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

The opening sequence of a film serves a number of purposes: engaging the audience, establishing characters and triggering the series of events in the narrative. Often the themes, genres and issues in the film are also established from the outset. The opening sequence, therefore takes on a particular importance in the overall narrrative structure of the film. In our opening sequence i feel we have managed to achieve all these things.

ENGAGING THE AUDIENCE:
We engage our 16-25 firstly with the ambience of our young lone character (to which they can relate) 

and then secondly with our fast action element nearing the end. Much like this clip from shank has done near the start of the film, with again the lone young male character.

 

ESTABLISHING MAIN CHARACTER:

We tried to establish our character as best we could by giving him a big build up and allowing time for the audience to take in his ordinary clothing, the fact he is fairly young and that he is clearly up to no good.

The start of the build up 
of our main character.

Our main character being 
followed to him sitting down.

At the end of the build up
 when we start to see what 
he's up to, the emphasis is 
not not on him but what he's doing.

TRIGGERING THE SERIES OF EVENTS:

We also trigger the series of events for the rest of our narrative by instantly disrupting the equilibrium (with Jack seeing the two antagonists and the body), to then allow the outcome, immersion and resolution of this in the rest of the film. This is used in alot of action/thriller movies such as Eden Lake, see clip below.

Equilibrium

Disruption of equilibrium- seeing 
the men with the dead body.

MUSIC:

We embraced the music in our opening sequence in order to portray the genre to our audience. The Witness is an Action Thriller, and so with our running sequence we used heavy beated, exciting music, to show it is action based and also to portray the adrenaline of the chase through to the audience and made sure it had an upbeat pace.For this we used 'out on a limb' .

 We also get a clear sense of the action element at the end with the simple use of the siren, as this shows the film will involve a lot of chasing/running and also signify an almost ‘street’ and ‘gangster’ element, to engage our younger audience, as this song 'Sirens- by Dizzee Rascal' does in order to put across the street and crime portrayal which is also aimed at a young British audience to which it is very popular.

BINARY OPPOSITES:
We have also used Binary opposites with the men/boys in our sequence wearing fairly dull clothes and the only female wearing a bright red top, making her stand out as the main source of the disrupted equilibrium. 

Very dull clothing 
compared to girl.

Very bright clothing 
compared to men.

Again, our antagonists are wearing dark clothes and our protagonist is wearing lighter clothes clearly apposing the two and making it clear to the audience which ones are more villainous.

Ligher clothing
 representing 
him as the 
protagonist.

Again, dark clothing to 
hide their identity and 
make it clear they are 
the evil antagonists.

TODOROVS THEORY OF EQUILIBRIUM:

We ultimately followed Todorovs theory of equilibrium as a narrative pattern, as in this clip of ‘Lucky Number Slevin’,
by introducing our main character and protagonist Jack, in his equilibrium, although in this case pretty bleak as he is a loner, this is then disrupted by our to two antagonists who end up chasing Jack through the forest and capture him. Through the rest of the film we get to see this resolved and Jack to reach his equilibrium, if not an even better one, once again. 

Our main character in his equilibrium, smoking.

The equilibrium is disrupted.

The disruption triggers the
series of events that follows.

ENIGMA AND ACTION CODES:

We have also used hints of enigma and action codes to help our narrative, for instance our main action code is our main character Jack entering the forest as this then allows the narrative to move forward with him seeing the antagonists etc. 

Right at the very start when we first see our protagonist we are graced with many enigma codes, why is he going into the forest? Why does he look so shifty? Why is he alone? And all of these are answered later on in the sequence but keep the audience gripped until they find them out. 

Our main action and enigma code:
the main character entering the forest.