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

There are eight conventions of an opening sequence. These include: titles, establishing shot, equilibrium and disequilibrium, close ups, establishing the theme, soundtrack, logos, and giving clues to the audience. Conventions are used within an opening sequence in order to set the scene and reveal pieces of information to the audience. One opening sequence  that uses the convention of using lots of close ups is Wallander, which we analysed for part of our research posts. Throughout the opening sequence, there are close-ups used to show various parts of the character, ending showing the main character holding a knife, consequently suggesting to the audience that she has committed a murder.  An example of where we used a close up in  our own opening sequence is  when I can be seen putting a piece of card into my pocket. The fact that the only the blank side of the card can be seen makes the audience wonder what significance the card holds to the rest of the film.

Our opening sequence falls under the genre of a thriller film. the conventions of a thriller movie are: cinematography, characters, theme, music and sound, mise en scene and editing. One way in which i think we used music and sound effectively is that our music consisted of  a low droning sound without any natural sound in order to create a dark, almost evil atmosphere and suggest to the audience that something  is about to go wrong. One film that also does this effectively is "the sixth sense" as it incorporates in its opening sequence a similar piece of music to ours and makes it work with the genre. 

I think that we constructed a good representation of an antagonist- something that is very conventional of a thriller film. This is because we made him a very mysterious character, and as it was an opening sequence, we did not reveal much about him- such as his motive for doing what he did (abducting a child). We portrayed him as being very dark and also scary. This type of thing happens a lot in thriller films, such as SAW, in which the antagonist- Jigsaw, is a very dark and mysterious character.