Evaluation Question 1

In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?


The opening credits of a movie generally involves a series of superimposed text. There are three different types of title sequences. There's the separate credit/title sequence, the titles which appear over the images as the narrative plays and then there's the films that display a black screen with credits. There are also films that do not have openings credits such as The Avengers, were the credits are left to the very end of the film. In reference to our thriller opening, we'd decided as a group to opt for the titles which appear over the images as the narrative plays. Therefore our film opening follows the common style of real media products.

There are two characters in the opening of our thriller: the intruder and the victim. The scene opens with the victim, showing her entering her flat, which is about 20 seconds in all. Second, the scene changes to show the intruder going into the same flat, then the camera shows the victim entering the house and going upstairs into her room, and following suit the intruder does the same. The pattern here is that during the opening, the camera shows the victim and the intruder in turn, one after the other which is a common convention of thriller films, an example film would be one such as psycho. This is useful as it enables the audience to make judgement of what is happening at the same time on the side of the victim and intruder. As the distance between the two parties reduces, i.e. the intruder gets closer to the victim, the camera begins to switch between them faster, and the music changes to effect suspense. This technique is a useful and common convention of mainstream media.

All in all, our opening is not very contrary to real media products. We chose not to deviate from traditional styles of thriller films as we did not want to lose the thriller aspect of it, which is the fundamental purpose of the opening. Following the common style of action thriller films gives the audience a chance to predict what might happen and therefore allows them to enjoy it more.


Conventional Film Opening Sequence- Production Complany (Ident)
- Distribution Company (Ident)
- Production Complany (Title)
- Distribution Company (Title)
- Actor 1 (Star)
- Actor 2 (Star)
- FILM TITLE
- Actor 3
- Actor 4




- "

- "
- "
- Casting
- Costume
- Music Supervisor
- Music by
- Edited by
- Production Designer
- Director of Photography
- Executive Producer
- Written by
- Director

This is the general order in which the Credits of a film are shown. The production Company and the Distributers are shown first as they're most important, followed by the stars of the film, before the film title.

Here are a few examples of the titles in our opening sequence.