1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

The target audience would expect the track to be suitable to our genre; it needs to sound slightly eerie and dark. The track we made was suitable for our genre because it has an mysterious slow beginning then it builds up, which symbolizes the uprising action that would of come up, after the opening scene. The choice of track we picked was from YouTube, it was by John Murphy and it was called ‘In The House, In A Heartbeat (28 Days Later Soundtrack) and it was the HD version and we converted it to an mp3 file. But we couldn’t use the track because we don’t have the permission to and if we did use it for our opening, that would be plagiarism because the track was used for another film called ‘’28 Days Later’’. So then we made another track on Logic Pro, that has the same rhythm and the same build up of tempo, like the John Murphy track. The reason why we liked the John Murphy track was because it has a slow, mellow and calming tone from the piano in the beginning then after 20 seconds roughly, the music builds up with the sound of strings instrument a bit more and then more, with an added rock genre type of music - the electric guitar, drums, which was added over the mellow sound.

The lighting in the opening was dimly lit and we set the opening at night, to make the opening seem secretive and odd, because the protagonist was getting ready at night to go somewhere and he was all alone in his house. The décor of the living room was not we wanted originally because our aim was to film in a house or apartment that was suitable for a single, middle class 25 year old, so it had to be clean, modern and vague, and it should have a cold atmosphere overall because of the protagonist’s peculiar presence. However, the décor we had to put up with was not too bad, it had had what we wanted. For example, the living room had a sofa, TV, Clock and it was easy to move the sofa around, so we can film the actor from his back whilst he is sitting on the sofa, watching TV. The décor the stairs did not require much; the stairs just needed to clean from any rubbish so the protagonist can easily walk to his ‘‘bedroom’’. However, the bedroom lighting was too dark, especially when we wanted to film the map scene, but luckily there was a lamp was lit brightly below where the map was placed on the wall. However, the lighting in the bedroom was fine for the scene where the protagonist was walking in bedroom to then sit down to take the deck of cards and put it in his blazer and fix his tie. The lighting in the passageway downstairs was more brightly lit than the passageway upstairs, which was not really an issue because we didn’t have to see his face anyways, and the darkness upstairs actually made the opening look more hidden, the décor in the bedroom was okay, we wanted a laptop instead, so then the protagonist can then close the laptop screen down, because it has a questioning hacking file opened. But there was a Mac computer, which turned out to be okay as we just added our hacking screen over, a fade out after. Then we added the fade in and introduced the map scene, this scene was added last minute because we needed to add a

scene that adds more suspicions to the protagonist and using maps as props is typical for a crime/mystery film.

We only hired one male actor for the opening, who was told wear a suit. The actor in the first scene is topless, but we can only see the back of him, then he wears his white shirt, then the later scene he wears his tie and put on his blazer to build his character to have some sophisticated class to him, since he works with police force even though he is also the criminal mastermind. The actor didn’t have to act much – speak, have emotion or have the ability to fight in combat, as we only wanted the actor to just walk in a awkward yet sinister way - slow paced, upper body slightly straight. We only filmed the back of him to make him look mysterious and get the audience on their feet as to what he is hiding and how he looks. The actor did not wear any makeup, as we only filmed the back of him. But I did put on face paint on his back; I painted on the tattoo of the code ‘74723’ that spells SHARD on a old fashioned mobile keyboard. The tattoo was below his neck. Also, I added a huge scar on the center of the back with the face paint. The scar was quite huge and it was there to show how the protagonist had a rough past, relating to criminal activities.

The props were the watch, clock, sofa, TV, stairs, laptop/computer, chair, deck of cards, desk/drawer, map,. The hacking file on the computer screen, deck of cards and map were clues of the protagonist having to be involved with something illegal and dangerous, which clarifies that the genre of the film is crime/mystery. The sofa, TV, clock was needed for the living room, the clock was an eye line match from the protagonist’s point of view, then he looked down to his watch. The stairs was needed for actor to go upstairs to his bedroom. For the bedroom scenes, we had a map on the wall, with three red pins, we placed the pins on Greenwich, The Shard and Canary Wharf, and these were the areas in London where the protagonist would plan his heist, since he is also an undercover criminal mastermind / antagonist. We also needed the computer to show how the protagonist also does some hacking for reasons relating to his heists. The deck of cards was needed to suggest to show how the criminal could be a gambler, or a distrustful scammer or magician, since a criminal mastermind is like the king of any criminal operations and handles out the blue prints (design plan).