Video: Film Openings – Forms and Conventions; institutions

Hollywood films are produced and distributed by big companies such as universal, Warner, fox searchlights, paramount and Sony. This results in high advertisement and media hype when a film comes out. With convergence into other media forms through merchandising and genres such as pirates of the Caribbean which went into cartoons on TV after the success of the films.
The film these big 6 companies make are generic with similar values that all deliver the same message. There is an awful lot of sequels for these films such as die hard, terminator, Shreck 1,2 & 3. Art house and social realist films are produced by smaller scale companies such as Big Arty productions, film4, uk film council and EM media. These mean much lower budgets meaning that possibly because of this, the film makers have to be more creative into the movie, such as to do with storyline/script and other features. Certainly films such as This is England and Funny Ha Ha have much more deeper and complex stories than Hollywood blockbusters. For this reason production companies matter when you’re looking for the movie you want to watch, as one company would mean a engaging intimate film that sets across values such as individuality and rebellion, or another could provide thrilling and impressive action scenes where the guy always gets the girl and the good guy always beats the bad guy.

By looking at these forms and conventions and narrative in these movies I have realised which set of values come with the genre of each movie type.
This has given me experience for when I decide which genre I will choose when I do my video production.

Someboy out

Film Openings – Forms and Conventions

Different genres have different forms and conventions, I looked at 3 different types of genre movies, Art house, Social realism and Hollywood action movies.
Action movies tend to be very generic in structure with it all being happy and well at the beginning before something or someone disrupts this, but by the end of the movie this is always put right and the feeling restored. The budgets for these movies are always high and big Hollywood stars are often in the central roles. Social realism films which are a British speciality in the industry often cover gritty working class situations that involve controversial subjects and values such as racism, crime, underage sex etc. They do not always end how you think they will and have un-generic features. Art house films are normally low budget productions using more skilful features rather than big actors to attract filmgoers, the films are normally qwirky and distributed by small companies looking not looking for big box office returns. Funny Ha Ha for example was produced on a miniscule budget.

Someboy out

Video: Film Openings – Genre and Narrative

I have chosen to do the video project for my practical work. The first thing that I needed to do was research into the Genre and Narrative of an opening film. I looked at Dog soldiers and saw that in the opening credits it clearly expressed the feeling of the horror/ werewolf genre with a dark and gloomy forest at night and chase scenes along with the unexplainable killing on a clear moonlit night deep in the Scottish wilderness. The narrative becomes clear soon on as the proppian Hero clearly signalled as the compassionate intelligent soldier who will not shoot the dog when ordered after evading capture for 23 hours on the run. The villain becomes obviously clear as the man who shoots the dog for no reason. The narrative structure is disrupted breaking the equilibrium when the women is taken in the night, but there are strong hints of the coming story, the obviously significant silver dagger coming into the narrative for example, and the hero who has now been established who must put things right by the end of the movie.

Someboy out

Different Genre's and Conventions

In class at present i am looking at different conventions and forms of Genre's and have been looking at aspects of different movies, such as the vital conventions that attracts the target audience to the movie. For example action movies need gunplay and physical/fist fights and Drama movies need romance and close reletionships in the plot. Adventure movies need the epic locations and the aspect of traveling or journying around the world like in such movies as Indiana Jones and national treasure. In this research i can get a better idea of what genre's would be possible to do, a Science fiction space sequence would be very impracticle to choose for example. I am Starting to consider which Genre films i enjoy and which conventions i would be able to do and not do, taking into account equipment restrictions such as the cameras not being good in low light.