Question 1

How does your film opening use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of existing film openings?

The genre of my two minute film opening is a teen horror. There are many other teen horror films made that have all been of success. For example, Dead Mary and Dead Wood. They both consist of typical conventions of a horror film, such as, a young vulnerable girl, that fits the typical stereotype and they're both in secluded locations.

In a teen horror films there are many other conventions that are expected; Colours such asred and black as these link to danger and blood. The hero(usually male) and the villain(usually a monster,killer etc). 'Fake scare' which makes the audience jump, even though its not a murderer jumping out but most likely a bird or something being dropped; this gets the audience immediately on edge which is the aim when the producers make the film, if he audience are on edge it will make the horror film
scarier throughout.

In the film 'Scream' the female character is vulnerable and in the house alone, this made her an easy target and she was the one that was killed. In my groups film opening 'The Hidden Nightmare' we used this used this convention and had a teenage girl in the house on her own. We then developed this convention of vulnerability by showing the threat to the audience, although we didn't show the face of the threat, we made it obvious that he was there throughout the whole film opening, therefore developing the idea in 'Scream'. Another way we used a convention from the film 'Scream' was the suspense, using both diegetic and non-diegetic sound we created suspense and a build up on tension in our film opening, by for example having the non-diegetic sound of eerie music as the threat walked up the stairs to indicate perhaps what would happen later on in the film and also to help show the genre of the film, as 'Scream' did too.

Another film opening that can be referred to with our film opening is 'Dead Mary'. This film is set in a secluded location(the woods) which is a location that is chosen by many horror film openings, eg, Cabin in the Woods, Dead Wood, Cabin Fever. Challenging this convention was something that my group chose to do because we wanted to show that using other conventions(fake scares, vulnerable girl) that we could make our teen horror film just as scary as this. We did however try and develop this idea too because although the actual setting wasn't secluded, the female character was alone in the house and this was made clear. This made the threat seem a lot worse because the audience knew she was alone.

The sound was something that we looked at in advance, we watched a few film openings in lesson time, such as the film 'Se7en' and look at the effectiveness of different sound, how much diegetic sound looked good and just generally picked up idea's from this film opening that we could adapt into our own film opening.  In the opening of 'se7en' there is no acting or actors/actresses that can be seen, so the sound in this opening is emphasised and there is sound the whole way through. With my groups film opening, we thought this was a good idea so we had non-diegetic sound near enough throughout the whole opening as this was able to built tension and also interest the audience more, we did however use diegetic sound too (the sound of the door and fridge opening and the typing of the phone). We thought that this was something that 'se7en' was lacking and we also wanted to give an aspect of realisation to our opening, as this was able to make the audience relate more and therefore make our opening more intriguing.

Titles were something we felt were very important, they could foresee something that was going to happen later on in the film, they could be used to created tension and also to help show the genre of the film within the first few seconds. Some titles shown in 'se7en' are the names of the actors/actresses 'casting by' 'music by' and 'production designed by'. We thought these were good titles but the repetition of the word 'by' made it less effective so we decided to take this word out when putting the titles in for our film opening for 'The Hidden Nightmare'. The colour scheme of our film opening titles are white on a black background with the font of 'Papyrus', this was chosen because the connotations that come to mind with the colour black are 'death' 'darkness' 'fear' so this is why we chose this colour, we didn't want to use to colour red because we didnt want to give to much away, we wanted to indicate that the film would be scary and dark but without giving away that there might be blood or gore involved with the colour red. 'Papyrus' is a font that doesn't neccesserily look too scary however it is a strong font that we used purposely as we didn't think the 'writing like' font used in 'se7en' was effective. The titles are over the acting in our film opening because we didn't want to waste any of the two minutes with just a blank screen and one title at a time.