Using Conventions of real texts

When researching conventions during my AS opening sequence, I looked at the first 3 minutes of two films from my thriller genre, these were ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and ‘Touch of Evil’. These two thriller films allowed me to understand the genre and combine the conventions of this into my opening sequence.

First I studied Touch of Evil, from this we used some of its storyline, from the storyline we are told that the officers’ wife is taken from her hotel, we used the main aspect and included it in our sequence which soon became the main story this was the idea of kidnapping. Also looking at the Hills have eyes I found that the main element throughout the film is murder, the locations of this film are set out in the open desert, again this is when we considered filming our opening sequence in the open. Another element in the storyline is rape, we are shown in the sequel that one of the sisters later gives birth to the child. From this I gathered the idea of having our character killed; this then allowed our group to through together ideas including these storylines. We then linked the conventions from these two movies and came up with the idea of having her kidnapped, raped and killed.

Planning the scene for our opening sequence took our group a long time; we knew we needed an open space that looked as if it was far away from the public. This is when we would the field in which we filmed in, we used wide camera shots throughout the sequence to show its open location whilst also including close-ups to help show the tension between the characters leading to the later unfortunate events.

Looking at the conventions for my A2 music video, I studied a number of videos from the Dance-Pop genre, these videos were created by well known Pop artists Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. The two songs I studied were called ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Last Friday Night’ both of which contained numerous similarities that we included in our video.

We looked at the use of mise en scene throughout these videos whilst also considering location and what the artists themselves looked like and done ,during the  music video. One of the many similarities that we found whilst looking at these videos is their location, both music videos were filmed whilst having a house party, this convention is something we gained inspiration from and also included in our video. The use of costume throughout the Lady Gaga music video were very revealing, showing a lot of skin, for both the male and female characters, we used this for our main character as she would always be in the view of our audience and we wanted to follow the Dance-Pop genre. Make-up throughout the Katy Perry video was vibrant, exciting and energetic, with the use of maracra and eye-line to create bold eyes and over the top colours used for other details on the females faces.

We took inspiration from the use of mise en scene in these videos and incorporated it into our video, allowing our music video to fit the conventions of the Dance-Pop genre. During the editing process, we used a quirky 4-way split screen to keep with the fun and strangeness of our music video. We done this by using the same shot 4 times but changing the colours of the background too those commonly seen within the Dance-Pop genre, these consisted of colours such as yellows, pinks and purples.