Evaluation - Question 1

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

To answer this question I have got nine stills from the 2009 Action Thriller Sherlock Holmes, becuase even though the film is about the Sherlock Holmes books, it is still in the Action Thriller genre and goes back and uses clips from the film with the titles.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

www.artofthetitle.com 

Sherlock Holmes does things a bit differently, because it does it's titles at the end of the film for the end titles/credits. However, it still uses some of the same conventions as we do in 'Loan shark'.

'Loan Shark'

Just about all of the Action Thriller film openings that I have seen in the past, whether it be leisure or research use an animation to show their titles to their target audience, like in James Bond or Mission Impossible. So because of this I feel that we are challenging the standard conventions of the genre when we have the titles going over the film like in 'The Towering Inferno'. We really liked the idea of challenging the standard conventions, because it would show and require more creative skill while still keeping with the genres conventions. So to do this we decided to split the opening sequence into sections by splitting them up with the titles.

Below are the titles that we have used:

This title is showing our production company logo and it is right at the start of the film with no sound over it or anything, as the only connection from the logo to the film is the fact that our production company "Three Lions Productions" made the film.

We done this because, we didn't want a long animated video like those of James Bond and Mission Impossible, as even though the fantastic opening sequence is one of the reasons the James Bond is known throughout the world it weren't something that we were hoping to recreate. Sherlock Holmes does the same thing as us for our title sequence as it puts the titles within the films video, yet it uses an animation so that it stays within the films story line. 

For the clips we wanted it to be quite light given the films plot and I feel that this once again gives us a closer connection to our target audience, because traditionally in Action Thriller it's always done in a dark warehouse where they fight to the end, however because we want our film to be realistic we choose it to be throughout the day and in a wide open space like a field as in reality the last thing that you want to do is to meet a stranger in a dark and spooky place like an old warehouse or alleyway. 

The music however, did stay within the standard conventions of the genre as for most action thrillers their music is a guitar solo and that's exactly what we have used to build the tension through the opening sequence and to give a commentary of events as at the end of the opening we use a piano to explain the sense of loss and disappointing in the eyes of our main character. 

We decided to put the films title at the end of the opening sequence as that is at one of the points where the tension is at it's highest and also it challenges the standard conventions of most Action Thrillers as they normally put their films title at the end of the film. For the other titles in the opening sequence that tell the audience who's in the film and who made it we decided to put in between the different scenes to split them up and help to build the tension even more as it get the audience wonder what's happening, because this is a technique that is used a lot it Thrillers and Horrors.

Despite this, throughout the whole opening sequence we decided to challenge most of the standard conventions of the Action Thriller genre, while sticking with the more basic ones like the music and the plot of the film.