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

Above is a  9 frame sequence from the opening sequence of the thriller movie me and my group shot. 

The frames above will be used as examples for the conventions that will be talked about. The conventions I want to bring to attention are;
- Title + Text
- Camera movement and angles
- Camera shots/framing
- Mise-en-scene
- Editing

 Title and Text
Our opening had one of our characters 'playing' with a red liquid representing blood. With this we wanted to add red to our title to symbolise that there will be blood in the movie. The title is in the middle putting all attention on it (there's nothing much else in the frame anyway). Most thriller films (Terminator 2, The Departed) have their titles on black backgrounds or something similar. It is usually acompanied by some non-diegetic sound to set the scene. Our title is done in a simialr manner where music plays when the title is there although instead of a black there is a misty red background. Adding more red means there will be some more blood in some way in the movie, the mist adds a sense of mystery and accompanies the unseen person in the sequence as you don't see who it is (some enigma code is added).
The text (both titles and credits) used also suits a thriller movie. The font type used in 'cracked.' The text is cracked in a few places which could mean the movie or a character is also 'cracked,' he's not sane or there's something wrong with personality of th character. It could also be a glimpse of the type of genre used.

Camera Movement + Angles
We moved the camera in a few shots to follow the character as seen in this frame. We tracked the character's feet as he walked along. We also used it to follow the character up the stairs, as seen in frame 2. We also panned the camera up in one scene when the character was buttoning up the white coat (seen on frame 5).

We experimented with the high angle shot seen in frame 8. Usually this means a weakness of a character although here instead of the weakness of one character compared to another we wanted to use this high angle shot to show that that our character does have some weakness, the control he has over his 'hobby.' We didn't use any zoom elements in any of our scenes since with all the movies i've seen i havn't seen many cases in which a zoom is used. Mainly cuts/quick cuts are used when the camera wants to go closer.

Camera shots
From what i've seen the most common type of shots used in thrillers are close-ups, especially in the beginning of a movie (as seen on Se7en and Kill Bill). Another type of shot commonly used are long/establishing shots to show the audience the setting and to show where the action will be taking place. Our sequnce lacked establishing shots but mainly focused on medium close-ups (mainly of the lower body), extreme close-ups and a few close-up shots. We have examples of some mid-close ups above such as in frame 6, 8 and 9, where you see the body and hands of the character. We have an extreme close-up in frame 5 where the camera is looking at the breast pocket of the white coat our character is wearing. There is a close-up shot in frame 7 on the flasks the character is handling. This shot focuses more on what the character is doing with the objects he has available to him instead of the actual character himself.

                                                                                                        Mise-en-scene and Character Intro

The main focus on this was the lighting which wasn't too bright (although in some scenes i had to edit the brightness as there was too much natural light). Most, or probably all, thriller films focus on the lighting being dim, dark, gloomy or any other similar lighting, especially if it's a psychological thriller. Lighting is used to set a tone and atmosphere to a scene and the lighting we used was dark and gloomy. We wanted to show that it wasn't a happy movie and that it might not end in a happy ending as the first character we are introduced with is obviously not good. We are also shown in frame 6 the tools he has at his disposal. Very precise tools such as scissors, scalpels, tweezers - our character seems like he is dangerous and he doesn't like to make a mess. This could suggest he is intelligent. The location shown looks like a normal building which goes into a lab like room, not the scariest places in the world but it could suggest that the character, who is walking around the building, is very familiar with the place. We use this setting since we wanted to give off the feeling that the character is somewhere he is comfortable in and is why we we wanted to use something which looked more normal than scary.

Editing
Our editing mainly consists of cuts from one place to another following our character to where he is going and to what he doing. Many thrillers use quick jump cuts as many things are usually happening at once and the jump cuts fill in to audience what is happening. we didn't use any jump cuts since we focused on the simple idea of following one character doing what he is doing, we wanted to show the audience he is doing something but wanted them to ask the question 'what?' - since there aren't so many things going on at once we didn;t need to speed up any of the cuts and used a steady pace when going from one camera shot to the next. We got this idea not from a movie but from the openings of american drama television shows, the two main ones  'Dexter' and 'Six Feet Under.'

This opening doesn't include credits but the main focus is the shots and how it cuts from one to the other.