Main post 12.1

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

After doing research on the crime genre and looking at the films Goodfella's, The Dark Knight and Pulp Fiction, I can see that our film breaks away from these conventions because one of the films has no video footage and all the titles, and the other two have a short bit of footage at the start or in the middle whereas our opening title sequence has the titles mixed in with the footage. The structure of our sequence also breaks away from conventions in the placing of the title, this is shown through the fact that in the opening sequence of The Dark Knight the title is placed at the beginning of the footage, in Goodfellas the title is placed in the middle of the footage and in Pulp Fiction, the title of the film is placed again in the middle whereas in our opening sequence the title is placed at the end of the film. This means that looking at our footage we can see that the structure of our opening sequence clearly breaks away from the conventions.

After looking at how the style of the font and credits is shown in other crime film opening sequences I can see that our film does not break away from the coventions in some ways. In all of the opening sequences Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas and The Dark Knight they all have the titles on black backgrounds, as you can see our opening sequence also does exactly this. Looking at the font in the three opening sequences I can see that they all use an almost smart and clear font, for example Times New Roman, comparing this font to my groups opening sequence I can see that we have stuck to this convention of using a smart font. The colour of the font in our opening sequence is the same as the colour of the font in Goodfella's, the white, which contrasts to the black background however in other crime films including Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight we can see that they have used bright colours like the bright blue and the bright yellow.

Looking at websites like http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html we can see that crime films are developed around the sinister actions of others, this also happens in our opening sequence as the film revolves around drug dealing and both characters are holding guns as props. When looking at the amount of dialogue in the crime genre I can see that in Goodfella's there is a scene in the middle of the titles with a lot of dialogue, also there is a couple of lines of dialogue at the start of Pulp Fiction and no dialogue in The Dark Knight, from what I can see and what I have read I think that the crrime genre use very little dialogue in their title sequences, this means that as the audience we get more action and less introduction to the characters.

In our title sequence we used a majority of different camera angles as from our research we found that this was done quite a lot in chase sequences. One of the shots we wanted to use was the tracking shot which we found very difficult to use due to limited resources and the fact we had to use a skateboard. We initially wanted to use the tracking shot as it would stick to the conventions of the crime genre, shown in the opening title sequence of Trainspotting. Looking at the narrative enigma in our title sequence at the end we have a slight which character will be shot but by the end of the whole film this will be solved.

The style of our presentation was shot in 4:3 whereas it should have conventionally be shot in 16:9 this was an error on our behalf and if we had more time would have been done properly. In all other crime films I have researched they have all got up beat music with a bit of non-digetic sound underneath. In all the crime films I have researched including Goodfella's, The Dark Knight and Pulp Fiction there is no special effects and the editing is quite fast paced. The conventions of the mise en scene is seen to be quite smart, this is shown in the crime film, Resovoir Dogs where they are all wearing smart suits, we have stuck to this convention as both of our characters are shot in suits.