Evaluation - Question 1

When we first begun our project we learnt about all the different conventions of genres of films and the conventions of opening sequences to help us make our own. We knew that the main aspect we wanted to make our sequence do was to show off the fact it was from the horror genre and to grab the audiences attention and make them want to watch on.

 Once we had begun planning our own sequence we felt the best way to make ours successful was to stick to the conventions so that it would be easily recognisable and well liked, therefore we followed the conventional format of an opening sequence. Despite us not breaking the conventions we felt that if we were going to play about with anything it would be the horror genre conventions, as these have a lot more scope to be made different. The main reason we stuck to the conventions was because it was our first time to make an opening sequence; therefore it was a huge challenge in itself. For us to then break the conventions and yet still make it understandable and popular with the audience would have been too time consuming and difficult. When constructing our research we felt that a lot of the films that did break conventions such as ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (Myrick and Sanchez - 1999) and ‘Cloverfield’ (Reeves - 2008)had a lot more of a niche appeal whereas we wanted to make ours appeal to a wider audience. As we were relying on audience’s expectations and conventions that make horror films successful we did a lot of background research into this to help us along. We looked at many opening sequences from various films to see what they all had in common and blogged up notes about our findings. Horror/thriller sequences such as ‘Seven’ introduce you to the storyline almost immediately and with the use of dark shots and atmospheric music tell the audience what genre they are watching. We also looked into different theorists and researched different horror movies. Legendary films such as ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’(Hooper - 1974) stuck to conventions rigidly, making it appeal to the audience. For example they used teenagers as the vulnerable victims, taking into account Propp’s character roles. We also tried to mimic this in our sequence by using a teenage girl as our victim. Films such as ‘The Omen’ (Donner - 1976)broke conventions slightly by using a young boy as the killer, which went against Propp’s conventional characters roles. It still managed to be successful but very controversial among audiences.  We used Levi-Srauss’s binary opposite theory a lot throughout our sequence:

• Weak vs. Strong
• Light vs. Dark
• Naïve vs. Clever
• Innocent vs. Guilty
• Good vs. Evil
• Downstairs vs. Upstairs
• Known vs. Unknown

Our sequence also follows Todorov’s narrative structure of equilibrium-disruption-equilibrium, with the equilibrium being at the beginning when she has just woken from her sleep after getting back from a late night out, a fairly normal situation for a teenager, and the disruption being when strange things start to occur. We have also used one of Propp’s character roles, the typical victim, who is naïve and vulnerable and not a main character in the storyline, just there to introduce you to the style of film. All of these findings we tried to use in our own project so that it could be as successful as possible.  The main bulk of our sequence was aimed to show a real time sequence, where everything occurs at the same time the audience are watching it. The aim was to create more fear and tension as it would be more realistic. The only time it was not a real time sequence was when there is an ellipsis between her getting home and her waking up, which the audience are supposed to fill in the gap and the dissolve between the two shots helps to show a passing of time.