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

The film opening we've made is a teen drama combined with a murder mystery. While it involves teenagers, the viewer is introduced to a dead body almost immediately. The mystery is made apparent by the fact the body is there with no explanation and the girl seen walking at the beginning walks with no purpose and seems to be minding her own business with no knowledge of what she'll encounter just a minute or two down the path.

Film Titles
We looked at all types of film titles featured in other films and have taken these ideas to use in our own film. We saw various films using the idea of having the film title on its own in white text with a black background. We thought this was very effective as it gives the effect of ellipsis, this of which benefits our film opening as it has the essence of mystery.

Here, as you can see, is the film titles of our film and 'Brick' look very similar. We liked the simplicity of the way the film title is shown as well as its effectiveness. A simple black background and white font has many different meanings to the film rather than just being the introduction to the film title. The text used also portrays the film title, as the 'Brick' text is block text, and our 'Timeless' text is very loose. We also noticed that a lot of different films used this technique as it is very effective.

We also looked at the different titles that are included within the film. These are usually shown on the same scene as film, to help show that it is the beginning of the film. It states the directors, producers and any media institution that is included with the film as well as costume designers etc that had something to do with the film. It shows their names and mentions that they had an input within the film.
As you can see below, the titles of our film look similar to 'Sliding Doors' and show the titles on the same screen as the audience are watching. We also thought that this would be more effective as having the titles on a different screen wouldn't work as well as it doesn’t make it look part of the film compared to how well it looks with it being on the same screen.

Camera Shots
One film that we have looked at from the same genre of our film is 'Juno', we think this film portrays a very good teen drama and the types of shots it uses. We have looked at the opening and have used similar shots to 'Juno' in our own film.

Our Film (Left) 'Juno' (Right)

As you can see we have similar shots to 'Juno' apart from the fact that the characters are walking in opposite directions. We thought that this was very successful in 'Juno' and thought it would be good to include these types of shots in our own film. Another change we put in our film, so that it wasn't exactly the same as 'Juno', was that we changed the colour to black and white. We thought that this would give it a better effect as it helps portray a number of things in our film as black and white are 2 completely different colours that are opposite from each other. It helps portray things in our film such as the fact that there are only 2 different scenes that we cross cut from. It also portrays the 2 different scenario's within the scene as one scene seems calm and another seems tense and confusing because of Ife's death. This in effect gives the 'black and white' concept of the 2 contrasting things. It also has the same similar camera shot as it is a long shot of the character as they walk by and the background and scenery looks very similar.

Here is another similar shot from brick, as there is a close up of the dead characters hand. It helps give a sense of mystery and makes the audience wonder what’s going on with the characters. Also, the fact that we only see parts of Ife's body before we see his face adds to the mystery and makes the audience wonder who the character is, as the face is the main visual concept of someone, for example, you can see 3 different peoples hands and think that they were all the same, where as 3 different peoples faces, we would clearly be able to see that they were 3 different people as their face features of each person are very different from each other.

Location

We looked at different locations and how the scene is set from the beginnings of each film openings. We focused on how each film opens and where it opens to set the sort of feeling the film wants to portray. Therefore, the day we went out and spent time looking at locations and taking pictures allowed us to get a feel of what location we wanted and what we wanted it to achieve and portray so that it linked in with our film. We therefore opted for a place near the canal as our inspiration came from one picture we took, where Fiona is sat by the side of the canal and she looked very calm and collective.

We also thought that someone going to by the canal would only do this if they were upset or needed to think about things, and because we wanted our character to portray these feelings we thought the canal would be a good option to film by. It also adds a sense of mystery as the audience wouldn't know why the character would be by the canal.

A similar film that uses this is 'Brick' as they also have the film opening in a canal of some sort. We have therefore used this sort of location to help with he mystery of the dead body. It also helps with the sense of mystery as there is very limited lighting near the canal. Therefore meaning that filming by the canal is naturally a mysterious and scary place to be as typically darkness equals scary and unknown places.

Costume

For the costumes we have looked at the typical dress sense of teens. we found that there wasn't any specific dress sense of either characters as we wanted it to be really simple and not too elaborate. We therefore thought that Fiona would be in black; tights, skirt, vest top, shoes, all apart from her coat which would be red to help signify that something bad could be coming her way. Also the fact that she is dressed in all black makes her look morbid and that she is attending a funeral, however, she obviously isn't as she is clueless to Ife's death.

We also looked into Ife's costume and also found that there wasn't any specific dress sense that he needed to be in to establish anything about his character as he is left in mystery and we don't really need to know much about his character as we will find out more as the story unfolds throughout the rest of the film. The only piece of clothing that we thought that could signify anything would be his hooded jacket as typically, people who wear hoodies look like yobs. However, we thought it would be clever to have him dressed like this even though he isn't in a gang or a yob.