Evaluation Post 1: In what was does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media projects?

Our film, titled 'Follow' is about an 18 year old girl called Grace who is stalking another 18 year old girl called Ella. Grace finds out at the beginning that Ella has recently started dating Grace's ex boyfriend and therefore becomes obsessed with Ella. Throughout the movie she stalks Ella and attempts several times to kill her before eventually Ella fights back and Grace does not succeed.

The main genre we chose for our film opening sequence was Psychological Thriller, with the secondary genres being Horror and teen Drama.

Narrative Theory

An example of a movie which also follows Todorov's narrative theory is 'Single White Female'. 

• Equilibrium- Protagonist Allie is looking for a new room mate and decides on a girl called Hedy
• Disruption- When Allie decides to get back with her ex-boyfriend Hedy become extremely jealous and starts doing weird things in order to prevent them from getting back together. Hedy also changes her appearance to look exactly like Allie. She eventually murders Allies boyfriend
• Resolution- After a fight between the two girls Allie wins and kills Hedy.
• New Equilibrium- Allie continues her life without Hedy. 

Claude Levi-Strauss looked at narrative structure in terms of binary opposites. This theory helped us when making our character choices. 

• Grace- Stalker 
• Ella- Stalkee

Our two characters follow the typical Good and Evil characters and are therefore binary opposites.

A theory that we decided to include a lot in our opening sequence was Roland Barthes five codes, specifically the Enigma Code:

Enigma codes pose questions to the audience which are then answered shortly after or later on in the film. For example, who is she? Where is she going? Why is she doing that? They're questions enabling the audience to get intrigued with the film and wanting to find out the answers to these questions, therefore watching more of it.

• Our first enigma code occurs when Grace rejects her friends offer to meet up that day, this makes the audience ask why she doesn't want to see her friends.

• Questions are also raised in the audiences mind when Grace scribbles out a photo of Ella's face as they wonder why she is angry. 

• The main enigma code featured in our opening sequence is the knife. This raises lots of questions in the audience's mind about what Grace is going to do with the knife and these questions will be answered later on in the film. 

One of the main ways a film connotes its genre is through its choices in style, this includes

• titles
• editing style
• choices in the framing of shots

For our titles we decided to use a digital clock-style font and have the titles appear as if they are being typed on the screen. We did this to connote the social media and online theme that is a main theme in our movie. We got inspiration for this from the titles for the movie 'Unfriended' as it is a horror/thriller movie that also has social media as a main theme. Our titles follow the conventions of psychological thrillers as they help to connote the genre well. 

The titles from 'Unfriended':

An example of our titles:













A convention of psychological thrillers that I found, was that they generally start of with slow paced editing which means the storyline also begins quite slowly with nothing too dramatic happening within the first few minutes of the movie.
This is seen in the opening of the movie 'The Gift' where little of what to come in the rest of the movie is given away and the editing style is also slow.
We challenged this convention by having quite a dramatic opening sequence with a fast editing pace to reflect the fact that Grace is rushing to get ready.

For example we cut this shot up several times to create a fast paced, choppy style which conveys to the audience the fact that Grace is in a rush to get ready.