HOW DOES YOUR OPENING TITLE SEQUENCE USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?
When filming our OTS it was important that we had a simple plan to follow in order to create our opening title sequence. we took different scenes and scenarios from multiple horror films as inspiration and pieced them together to create our OTS. The reason we did this was because the unique scenarios from each horror film worked very well at drawing our attention to the film , and therefore believed this would reflect onto our audience.
We took some inspiration from films like the human centipede and reservoir dogs , incorporating a similar torture scenario, for our torture scene we took a lot of inspiration from the torture scene from hostel especially its presentation of violence and torture, the mask was inspired by the iconic killer Jason Vorhees from the film Freddy vs Jason. However, our scenes were not as gory and as explicit as the scenes in the human centipede and hostel, a lot of these scenes had recognisable features from other existing horror films that we aimed to replicate in our OTS.
did we challenge or conform to horror conventions?
Usually the majority of horror films use low key lighting throughout, to create the perfect atmosphere to keep the audience on edge, we stuck to this for the most part of our OTS as if we had used high key lighting within the torture scene, you would easily be able to see the location of the scene, this would also make the scene less enticing to the audience as it would not create the same eerie and mysterious effect, we developed this convention as we kept the scenes dark using only artificial lighting to create a much better effect, however we stuck to using high key lighting in the hospital scene as there wasn't many obvious horror conventions present within this scene.
Another convention that we conformed to is the location, we used a similar location to the film Hostels torture rooms and hospital scenes, we did this because a large amount of horror films are filmed in very safe locations such as schools and hospitals to create the idea that everything is going to be alright and the victim is going to be safe, we started in the hospital because it creates the effect that the victim is going to be taken care of and he will be safe, this is more likely to make our audience feel on edge as when bad things happen in very safe and secure places, it contradicts the usual feelings that you would typically feel in a safe location, this is a direct link to Wes Craven's theory as he believes that the best place to film horror is in safe places. We took inspiration from The Human Centipede as it has an unstable doctor who performs experiments on his patients.
We also challenged some conventions while filming our OTS for example, instead of using a typical dumb girl as the victim we used a male character as the victim because it contradicts the usual stereotypes as a male is never usually never the first character to die, we did this to make the OTS a lot more unpredictable and so it would intrigue the audience and make them want to carry on watching and they would not know what to expect.
We conformed the convention of the ordering of the distribution company coming before the production company.
DISTRIBUTION COMPANY: