EVALUATION QUESTION 1

George Watkins

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

In this question I will be discussing what crime thriller conventions we used and why plus how they relate to real crime thriller films produces by film companies. Also I will be mentioning how other films have influenced our film.

As for our film we chose to the genres crime and thriller however thrillers generic conventions aren’t as obvious as crime due the fact that thriller is more of the way it makes audiences feel, thriller tend to give viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. We had rough ideas of what generic we wanted to include in our film opening due to several sources of information, one of these sources was a questionnaire that we carried out and one of the questions asked what generic conventions you expect to see in a crime film

Here are the first 4 pictures from the 8 screenshots required to answer this question. (Top left = genre screenshot, top right = film title screenshot, bottom left = film setting, bottom right = character introductions)

The top left photo of the 4 above is the screenshot which I believe best represents our genre in our opening due the mise used in the shot, in the shot you can clearly see there lies a dead body covered up by a dust sheet with evidence markers laid out, these are stereotypical generic conventions of a crime film hence why we included them in our opening so that the genre was obvious to the audience, other generic conventions we used in terms of props were; police tape and police and forensic tape.

The top right screen shot is our film title of which we adopted a very simple look to so it’s clear and easy for viewers to see. The name of our film is called ‘Giallo’ due to some research on the crime genre and we found out that the word is associated with old crime novels. Therefore, you could say our title links very well with our film opening.

For our setting, seen in the bottom left of the 4 photos we located 5 possible locations that we liked for our opening involved a murder investigation scene and we needed a location that might be hidden away or is unlikely you have many people around as this a place you would expect a planned murder to take place which is why we ended up choosing a location with lots of trees and also a place that wasn’t too heavily dense with trees that it would be very difficult to film. I would say our location is very typical of our genre due to the secluded nature of our location which also doesn’t give away much about how and why someone has been killed as appose to someone who may have died in a big city because they have been stabbed and shot and there were lots of witnesses to tell the story.

The screenshot at the bottom right is for the character introduction, for the majority of our characters they are introduced into the film in a standard way except our detective who is the main character in our film, our detective is introduced with a few shots before you eventually see him in full for example we show a close up shot of him doing up some buttons walking towards the investigation scene and also a tracking shot of him from behind continuing to walk onwards. You could say our film is seen in a stereotypical light for this point as often detectives have main roles in crime films and therefore will have a lot more camera time compared to other characters. Another thing we did with the camera to try and make the detective appear as the main character was by not revealing his identity fully with him still being in shot, we thought this would make him stand out compared to the other characters as it adds a mysterious sense to the character and it leaves the audience guessing who the character is for a period of time.

The next 4 photos are screenshots for camera & editing = bottom left, how the opening sets up the story = top left, costumes = bottom right and title font and style = top right.

The screenshot for setting up the story through the opening is the picture of the phone receiving a call from an unknown number, we felt that this is a good stage for our film to start with and the unknown phone call sets up our film nicely as the viewer doesn’t know who the phone call is from and they aren’t 100% sure on who’s phone it is which makes viewers ask questions on the film which will be answered if they watch on and they can find out for themselves, our opening also includes a small flash back would also be a repeated shot of one we could have later on in the film to try and relate the whole film together. This is typical of our genre as usual in crime films involving detectives they try to leave the audience guessing and try and make them work out how the death took place which is what we tried to achieve for our film.

The photo next to this is a screenshot that represents the style and font of our titles for our film, for our titles for actors, producers, directors, etc. and the ‘in association with’ title between the two institutional logos we adopted a plain white font that would be easy to read as it would stand out on the screen and we also went for a simple font as well, one that was easy to read as we didn’t want to overcomplicate something that should be particularly easy to implement into your film. It’s hard to say whether this is stereotypical or non-stereotypical of our genre as we were copying our title order from the crime film Reservoir dogs however we have no copied the same style, font or colour of their titles and also our titles do not give of any hints at our genre however with the other generic conventions in our opening I still think audiences can identify the genre of the film without having to look at the style of the titles.

The screenshot below (bottom right of the 4) is a screenshot for our costumes, in the shot we have our characters; detective, runner and police officer and we also have the forensic scientists who aren’t in then shot but can be seen below. The costumes in our film I would say are very typical of the crime genre with the detective however this characters costume could’ve been improved, police officers who’s costumes could’ve also been improved however the hats give away their identity as police officers, the forensics who’s costumes we were very pleased with other than the clothes these characters are wearing underneath can be seen through the costumes and also the standard member of public who first discovers the body. I believe that because of these costumes it makes our genre very obvious to the audience.

The final screenshot which is the bottom left photo of the 4 screenshots is the image that shows the camera work and editing we used in our film, at the start of our opening you can see the establishing shot which is also shown in the image, we have used this shot to set a scene for our opening and if you listen to the clip you can also hear that we had added in the sound of a siren as this is another generic convention of our films genre and we have used this as its one of the main sounds we would say was stereotypical of our genre and a sound you would expect to hear in a crime film.

We had some inspirations from real media products for our film however there wasn’t too many as with our genre that is only a small amount of main generic conventions to choose from, in fact we picked most of our ideas for our film by ourselves and also used our audience questionnaire to include certain things audiences would expect to be in a film of our genre. We barely used any real media products for inspiration however we did use certain camera work skills and titles orders from the films; SPECTRE and Reservoir Dogs.

  Films we used for inspiration

For our title sequence we were quite lucky in the sense that a remake project we did on the opening to Reservoir dogs which is also a crime film had a very typical title order so we decided to simply copy this idea from the film with the order of the titles however we may change the colour, font and animation of the titles to make them tie in with our films genre.

During the research and planning of our film making we analysed several films as research tasks and after watching one scene from the film was on spectre we found a specific type of camera work which we linked and therefore wanted to implement it into our own film, the camera work is used when Dave Batista enters the frame at 0:17 in the clip, we wanted to use this kind of camera work as at first you don’t see all of the character in fact the mid shot tracking from behind means you don’t see much of the character at all which adds that few seconds of uncertainty for the viewer’s when watching the film as they are unsure who this character is and what he does in terms of the story line.