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

Our fiction – film opening sequence is meant to come the beginning of a psychological thriller. Because of this, we had to follow various conventions, such as setting up enigma for the viewer. This is why our sequence follows Barthes’ theory of the five codes; the action, semantic, enigma, referential and symbolic codes. For example:

To make the plot of our film different, we decided to experiment with Todorov’s narrative theory; how films start in equilibrium before a disruption occurs. Our sequence goes against this; a man has been killed and Dawn is trying to deal with the corpse.

However, the difference between our film and others is that most thrillers (especially horror and action) begin with somebody (usually female) being killed, such as in the film Scream (1996, Craven)

Additionally, because we wanted our audience to know that it was a thriller, we had to include some genre conventions but to keep our film experimental; we deliberately subverted some of them as well:

• Conventions we followed - disturbing music, somebody has been killed and the killer doesn't want to get caught.
• Conventions we subverted - set at daytime, the killer is female and the killer is not alone

As the brief was for an opening sequence, we also had to follow the conventions of an opening sequence. I believe that we achieved the four main conventions that I previously wrote about:

1. Both characters are introduced, Dawn the protagonist and the dead body she has to deal with.
2. From the shots of the curtain, it shows the reader that the sequence is set at dawn (which we further anchored with our film’s title.)
3. Our sequence has titles; each of us has a title for a role we helped out with. Tom Rivlin is the name of my friend who was our test actor on the second shoot.
4. Our soundtrack suits the content of the film, it is slow and calm but is unsettling in the context of our film about a dead body.

When thinking about the project, our group decided that we wanted our opening sequence to have an art-house, calm and slightly unnerving style: