Final Evaluation PART 1

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

In the development of ideas for our title sequence we had to research into the codes and conventions of other title sequences of the same genre as ours, which was sci-fi/romance. Because it is a combination of two genres, we had to include aspects of it both. I believe with the way we integrated both genres together in our title sequence kept it relatively tense to the viewer but it was not an obvious giveaway to the remainder of the film – as title sequences should be. However, I believe the theme of romance is more obviously noticed, from the music choice to the first shot of the sequence. The choice of music directly follows the typical codes and conventions of romance, with the soft yet tense piano use, indicating the drama that the film will also include. Within title sequences, it is also important to create an enigma throughout, leaving the viewer wondering what is going to happen, and where the story line will take them. I believe we did exactly this within our title sequence as the letters being written/read is what drives the title sequence, but most importantly leaves the viewer saying “what happened” or “why is she doing that”. 

Collectively, we also had to look at the codes and conventions of the camera shots, cuts and the choice of lighting. For our choice of genre, the shots we mainly used were ‘close up shots’ and ‘over the shoulder shots.’ We chose close up shots as within the title sequence the main focus was the characters, their emotions and body language, and I believe this shot captured that well. The purpose of using over the shoulder shots was due to the writing we had in the sequence, and it was a necessity for the viewer to be able to have an idea as to what was being wrote because as I have previously said, that was what drove the whole sequence. The choice of lighting was equally as important as the shots, as it I think it adds to the sincerity of it all. The reflection of the light onto the faces enhances the emotions, and the fact that it is quite dim around the main focus of the characters creates more dramatic effect. The codes and conventions of cuts we strayed away from to an extent as there are no direct cuts through each clip throughout the whole sequence. We overlapped the images, changing the opacity levels so the two overlapping clips would link in well together. However, I think that the way the clips have been edited over fits well with the rest of the sequence, even if it is not a typical way to link the clips together.

     

This still image from the title sequence shows how the lighting reflected on the face, it also shows the two different clips overlapping, which is the technique we used instead of doing sharp cuts.                                                                    

https://audionetwork.lgfl.org.uk/terms.aspx ---- This is the website where we found our piece of music