Evaluation

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

The genre of our piece which we chose to create was a Emotional Drama. From the title of the film “Runaway” we can see what the film will be about and a idea of what the film will be like. For our opening we researched other openings of films in similar genres and a lot of our ideas and inspiration come from these. One way in which we added emotion to our piece was through the use of our voiceover, where our character is using several different emotive lyrics from bands such as Joy Division. Voiceovers are used in other emotional dramas and openings we looked at such as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” where the audience can see the protagonists depressed state through his monotonous voice. In our piece we tried to do something similar, where our audience will hear our character saying things such as “I can feel my life getting harder, I don't think it will get any better” and then they will have a insight into the characters emotion.

Protagonist in open spaced beach area

Another way in which our opening sequence is similar to other emotional dramas is the setting. We have our character walking through the seaside area and near the beach then walking off down the beach, this sets up questions in the film such as where is he going to and why. Also the wide open spaces of the seaside mean you can focus on the character and his emotion and it also signifies his aloneness. We see something similar to this in the opening of Dead Mans Shoes where we see the characters walking through the countryside dragging something behind them. The open space there signifies there loneliness also, also we hear the soft music which sets the tone for the piece, giving it a solemn feeling. We have a soundtrack on ours which we feel reflects the protagonists mood and sets the feel for our piece. The soundtrack to match the characters mood is quite a common feature in Emotional Dramas.

Use of flashback in our sequence

One thing we thought we were original with was our use of a flashback. The use of flashback is quite common in Emotional Drama as we see in Dead Mans Shoes where we see the two characters as toddlers. We used similar techniques as in making the shots “grainy” and using a “sepia effect” all of which we did in post production on Final Cut Pro 7, both of the techniques help distinguish between the present and the past. However we did something original in the size of the screen. For the past aswell as the techniques said above we changed our screen down to a smaller size as to further help in distinguishing between past and present. We did this with the idea that there would be more flashbacks in the film and throughout and that the same technique of making the screen size smaller would have been used.

Screen captures of our procution companies highlighting the use of slow fades

In terms of the piece as a whole it is similar to other emotional dramas due to the slow cut rate, which helps the audience come to terms with the characters emotions. We see the slow cut rate when we cut from the shots and the titles seen above with the use of a slow blur.