In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Conventions of the Thriller Genre
When I began to resarch the Thriller genre I found that the main conventions are:
- The unknown
- Narrative Enigma
- Crime, Often Violence
- Complex narrative structure
- Everyday normal setting
- Uses themes of: mirroring, identity and voyeurism
- Being fast-Paced
Above are the conventions that we have thought about and used when planning, filming and editing Sacrament the conventions that have been placed in red have been cleaerly focused on in our film and I have expanded on them below.
Narrative Enigma
This was part of Roland Barthes theory who named it the 'Enigma Code' this was a theory that suggests that any text (E.g. Tv, Film or Poster) that makes the audience question something, to draws the audience in. There are examples of this in our own media text
Sacrament as throughout the opening sequence the audience will be asking questions such as:
Why is the girl alone in the woods?
Who is this girl?
Why are we unable to see her face?
Why does she seem to have nowhere to go?
All of these question examples run through the text whenever the girl character is on screen.
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| The girl has obviously missed the path and skipping through the woodlands, this helps to create narrative enigma for the audience. |
An example of a Thriller that uses large amounts of narrative enigma in the opening sequence would be:
X-Men: First Class(Vaughn, 2000). A limited amount of dialogue is used in this opening sequence which helps the audience to ask questions of what is happening helping to create narrative enigma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI7SEIKaKwE (embedding was disabled by the uploader)
Identity
We have explored the themes of identity as throughout the opening sequence of
Sacrament we are unable to see the character's face, we felt that having a character whose identity stays secret helps to portray the main narrative of our film as this girl is dead, this also helps to create tension for the audience as the eyes tell someone a lot about a character but in our scenes her eyes are never on show. All of this means that throughout the opening sequence this female character has no identity which links to the basic conventions of a Thriller Product.
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| We used a variety of different shot types, this allowed the Thriller to still have the interesting shot types and allowed us to correctly mold the opening sequence allowing us to hide the identity of our character. |
This theme is also apparent in the Thriller film
Inception (Nolan, 2010)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICig7aW9Tmg
Identity is used in this opening sequence as the frames and shots of the characters are very dark. This allows shadows to be cast on the characters faces meaning that the audience struggle to see what the characters are doing and what they look like. This means that their identity has been hidden from the audience in order to create more tension towards the opening sequence.
Being Fast-Paced
We chose not to use the fast-paced theme in our opening sequence as it would have not fit with the narrative of
Sacrament this would meant it would have looked silly.
Our narrative is that the young female girl has been murdered and remains in the between location (reality and heaven) until her murderer has been bought to justice. We felt that if the opening sequence was fast paced it would have taken away the tension from the narrative structure and would have made the actions which took place on screen just look slightly silly.
The theme's of being fast-paced is used in some Thriller films such as
Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie, 2009)
Throughout this opening sequence a variety of fast cuts are used, overall a lot happens in the first minute and a half as it is very fast-paced through the soundtrack, shots, cuts etc
The fast-paced theme has also been chosen not to be used in the film
Valkyrie (Singer, 2008) the film is set in the middle of world war two and is based on true events.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6n3hRZmgxU (embedding was disabled by the uploader)
As you can see from the video above, the opening sequence to this film is done at a slow-pace this is because there is text on the screen which is giving the audience an understanding of the context of the film. Another reason why the film begins with a slow-pace is because the film company wanted to portray the main theme of the film, if this was done at a fast-pace the theme may not have been registered with the audience meaning that the context and narrative of the play would be confusing to the viewer.
Mirroring
We explore the theme of mirroring in one specific shot and section of our opening sequence, the shot helps to explore the narrative behind our Thriller this is:
We see the character from a reflection this helps with the theme of mirroring, the fact that we see her reflection is used to show that she is trapped between reality and heaven as her murderer hasn't been bought to justice. This is also reflected through the idea that you can see the sky in the shots behind her which has many connotations of heaven and the afterlife.
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| This is the final shot that we see in the opening sequence, this leaves the audience with a large amount of narrative enigma for when the shot fades to black. |
The themes of mirroring is also explored largely in the film
The Lovely Bones (Jackson, 2009):
This still was taken from one of the scenes from The Lovely Bones as you can see the theme of mirroring have been used but in this case with a window, in both cases they help to create narrative enigma for the audience as the character's both know something that the audience doesn't, the theme of mirroring also helps to give an interesting shot type as well as creating tension for the audience.
