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

When producing our film opening, we took alot of inspiration from real films, for example Juno and Submarine. Firstly, I have produced a set of captions for the youtube video in English which discuss the thought processes of the team behind many of the shots.

Unfortunately, the length of the captions are limited so the last 10 or 15 seconds of the video do not have a commentary. However, the only major moment missed was the final punch. We included this as although it is a negative action towards our protagonist, it is very humorous at the expense of our main character and such humour is a key convention of Coming of Age cinema. To watch the video with captions, simply activate the English captions that are NOT auto generated and feel free to pause and rewind as necessary.

The aforementioned punch

The commentary makes reference to a few films that greatly inspired our opening, such as Juno and Submarine, below I have included the examples I was referring to.

Juno's Titles

Submarine's Soundtrack by Alex Turner

Submarine's Institutional Titling

Our Submarine inspired colour grade

Grading

An example of Submarine's colour grade

One important aspect of our opening briefly mentioned in the commentary was the grading of our footage. We really liked the grading used in Submarine and in a number of the sequences in our opening we really wanted to replicate it as best as possible. It seems like they tried to do a split, by pushing highlights towards a warmer orangey tone and the shadows towards a colder blue tone. This resulted in a very interesting, almost sepia looking grade which we really wanted to use in our sequence. I think this is best demonstrated in the shots by the lake, where the orange and blue of Craig's jacket really standout. I feel this grade really worked well with our piece and helped bolster it's indie aesthetic.

Narrative Structure 

Although narrative theories of Todorov and Barthe are explored a little bit in the video, these theories greatly impacted how we constructed our opening sequence and thus ought to be explored further. Below is a table detailing how each theory affected our opening, as well as a short summary of each theory.