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

We decided to make the opening sequence of an action film. Despite rarely getting much critical praise, action is one of the most popular and highest grossing genres of film, and has been a reliable source of income for the movie industry.

Action opening sequences often throw you straight into the action, often offering little or no clue regarding character or narrative, such as in The Bourne Identity (1988). Our film does exactly the same, not revealing who the two characters are, why they are there, or how one has come to be being hunted down by the other, but instead grabbing the attention of the audience with high paced music, fast movement, fast editing, guns, bad guys, and fights.




Blackout sticks to many conventions of the action genre, for example kidnap is often a theme, such as in Taken. Our use of camerawork and editing is typical of the genre, with faced paced cuts and lots of movement. In fact, we took shots directly from Casino Royale and Wolfman and used them in our own sequence.

Narrative

Tztetan  Todorov was a narrative theorist who examined hundreds of russian folk tales to try to find similarities between them, and came up with a theory that he believes can be applied to every story ever written. He proposed that each story is broken down into these 5 basic steps:

todorov







However, Blackout challenges this model, as the film opens with a chase and a kidnap, with no real equilibrium and not introducing the hero or the villain.

Narrative continued

Blackout follows a parallel narrative, cross cutting between Matt’s father trying to rescue him, and Matt trying to escape (similar to Finding Nemo). We have also used many binary opposites, as in Levi Strauss’ narrative theory, which says that important parts of the story always appear in pairs.

For example:

• Matt is wearing appears terrified and runs through the house, while the kidnapper is very professional and composed, and walks up through the house.

• The homeliness, safety and normality of the setting and the abnormality and danger of the event

Form & Function

The main function of a title sequence is to introduce character and narrative, and to inform the audience of the people involved with the film through the use of titles.

We have chosen to place our titles both before and after the main opening sequence, such and in The Bourne Ultimatum, and more famously, the Bond films.

 

Style

In the opening part of the sequence, we use fast editing, lots of camera movement, and fast paced music to create a sense of excitement and danger in an otherwise normal and unexciting setting. Each shot is edited to about a second or less, and is matched together well to create a continuous sequence. Most shots are LS or MS in this part of the sequence, so that we can really get a sense of his movement, like in the airport chase in Casino Royale.




When the kidnapper enters the house, the pace of the sequence slows, many of the shots are more tightly framed and the music becomes more tense, increasing the audiences awareness of Matt’s fear. The sequence feels much more like a stalker/thriller, despite the setting still appearing very normal and safe. The use of manual focus and tightly framed shots helps to withhold the identity of the kidnapper as he walks through the house, and the gradual build up of the music gives the sense increasing danger.

 This tension climaxes with the track across to Matt’s eyes, a technique also shown in Wolfman. The pace of the editing and the music speeds up again for the fight, another convention of action films, and again, is matched together well. We added the blur on the final shot in ourselves on Adobe Premiere CS3, which works well, as it looks like a focus pull (which we didn’t think of on the shoot).