I will be talking about the sequence I have made as part of my AS media Project. I will be answering this question in four parts; Genre, Narrative Structure, Form and Style
Genre
We chose our genre to be ‘Action/ technological mystery’. Our film is heavily based on hacking. We have followed some forms and conventions, from looking at previous hacking films, such as dark rooms with little light and the light would have a colour filter to create a tense atmosphere.
For example in the film Masterminds, there is a boy hacking in his room, he has a typical messy boys room and the lighting is red, which creates a strong sense that hacking is bad and illegal. We adapted this outlook on hacking and tried to boost the intensity of it. We did this by making our hacking sequence very snappy and included lots of hard and fast cuts. We used a blue tinted light, inspired by Die Hard 4.0, as we wanted to focus more on the technology side itself rather than focusing on whether it is good or bad. We felt blue created a very tense almost futuristic atmosphere, also it replicated the sort of light you would get coming off a screen in a darkened room. We have some similar shots to Die Hard 4.0 as we wanted hardcore hacking, not just a represetation like in Mastermind.
These are some shots from Die hard 4.0:
Our character is stereotype of a ‘hacker’ as he looks quite geeky and is also a typical teenage boy, in that there are biscuits scattered around his room, clothes everywhere and bits of lego toys stuck to his computer.
Genre
We chose our genre to be ‘Action/ technological mystery’. Our film is heavily based on hacking. We have followed some forms and conventions, from looking at previous hacking films, such as dark rooms with little light and the light would have a colour filter to create a tense atmosphere.
For example in the film Masterminds, there is a boy hacking in his room, he has a typical messy boys room and the lighting is red, which creates a strong sense that hacking is bad and illegal. We adapted this outlook on hacking and tried to boost the intensity of it. We did this by making our hacking sequence very snappy and included lots of hard and fast cuts. We used a blue tinted light, inspired by Die Hard 4.0, as we wanted to focus more on the technology side itself rather than focusing on whether it is good or bad. We felt blue created a very tense almost futuristic atmosphere, also it replicated the sort of light you would get coming off a screen in a darkened room. We have some similar shots to Die Hard 4.0 as we wanted hardcore hacking, not just a represetation like in Mastermind.
These are some shots from Die hard 4.0:
Our character is stereotype of a ‘hacker’ as he looks quite geeky and is also a typical teenage boy, in that there are biscuits scattered around his room, clothes everywhere and bits of lego toys stuck to his computer.
This is our main character 'n00b'
I researched some other hacking films to give us an idea of some typical features of hacking films.
The main idea that we borrowed from the film 'Hackers' is that anyone can be a hacker, they dont have to be your typical nerd. In Hackers Angelina Jolie is a hacker and she is definitely not a pubesant teenage nerdy boy. We challenged this idea with our main character 'n00b', by having him as a typical hacker (as seen above), but our other characters are not.
Narrative Structure
As far as our sequence, we have used a compressed version of Todorov's narrative structure in that the hackers are all hacking and getting along with what they should be doing when suddenly they start to receive error reports, the main hacker then finds a solution and the equilibrium is then restored.
We also break this rule as after equilibrium is supposedly reached again, the main hacker is attacked / taken out and all the hackers do not know what has happened, then we hear a knock on the ‘n00b’ hackers door and the sequence ends there. This leaves the audience on a cliff hanging with enigma, guessing what is going to happen next. Our sequence is all in real time except one shot where the main hacker is attacked which we decided to put in slow motion in order to increase the impact of the attack. We have sort of multi parallel shots i.e. We have all the different hackers hacking at the same time yet we can see all them together in some shots or separate in others. The real time parallel editing is very similar to that of 24 where you see a lot of action all happening simultaneously.
We have many enigma codes within our sequence to get the audience asking questions like ‘Why was he attacked? Does that mean he is bad? Is the knocking at the innocent or is it serious? Etc’ We also start off our sequence revealing as little as possible of the hacker and his surroundings. We just show off niche characteristics of the room or the character and slowly reveal more and more until the audience has built a fairly strong character profile. ‘n00b’ is our Anti-hero/ protagonist as he is part of a group doing something which is against the law, but they are doing it for a good reason.
Some features of a typical opening sequence we have followed, others we have not. For example quite often in opening sequences you will get a very wide shot of the scene; a house, office, playground etc this will often linger for a while and let you gradually place yourself within the scene. Our opening sequence however has done the complete opposite but with a similar effect. We disorientate the audience and then putting them in medias res without giving them a distinctive ‘starting point’, this forces them to really pay close attention as to what is going on to try and find little clues or hints as to where they are and why they are there? This lets them slowly build up a picture of the character and the setting and lets them find out where they are in the film, rather than just telling them. This gives our piece a voyeristic feel and lets the audience view the footage from different perspectives.
This sequence is similar in that it makes fairly boring tasks exciting and also slowly reveals the character:
I think function of an opening sequence is to create some sort of situation that creates enigma in order to have the audience watch the rest of the film to find the answers to their enigma questions.
The opening of the film ‘The Holding’ started with a very unclear sequence of a man being drowned and then being buried somewhere in a forest. This had me asking a lot of questions as the next scene was a happy family scene in a house. Later on in the film, that opening sequence was used almost like a flashback and it was revealed that it was this mum of the happy family drowning her husband (this was a key part to the plot). That film opening and ours are similar due to the fact that he opening sequence is like a key you receive at the beginning to use later on to work something out or unlock some clue that is vital to the plot. Another similarity to the Holding is that both films build a lot of momentum and the very sharply kill that momentum to put the audience an unease.
Another important aspect of an opening sequence is to reveal the title.
Style - Our opening sequence looks and feels like a futuristic, tense action sequence. This was our aim, we wanted to make something that could seem quite dull (typing at a computer) really fast pace and high adrenaline whilst also keeping a very technological and tense feel. Our soundtrack was from a website where music is copyright free called freeplaymusic.com. We thought this track would be perfect as it starts with a very high reverb but quiet drum and bass line, which slowly changes and drops into a techno sound track. It also has a variety of different breaks in it, which meant it was not just the same music looped over and over. We had to make some cuts and changes to the timing and structure of the music which was mostly done by Anna, I did make the audio effect of him taking his headphones off.
Our only spoken dialogue is the main hacker telling all the other hackers what to do, our idea was to make it so that it sounded very tech savvy to the audience, so we looked up different hacking terms and incorporated them into our script.
Our overriding colour for the whole sequence was blue. We used 3 lights all with blue filters on them for ‘n00b’, for the other hackers we just had fairly dark rooms with smaller neutral lights just providing enough light to identify them. This was the look we had in mind when originally coming up wit our shots, and we slowly progressed that idea into how our actual sequence is.
We used quite a lot of graphics to create on screen animation of what the hacker was doing e.g. Typing or moving a window.
We also used graphics to illustrate what the ‘n00b’ could see on his screen in terms of webcams and chat windows, so whenever the audience sees a hacker that isnt ‘n00b’ they are seeing them from the point of view of ‘n00b’ through his screen.
All of our early shots of ‘n00b’ are tightly framed and then as the sequence goes on, they become wider to tell the audience more about what is going on. As can be seen by the stills of shots of our main character 'n00b'.
Our only spoken dialogue is the main hacker telling all the other hackers what to do, our idea was to make it so that it sounded very tech savvy to the audience, so we looked up different hacking terms and incorporated them into our script.
Our overriding colour for the whole sequence was blue. We used 3 lights all with blue filters on them for ‘n00b’, for the other hackers we just had fairly dark rooms with smaller neutral lights just providing enough light to identify them. This was the look we had in mind when originally coming up wit our shots, and we slowly progressed that idea into how our actual sequence is.
We used quite a lot of graphics to create on screen animation of what the hacker was doing e.g. Typing or moving a window.
We also used graphics to illustrate what the ‘n00b’ could see on his screen in terms of webcams and chat windows, so whenever the audience sees a hacker that isnt ‘n00b’ they are seeing them from the point of view of ‘n00b’ through his screen.
All of our early shots of ‘n00b’ are tightly framed and then as the sequence goes on, they become wider to tell the audience more about what is going on. As can be seen by the stills of shots of our main character 'n00b'.
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