FINISHED - CONVENTIONS RESEARCH: KEY INFLUENCES

KEY INFLUENCES

I have researched several films, both made by the Big 5 conglomerates, as well as by WARP, and have found general conventions used in each, as well as genre specific conventions in each.

TITLES 
Titles are a good signifier of the genre of a film based upon the font they are in, they also anchor the preferred reading. There are movies which do not have titles, however we are focusing only on films which have title sequences. The order of our titles will appear as follows:

- A Scope Productions Film
- A Spikey Films Production
- In Association with Polyhedron Productions & Bright Films
- Luxembourg Film Fund
- Directed by James David
- Produced by Nira Park
- Starring Tristan Plumridge
- James Whiteing
- Emma Scoble
- Introducing Nikolas Wilson
- And with Louis Hodges and Neil Scoble
- Director of Photography: Michael Bonvillain
- Costume Designer: Esmee Young
- Music Score composed by Hannah Ni
- VFX by Tom Szenher
- Hair and Makeup by Silvana Gamero
- Screenplay by Burr Steers
- Edited by Chris Dickens
- Directed by James David

Some of the names of people mentioned above, such as Nira Park, Nikolas Wilson, Michael Bonvillain, Esmee Young, Tom Szenher, Burr Steers and Chris Dickens have worked on films which are a part of the zom-rom-com genre.

IDENTS
 
Generally in the horror genre, the ident may be tweaked in order to anchor the genre. This is evident in Friday the 13th, where the ident has a red tint to it. There is also a considerable variation in the number and length of the idents.  

SOUND 

We would like to include an audio bridge from the idents to the film opening, similar to Le-Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee, or Hot Fuzz. Because our film fits into the comedy genre we would also like to include exaggerated sound which we would create separately, this Foley sound is a usual occurrence in the comedy genre. Foley sound is often used when the sound in a scene or used as part of a scene doesn't sound right or as exaggerated as anyone would had hoped, they would ask someone, usually the sound design team to work on sound in post production that matches the pacing and expected sound of what is seen on screen.

1st SHOT 

The first shot of a film, is typically used as an exposition shot, so that the audience can be familiarised with the setting and the main protagonist, the first shot also provides the audience with narrative enigma, and might not show the main protagonist straight away. In Shaun of the Dead, the main protagonist is shown immediately, with a close-up of his face, allowing the audience to focus only on him. 

CENTRAL PROTAGONIST & NARRATIVE

For the central protagonist in our film opening, we want to take a lot of inspiration from Simon Pegg's character from Shaun of the Dead, as well as Nick Frost's character Ed. We wanted the character to come off as a slob to the audience, and be somewhat of an unexpected proppian hero. We wanted to include binary opposition in our film opening, which we chose to do between the main protagonist and his friend. We wanted to follow Todorov's narrative structure theory, wherein the film begins in equilibrium, there is then a disruption, followed by the realisation, and then the attempt to fix or repair the damage, followed by either the same equilibrium or a new equilibrium.

MISE-EN-SCENE 
In Shaun of the Dead, the main Mise-en-scene in the opening scene, sets the scene as quite messy and dirty, and provides the audience with exposition for the main protagonist and his 'sidekick'. We are hoping to mirror the mise-en-scene in our film opening with the mise-en-scene in Shaun of the Dead, to provide the audience with as much exposition about the main protagonist as we can.

TRANSITION TO MAIN FILM 

The film openings we have looked at as a group have had their main titles visible in the film opening, Zombieland is a good example of this. We want our title sequence to be more like the title sequence in 'About a boy' and 'Pretty in Pink'