Evaluation - Question 1

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

I have selected 7 frames from our film opening which incorporate or challenge the post-apocalyptic/dystopian genre. Some of the screen shots used show how our film is similar to other films of our genre, how they have influenced our work and some show how it defies the natural stereotypes of our chosen genre.

FRAME ONE: STORY & OPENING SCENE

   The film starts off with a panning shot of the surrounding area. The audience can see that the area is desaturated, which gives the environment a damaged appearance. By using a panning shot, this gives the audience a chance to dictate what has happened/going to happen within the rest of the narrative. The shot then pulls into focus of the background so the audience can see the un-populated landscape.
   We chose to open the film with a natural setting because in most apocalyptic/dystopian films, when our man-made society has failed us we always go back to nature to shelter us.

FRAME TWO: CAMERA WORK & EDITING

   To create a dramatic opening that our audience will be attracted to, we thought about the use of camera work and editing and how this will affect the audiences viewing of the film. In this particular shot, our character his seen holding a rifle. The low angle shot portrays her as intimidating to the audience. With the threat of the gun, this makes the audience feel uncomfortable as it is handled by someone so young. Throughout the film, we desaturated all of our shots to make the event of the apocalypse look more devastating to the audience. The thought that this was necessary because the environment that we used was too green, so we decided that the desauturation would 'take the life' out of everything that is natural and give it an 'un-natural' and decaying feel, which would also hook in the audience.

FRAME THREE: TITLE

   Our title includes many elements. It not only includes the title itself, but is also placed upon an animated background, which was inspired by the sci-fi thriller Under The Skin. The dark background contrasts with the film title which makes it stand out to the audience. The audience will also be able to notice the ash falling from the sky, which is also an indicator to the themes and narrative of the film sequence.

   We created this title sequence using a mix of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. After creating the title in Photoshop, we then downloaded a greenscreen version of the ash, which was formerly pure white snow, into After Effects. There we changed the colour to a more grey-ish, brown hue to separate the audience from thinking that it was actually snow. After doing this, we added both elements, the as and the text, into Adobe Premiere and then also layered it with an image of dark clouds, similar to that of the 'Under The Skin' title.

FRAME FOUR: SOUND

   The sound for our sequence starts at the very beginning of our film, and is its most intriguing at the start. As the distributors titles role, an authoritative womans voice can be heard, alerting the audience of a possible nuclear strike against the country. The allowed us to immerse the audience into the situation of the film as the woman is addressing the audience. The sounds of bombing and people screaming in terror can also be heard. This also lured the audience in as the sounds are the key factor at this stage in the narrative as there is no important visual at this current time in the film sequence, so all of the audience are drawn to the aural sound. We thought that by having a large amount of sound of a certain theme at the beginning of our sequence would pull in the audiences attention, as said before, the visual narrative has not yet started.

FRAME FIVE: PROTAGONIST

   Our protagonist in our film challenges the conventions of a typical dystopian genre film because its lead protagonist is a female. Not only is she female, but she is young. She is portrayed at strong and determined, which are the main characteristics of a male lead. We chose to have female lead because we wanted to challenge the conventions of this genre and make it fresh and appealing to our audience.

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