‘In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.’
Font style used thought out the opening titles.
In films the title is often used to help the audience understand the idea and genre of the film. In our case we chose 'Infanticide' its definition in the dictionary is 'a person who kills an infant,for example their own child'. I chose this title because it basically sums up the main plot of the film. The title was presented to the audience and the end of the opening titles as i thought it would create a bigger impact to the audience as it is a big clue as to what the film is going to be about. This is then reflected in the opening scene where we see a young child drowning in the bath. I decided to integrate my titles into the props used in the opening titles as I thought it was different from any other opening titles I had seen and would be more unique to our film. It also shows that the character is very hands on as he has created this book, which later shows itself, when we learn he is a detective who deals with homicides and gets very involved in his work.
I chose a basic font which was very corporate and professional which shows that this film has a very serious meaning behind it, it also appeals to an older audience where as a bubble writing for instance could be seen as younger.
The way that characters are introduced in films is a very important factor to the relatonship they have with the audience as it is there first impression of the character which is the one imprinted in their mind. We decided that we would drop our audience straight into the life of our character by them waking up with him from a nightmare. The bottles and messy suit you see when he wakes up tells the audience he is a lazy and an alcoholic but his costume tells them he has a profession. We did introduce our main character first through the opening title scene with his hands cutting up a notebook and sticking new things in, the fact that the audience cant see the whole of his body give them a taste of mystery and tension to leave them wanting more. He was introduced immediatly in the film as we felt that the longer he was on camera the more the audience would establish a relationship with him. The shots used on the character throughout the film are mid shots showing you his upper body and making him less suspicious opposed to us having close ups throughout the film to build suspicion to his identity. When the child in the bath is introduced we used a first person shot standing over the child to belittle the child and to portray his vulnerability.
Story and how the opening sets it up (actor's introduction).
In the opening of my film I wanted to give the audience a insight into the main protagonist but without showing his face this way it was a sense of mystery and suspense which automatically tells the audience that the film is a thriller genre. Also this is a effective way to hook the audience into watching the whole film as they want to learn more about this character. Some clues were given away in the opening about the characters habits and lifestyle using props, for example
In these images the audience can see, that he smokes and there is a bottle of vodka left on the side of the table this could be that he is stressed doing paper work as there is sheets of writing scattered across the table, but after watching the opening sequence we realise that he is an alcoholic and that he has problems that are making him behave like this. From a over the shoulder shot be notice that he is wearing a white shirt that could suggest that he is a business man. Also the word murder is presented in the book, which could make the audience aware that this man could be dangerous within the film.
I got the inspiration to shoot my opening titles in this way from researching other openings such as 'Seven' which uses a simular technique of extreme close ups of props which entices the audience to watch the whole film as they want to learn more about this character.
< Screen Shot from 'Seven' this is where we got the idea for a book format to display our opening titles. 
< This is a screen shot from our opening titles.
Setting and Location.
We decided to use Georgina's house as our location for the opening sequence as it gave it a more personal feel, and we believe that the audience would get to know more about this character from just seeing inside his house and his behavior, without him having to say much dialogue. Using low key lighting we was able to only show what we wanted the audience to see, for example he is a single mid-aged man we didn't want any items that would be placed around a normal family home to be seen in the background of any shots.
Image Control/Lighting
Image control and lighting throughout our film was very important to show was time of day it was to show how late in the day the main character was waking up and how lazy he is. Lucky for us all of our shots needn't use LED lighting as the natural light coming through the windows and reflecting throughout the house made the shots lighting perfect to what we wanted. Some of our shots when uploaded were too bright so we edited them using the Brightness in the simple editing settings to dim down the scenes, If the brightness was too high than our film would give off the wrong vibe of being an upbeat happy film.
Costume.
We researched typical costumes used in Thriller film, we considered stereotypes when planning the characters of our film. We chose our main protagonist to be a detective as this is often the main character in most thriller films we researched such as 'Shutter Island'. We looked at the costumes that was used and it was a suit which shows the characters states and establishes that he is a business man. In the opening of our film the suit looks messy as his tie is twisted, this shows that he is not your typical professional detective. In the opening scene we see that he wake up already dressed in his suit with bottles of alcohol around him, we wanted this to be the first visible scene of our main character as the audience are made aware that he is an alcoholic which suggest that he has had troubles in his life.
Sound Track.
We created our soundtrack for our opening titles on Garageband, we looked at other opening to Triller films and realised that often a classical piece of music is used. We went with this idea and create a piece of music that was quite classical we wanted it to have a different twist on it as our film is very deep and by adding deep tones to the music it tell the audience that this is a serious film, which fits well to the 'Thriller genre'. As our detective turns the pages of the book, in the opening titles, the text jumps around and changes size, we added a extra noise to our music which was loud and help to shock the audience and keep there attention.
In the dream scene we added a different piece of music which was lighter and more distorted to help emphasizes that this was a dream and not real life, as it cuts from real life to the dream the contrast between the music and silence works well as it shows that the two scenes are completely different.
Special FX.
In my opening titles I used a range of effects to make it more interesting and eye catching the the viewer, I did this by adding flashes and 'Bad TV' to make the image jump, I also played around with changing the colour from normal to negative this was inforced by changing the scale of the the text so one minute it was normal then it jumped closer and changes to negative, fitting in well with other thriller opening credits that I had researched.
Blue - James
Red - Georgina
