In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The Initial Close-Up

Most emotional war dramas have a close up of the main actor either at the beginning or the end of the opening sequence. This creates an extremely emotive atmosphere for the film to begin on and since you are looking so closely at the actor you feel an immediate connection with the character. We decided to use proxemics by placing our character on the ground to show vulnerability

The Slow Walk

We emphasized over numerous shots the long walk that our main character had to take. We thought of doing this as it drew out the emotions of the character. This is extremely common in films such as our main inspiration – Saving Private Ryan. We also thought it was a good way to show off his isolation and location over the sequence of shots.

LocationWe decided that our war film had to conform to the common idea of a war film being set in big fields. We conformed to this by going to a farm (a member of our group had a relative who owned the farm) and using the fields to give off the impression of how far away this person was from anyone else and to give a sense of isolation. Another thing is how we also filmed when it was quite a dull day to give a moody edge to our film.

We also chose this location because there was no issue with people getting in the way of our shots making them unusable

The Puddle Shot

This was our groups favorite shot to film as it showed off our location as being quite a dull uninviting location. The cut is also very short so it doesn’t hold up the film and it also gave a good point for us to cut to another section of the opening without having to add a transition such as a fade much like we had already used.

We managed to get this shot in one take and almost cut it from the final film because we felt it wasn’t good enough but we kept it in and it works as an effective transition.

The Dairy TransitionWe decided that the diary was our key plot point in the film and how it would be the main prop that linked these two characters together. We were inspired to do this from the film Valkyrie as a diary was used to provide a monologue for the main character and was very emotive and drew in the audience to this mysterious character and what he was thinking.

The Old Man at a Typewriter

We used an older person to make the plot easy to understand to show that the character you first see walking through the field has now aged and is looking back on the events using our pivotal prop, a diary. The costume was important as it showed how this person had changed so much from the soldier in the muddy uniform.

The Old Man at a Typewriter 2

We also chose the typewriter because it was such a simple prop but showed that this character is living in the past. This evokes sympathy for the character. We also wanted there to be no dialogue as this was just the prologue and we wanted to keep things simple and leave the audience guessing who this character was and where the story was going to go.

The Title Screen

Our title screen was inspired by the Saving Private Ryan tiles as they are simple and doesn’t try to distract the audience. We felt that our titles needed to be on a black screen to show when the initial prologue ended and the main story begin.

The simple but famous titles or hit war film Saving Private Ryan