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

In the production of my groups' media product, we made conscious decisions influenced by typical conventions for film openings, including genre, narrative structure and style.

GENRE
Our film is a mixture of genres, being both sci-fi and action. Here are a few ways in which our film opening adhered to the conventions of the sci-fi action genre.

• Like a lot of action films, our opening begins by jumping straight into the action, throwing the audience into the story without really telling them what is going on. We thought this would be a good way to begin our opening as it adds drama and immediately grips the viewer. An example of this would be the beginning of the James Bond film Casino Royale, in which the film starts with a chase scene between James Bond and another man.

• The music in our opening is tense and adds suspense and atmosphere to the scenes. We deliberately chose the music as it was fast paced and worked well with the speed of the action in the shots. This sort of music is also seen in Star Trek, a film with the same genre to ours. In Star Trek's action scenes, it also uses music to set the pace and create a sense of urgency. 

• For our opening, we chose to have a female protagonist. This challenges the typical conventions of the action genre. We mainly took inspiration from female protagonists such as Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger games and Lara Croft from Tomb Raider.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

For our opening, we took three of the main theories and used them as a template in the making of our film's narrative.

• Todorov's theory: equilibrium - disruption - hero's journey - new equilibrium. 
  Our opening challenged this theory and started with a disruption (Leora being chased by the Henchman)
  
  
• Propp's theory: the 8 character roles (villan, hero, donor, helper, princess, father, dispatcher, flase hero).
  Obviously it would be a challenge to include all 8 character roles in the opening of our film, however we were able to include at least two, the villain as the Henchman and the hero as Leora 

• Levi-Strauss' theory: binary opposites.
  In our film we have the contrast between good and evil (Leora and Synergy), past and present (2014 and 2071) and known and unknown (Leora's present and when she jumps back in time).

Our film's structure was based on films of the similar genre, and so contained aspects of openings we had researched prior to storyboarding. The following displays the similarities between the opening of Attack The Block, a sci-fi film, and our film opening.

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STYLE
We made many deliberate decisions on the style of our opening, taking our inspirations from various films of a similar style to what we envisioned our opening to look like.

Editing - With the editing of our opening containing things such as the chase scene and the soundtrack, we were directly influenced by our research for the following reasons.

• For the chase scene, we had a look at examples such as Point Break and Casino Royale to see what techniques we could use to make our opening look as good as possible. After analysing the clips we came up with a sort of formula which you can read on our post about chase scene research. As you can see the majority of what the bullet points are describing are aspects of our own opening. 

• With the soundtrack as well, examples such as Men In Black and Fast Five were hugely influential in our choice of music for our project. During the research we noticed that the music for the chase scenes we were watching was all fast paced and heavily orchestral. However, as our movie genre was sci-fi, we made the decision to have music that recognisably computer sounds to connote the theme of sci-fi. 

Grading - For the grading of our final clip, we were directly influenced by our research for the following reasons.

• Looking at films of a similar genre to ours we noticed a pattern with the overall colouring of shots, with most films such as The World's End and Attack The Block having a strongly blue colour choice. Our group decided that this would be a good colour to grade our film opening, as not only did it conform to the general style but also has strong connections to the idea of technology and the future. 

Titles - With the titles present in our opening, some decisions were influenced by films why others were ones that we made on our own initiative. 

• When choosing the titles for the credits, we decided without any research into other films that we wanted to include integrated titles. We were later influenced by the way in which the titles were integrated from the sequence of Zombieland, where characters directly affect the titles, making them appear to be 3D.

• The static title at the end of the opening of our film however was wholly influenced by films such as Skyfall, Looper and Attack The Block. We decided as a group that the titles were typical of the action/sci-fi genre and that we should use the style for our film name. 

Overall, I think that our group managed to find a fine balance between conforming to, developing and challenging forms and conventions of real media products. In conforming to the more traditional ways in which sci-fi action films begin, we were able to make it clear to the audience what the genre was. In challenging them, we managed to create a more original story.