Opening sequence establish characterisation, setting, genre, visual appearance and ideology in a number of ways. this is done by using different media affects in a variety of ways.
I feel that our opening sequence is a good example of how an opening sequence should look, it starts to establish setting at the start of the opening sequence, i feel that when the door opens to reveal a room with a girl inside along with wardrobes covered in sheets helps you start to establish the setting, you see the wardrobes covered and usually when you see this you assume the place is abandoned, so for the audience so far they know this.
From the use of camera angles which allow the viewers to clearly see where the victim in being held hostage and being tortured; in a bedroom or room of some sort, it is not until the viewers see the name of the film "337" that they fully establish the setting as when we pan round we see that clearly its a house number, "337" so we realise that she is being tortured in a house.
Characters are established quite easily aswell, when the sequence starts we see a girl tied up lying on a bed as we get closer we realsie she is the victim from the excessive bruising and blood all over her, here we also establish the ideology of the film, we are on the girls side straight away as she is the one who is bloody and lying unconscience on the bed, the ideloagy grows as the seqience goes her when we see her trying to escape and then finally when she is killed.
You immediatly establish the genre of the film through the use of mise-en-scene throughout the whole sequence, You can tell from the bruised face and blood stained clothes that this film is sometype of horror, later on when we are revealed the extent of her situation that we realsise the film is somewhat familair to films such as Saw and Hostel; coming under the genre of Torture Porn, The horific shouting and screams also establish the genre of horror.
I feel that as three girls in a group we really chanlenged the stero typical directors of torture porn films, usually males are the directors of genres like these, Having us three girls do this i think can be seen as strange espeically as we casted a girl as the main character and used our own gender to be the victim of all the torture. We felt that by us attacking this type of genre being three females would give the message that these situations can actually happen, We also approached it in a realistic way, we didnt nesscarily show graohic toture like most other films do, we did it pshycologically, having the audience know it went it on but never actually seeing this, i think it worked well as it did look realistic again emphaisizing the fact that this can happen in real life.
These two shots the left taken from Saw II 's opening and the other from our opening sequence. As you can see both shots are quite similar, a close up angle shows the emotions of the characters while shownig the graphic makeup of each, which really shows the extent of the damage and torture that has gone on. A close up shot really is effective and you can see so much emotion and extra details of the characters.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our media product is focused at people who love horror films, preferably the younger generatio/young adults, but it can also interest people of the older generation/middle aged adults. However i feel that
it does not represent any particular social group in society but if it were i would have to say the working class. We decided to cast Amy Thorburn as our main character, the victim-the protagonist, because of many reasons. After having looked at the conventions of Splatter and Torture porn films, we saw that our victim needs to be attractive and young-preferably a college or "high school" adolescents, Also after watching opening sequences from Saw , Hostel and Captivity we decided that having a girl as the main character is a good idea, not only will it make the audience more uncomfortable but usually most victims to tend to be girls. Girls usually are seen as the weaker sex which is why having a man play the role would not give the same effect. We all agreed that Amy is very attractive and would fit the part ideally. Shes a typical atrractive girl aswell, with Blonde hair and blue eyes, she seems inncoent with these features which also help empahaise the convention of a torture porn and splatter films. We represented her as the victim by using good camera angles, we showed her as being a vulnerbale character by using high angle shots that emphasised her vulnerabilty within the sequence. Having a young attractive girl makes i
t harder for the audience to watch horrible things happen to her, which is what most torture porn films to. They create a intense uncomfortable atmosphere not only by using certain camera angles and editing techniques but also by the characters they cast. Culteral Signifiers help greatly too, we made Amys hair greasy and dirty to show she has been held captive for a while, also we did put some blood in her hair, Make up for Amy was very graphic and extremly detailed, We covered her face in pale foundation to create the look that she was ill and perhaps malnourished, her lips looked cracked and dehydrated and her face was very pruple and red, covered in blood and "bruises". To make Amy look more innocent we decided to dress her in a white dress, the white symbolising the inncocence she has, the colour white signifies purity and inncocnece which was perfect, the dress emphasizing her gender as a girl. Our target audience was those of the younger generation, having casted a Amy a 17 year old girl as our main character i feel that the younger genreation can relate more to her as she is of around the same age.3.What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
As we have made a low budget, independant British film, not a Hollywood film which cost hundreds of pounds to film, the media institution that may ditribute our media p
roduct would be Film4 this is because film4 eventhough now does broadcast hollywood block buster films it also broadcast low budget high quality films. Such Films like the infamous "Slumdog Millionaire" which one numourous Academy Awards, Film 4 had produced this film and the profit created from this was huge, the racked in a huge revenue of $377,417,293. The film was made out of a gross budget of $15.1 million, the low budget film had made outstanding profits which compared to some Hollywood films which spend lots of money and hardly make any revenue is `, and knowing that Film4 was apart fo it, aswell as Slumdog Millionaire Film4 is responsible for backing a large number of films made in the UK such as Borat and Four weddings and Funeral. I am confident to say that i would like to have Film4 distribute our film.4.Who would be the audience for your media product?
The target audience of our media product would be fans of torture por/splatter/slasher films. Also it would be tar
geted at both males and females from the age of 15+ I believe both genders would be interested in our film as it is a Torture Porn film and filsm such as Saw and Hostel have both genders loving their films. You could say that the film would mainly be targeted at men as some say they can stand the gore and and blood, however i know alot of girls who do genuiley like gorey films, people like me. I also know some men who dont like watchig gorey films as they cant stand the overuse of blood and reality that these things can actually happen... I feel that the audience who watch our film would need to have a stomach for gore and dont actually mind seeing alot blood going on. Our film I think would be classifed as a 15 for the opening sequence, as having found infomation from the BBFC (British Board of Film Classifcation) a film is classified as a 15 when the film contains• strong violence
• frequent strong language (eg 'f***').
• portrayals of sexual activity
• strong verbal references to sex
• sexual nudity
• brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to sexual violence
• discriminatory language or behaviour
• drug taking
I feel our opening sequence fits into this catorgory perfectly also for a horror film to be classed as a 15 these our the guidlines
At a 15 there can be strong threat and menace (as long as it is not sadistic or sexualised), althought the strongest gory images are unlikely to be acceptable.
However I only think that our opening seqeunce would be classed as 15, I think that the rest of the film may change the classifcation to a possible 18 depending on what went on during the film, on the other hand the film may stay at a 15
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
In order to attract our audience about our opening sequence, we posted it on facebook. This was to see weather
people thought our peice was succesful and weather we should change anything within it, also we wanted to see what our target audience though of it, as on facebook most people we have got are our own age or older so we thought facebook was an ideal place. The feedback we got from facebook was actually quite positive even if no one made it obvious and clear, we got told it was some "freaky shit" which to us is a good response as that is what we aimed to do, Torture Porn idealy is meant to make the audiences uncomfortbale...from the feedback we got i think we really acheived it. We then asked staff and pupils in our media class to see what their overall opinion of it was, many said it was extremly well put together, However one question everyone asked was..."is there any music?" we thought about this alot but decided that in the end we thought it still sounded and looked effective enough to go without, one reason why was becuase we wanted to make it look as realistic as possible and also make it more freaky to the audience. 
The last way we adress our audience was by creating a questionnaire. The first question was "did you enjoy our opening sequence?", the feedback we got was good becuase the results came back with over 90% liking our film. This was great for us as we had accomplished the aim of our film, to hit our target audience perfecty and also to have people enjoy it
The second question that was asked was "what genre did you think our film was"? Most people either thought the film was a horror or thriller, however overall they did understand the genre was Torture porn, we can understand why many thought the film could have been horror or thriller, this is because Toture Porn is not a well knwon genre as most people who actually watch tortur
e porn film belive they are wathcing a horror, Toture porn is a sub-genre from horror. Many could also possibly think that it is a thriller due to some of the fast pace movements that go on during the opening sequence. But however luckily most people we asked did know our genre was torture porn.The next question was "would you continue wathcing?"
The answers we recieved were great for this question, around 98% wanted to continue watching the film, which ment that we had captured the audiences attention and left them wanting to watch more. Many felt that they were eager to see what happened and to see the rest of the plot that could happen.Finally the last question we asked was "did you understand the narrative?" The asnwers we got was great again, 98% said they did understand what was going on, which is very helpful and good as we
know that we have got the narrative of our final piece across to the audiences correctly. Overall i think the feedback helped us to create a final peice that was aimed at our audineces and helo to also create a good final peice that makes the viewers want to watch. Even if its only once as its quite scary. 6.What have you learnt about the use of technologies in the contruction of your film?
I have learnt a variety of things about the use of technologies during the construction of your film. For example, haveing researched different genres in order to help us find the perfect genre to do, Using the interent helped sus find the perfect genre to do and also helped us researched into different films surrounding that genre, We found out that Saw, Hostel and Captivity were all major films from Torture Porn the interent helped us understand the gross budgets each film made and told us that these films were successful, which indicated that torture Porn is a good genre. Having the interent really helped as it was easy to access and gave you all the infomation. Watching Dvds and clips from Youtube also helped us definatly choose our genres, even though most freaked us out they did help us decide weather we were willing to do such a good genre. Watching many of the commentarys on the Dvds we began to understand the concept the directors were getting at. Another thing i learnt was choosing the right camera, we decided to stick with the the same camera we used for our preliminary which was JVC camera, the cmaera was very good at capturing everything we needed and alos made a clear non fuzzy picture when they were loaded onto the computer. Using a Tripod was another thing i learnt as we were then able to have still shots without having the cmaera go all wobbly if we had hand-held it. The main thing i learnt though was how to use our editing software, Sony Vegas Pro. Learning to use this was very important as eventhough we may have the shots they may not fit together smoothly. Using the software allowed us to create a perfect seqeunce which flowed well. We learnt how to Fade and overlap shots which gave the impression that time was passing aswell as learning how make the sound fit with all the peice, making it all seem perfect instead of having different breathing rates start and stop when a new shot comes in, we managed to make the sound smooth out.
7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt from the progression from it to the full product?
From having the chance to create a preliminary task i feel that we were able get a feel for what we needed to do. Doing the task enabled us to get used to using a camera and tripod and also got us used to creating storyboards and choosing the right place and charatcer,props and other things to include in it overall. We learnt from the tasks that if we planned everything correctly we could get everything done quit swiftly. We chose in that task to use simple angles just to see how they would look, however when it came to this we realised we should broaden our horizons and go a bit wild with things. We decided to take chances and even if they didnt work we didnt have to use it. Also from the preliminary task to the progression of our final peice we learnt that having more shots in a larger space time was alot harder than we thought, We needed to make sure the peice wasnt going to be too long or short which also put pressure on us, we needed to come up with more exciting shots to use, and plan carfully what we were going to do, as in the prelim task all we did was come up with a very simple story line which turned out efffective, but for thsi final peice we knew we had to do more. Alos editing was alot different from the prelimanry task, The task was very simple and didnt need much editing as the shots did come togther and there wasnt much of it, however when we began editing, eventhough it didnt take as long as we thought it would it still did take time to fully complete and make sure eveything was perfect. From doing the final peice i have learnt that the prelimnary task was alot simpler to do as we only had to create around 1-30 secs of footage.
