an action film and our target audience would want action straight from the start so that they wont get bored.

Here are examples of our titles:

• At the top we have the distributor the production and who is the film by (director)

• Middle we have the Main title showing how its stand out as it has an animation unlike the others plus the director which we have put at the end of the 2minute opening sequence to show there is more titles to come as it is meant to be a full movie. 

• At the bottom we have the main characters of the movie: Natasha as Lotus and Raef as the Mafia leader. we also have a quote which starts the opening sequence to get the audience in the thinking mood and captivated of the movie. The quote describes our character characteristics as she is a flawed heroin, who seems dark to those who are dark but she does what she does for the good.
  

Style


 We looked at different styles of movies and noticed they kept a consistency of their style throughout. We have done this through our camera work, editing and other functions of our movie. We want our film to be very stylised, where everything has a deep concept to it. 

• Our classical music gives us this as you find in movies such as "God father" having the gang leader listening to classical music which is ironic as he deals with such chaos and violence in his life. we also used our music to build tension just like horror films like "Psycho"  known for its disturbing music. We wanted a contrast to Lotus theme music which is up beat and full of action like our character. This is similar to "James bond" films where he has his themed music which represents him to the audience. The classical music is diegetic while Lotus theme music is non-digetic.
• The titles are simple but stand out, as they are a white colour on black background. this keeps the stylised simplicity and classical feel to the film. It was my suggestion to add the growing line which I had seen from “the Kings Speech” which I found had that classic look we were looking for. We made sure out title “Deadly Shadow” had a different effect to stand out just like other film main titles.  Here is the Kings speech titles on the left and ours:

• When filming we had a clear idea of what kind of shoots we wanted to give stylised camera work. Showed a varied style of shots, having long shots, focus pull, close ups and being creative by using hand held to get shot that would be impossible with the tripod. We did this to keep the audience engaged as it would get boring if the got the same view through the whole film. By having different angels they can see from different perspective.You tend to find focus pull and tilted images in thriller movies, to give that eerie feel, making the audience unsettled and uncomfortable. Just like we hope ours does.

• We have a focus pull of the man turning the music up at the top

• We have a low titled angle of Lotus as she leaves giving that distorted feeling and power she has.

• We get right into the action by having a extreme close up of the cigar.

• When editing we kept the continuity theory rules; such as match on action, 180 degree rule and 30 degree rule. We have seen this through out other movies as it helps the audience follow the story. The purpose of continuity editing is to smooth over the inherent discontinuity of the editing process and to establish a logical coherence between shots. This goes for editing of the music so that it is in sync with the cuts and shots of the opening sequence.  
• We also looked at films such as "Underworld" where their grading is all dark and blue, we took this on board as both having action thriller genre, we decided to make our grading dark and blue tint. this gave our opening sequence the essence of coldness atmosphere up holding the tension.