Evaluation - QuestionTwo

How does your opening sequence represent particular social groups?

Our opening sequence only has and focus' on one main ccharacter, which is the Toymaker, however, our whole story includes the primary characters of Amy's mother and father. Therefore, we had to represent their social roles of psychologically effected males,being an only child, over-worked parents and neglected children.

With the exception of Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Stephen Kings, Misery(1990), the focal villainous characters of - Psychological - thrillers is commonly males. But in this case Annie Wilkes was an obsessed fan, who kidnapped and held hostage Paul Sheldon when she didn't get the ending of Misery that she wanted. This is similar to our Toymaker character:

• White British male
• Only child
  
• Mind of a child
• Psychologically affected in childhood as father died and mother neglected him. She only gave him one doll each year on his birthday, to keep him company.
• Rarely interacted with others
• Grew bored of dolls as he could never have a conversation with them
• Became obsessed with finding something better and 'doll-like', and found that little girls were perfect. But they soon, wanted to go home but he wanted them to stay so he would kill and turn them into dolls with hot wax- much like Bo and Vincent in House of Wax (2005) who turn people into waxworks to make their figures more realistic-
• Occupation- Toymaker, he owns a rundown toyshop in which he stores and hangs his dolls in. Our opening sequence shows his workstation which would be situated within the toyshop.

Our Toymaker's persona is fuelled by his neglectful childhood, and doesn't want that to happen to other children. Therefore in his twisted mind he sees kidnapping and turning little girls into dolls as punishment for the neglectful parents. Whether or not they win his game,they are taught a lesson on how to treat their children with love and attention. An influential character for The Toymaker, is Jigsaw from the Saw(2004-present) sagas. Jigsaw uses a series of torturous games, which his kidnapped victims have to play in order to survive; like the Toymaker leaving notes for the parents for save their children. Jigsaw does this to teach his victims to appreciate their lives and to not take them for granted.

In our opening sequence, although The Toymakers character is age 47-50, we used Rachel's brother Daniel O'Connell who is 21 to portray him, However, through the elements of mise en scene, we were able to mask the age gap successfully.
- The costume was very important to the character, as from childhood, he rarely interacted with others and wanted to be very inconspicuous. He therefore wore all black as in long coat and black jogging bottoms, yet had white trainers on as he still craved some attention that he never received when a child.
-Before shooting, as a part of makeup ,we also dirtied up Daniel's hands as we felt that it would add to the Toymaker's creepiness. We also wanted to give the audience the chill that we felt when we watched the opening sequence to Se7en (1995) which was the primary influence for our opening sequence, due to the clever camera angles, movements,effects and the actual character within the frame.

- The body language and movement of the Toymaker was very precise and intricate, this is shown particularly when he is threading the needle and handling his beloved Amy doll. This is effective as his slow hand gestures, present to the audience the love and care that he wishes to show Amy. When outside of 'Amy's house', towards the end of the opening sequence, you will notice that the Toymaker, walks very awkwardly and not in straight lines, this is to emphasise the fact that he has a twisted mind and doesn't even realise that what he is doing, as in the way he is walking and the kidnappings, are wrong.
- The setting of our opening sequence was shown to be a basement workshop; withing the Toymakers shop. We achieved this by putting up black cloth covered boards,, a table, chair, table lamp, and sewing equipment. However to get the eerie atmosphere we had to attach images of innocent little girls to the back slats to effectively show his obsession with girls we also put up images of the doll to put across to the audience the instability of his mind. We scratched and tea stained the table to make it seem old, and suggest that he had been making dolls for a long time, We also scattered the sewing equipment like buttons and needles across the table to show how cluttered his mind is that he doesn't know right from wrong.
-The lighting was very simple and dim throughout the opening sequence, particularly in the workshop scenes, a deep yellow light was used to keep with the eerie atmosphere of the film as we felt it made it look dirtier, whereas the red light made the workshop seem demonic which was not the look we were going for. However, the red light within the red room shots were highly effective we felt as it gave the audience a change of scenery, but as it came up in quick flashes it created a sense of discomfort.
-Throughout our sequence The toymaker never had any human interaction as it was only him and the doll, we did this to emphasise his sick and childlike mentality. The use of extreme close up and slow stroke we felt were great as they portrayed to the audience his obsession and unnatural love for dolls and children, much like Robin Williams' character Seymour "Sy" Parrish in One Hour Photo(2002) who is obsessed with the Yorkin family. Similarly, Seymour "Sy" Parrish makes collages of the family much like our Toymaker with the innocent little girls.


To conclude the representation of The Toymakers social role was shown succesfully and suited the psychological thriller, through the mise enscene elements that we used and and the way he lived and the things he did were very similar to other villains that i have mentioned.

Evaluation - Question One

Evaluation- Yasmin Philgence

In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?

Our opening sequence uses typical forms and conventions of real media products, but also challenges and develops some of these conventions. Our film Silent Play is based around the Psychological Thriller genre as it shows conventions from other films that i have seen in this genre. The opening sequence follows as Toymaker, who is making a ragdoll, initially for which we do not know why. But as the sequence continues, the Toymakers sinister intentions for the doll become clear. We constructed our opening sequence like this so in the short period, that we had the audience would grasp that our film was a Psychological Thriller and hopefully the plot of the movie. We did this by using typical conventions of this genre which made it easily recognisable as a Psychological Thriller. Although, we didn't want it to be like every the other Psychological thrillers as we wanted our movie to be unique as we could make it.
In order, be able to use these conventions within our opening sequence, we as a group had to first analyse our treatment, to pull out the main themes that we had to weave throughout our opening sequence and film. After researching and treating our fairytales, we realised that in our opening sequence we want the audience to see our clear themes of:

• Neglect
• Obsession
• Redemption & resolution
• Revenge
• Mental instability
• Murder

Our original idea, was that ‘neglect’ would be a main theme that was driven throughout the film. The opening sequence of this (shown on storyboard draft one), showed a little girl, who we named Amy, waking up and having to fend for herself in the morning by making her own breakfast and leaving the house without her parents even noticing due to the busy working lifestyles. Amy would later be kidnapped and replaced with a doll. However, although we thought it to be a good idea, we were challenge with having to find a little girl aged 4-7 who would be able to play her whilst filming in a whole day. But after trying to work around the problems of schooling and scheduled shooting times, we had to go back to the drawing board and come up with a whole new concept. Whilst discussing we decided that we liked the previous idea of having Amy being replaced by the doll, but instead of focusing on Amy, we made The Toymaker the protagonist of our opening sequence. This time around we were able to focus on the Toymaker more and it enabled us to get to the mind of his character which transformed our whole opening sequence to what it is now. Our two main inspirations for our opening sequence was the opening sequences for Se7en (1995) and Dexter (TV Series 2006-present)From Se7en we developed some of the shots that were used in its opening sequence by adapting them to suit the story of our film.


Our film successfully used the conventions of an opening sequence in our media product by:

• Introducing the main character using a range of camera shots however, we didn’t want to give away our main characters identity as it would ruin the tension so we only shot him from behind or through extreme close ups of his hands. Tension is built up similarly in the opening sequence of Hannibal as Hannibal’s mask is hidden and only a box is shown making the audience curious and then the mask is revealed at the end before the titles start.
• Introducing the narrative by hinting to the audience what the film will be about. This similar to Jaws (1975) in which the opening sequence presents the plot of shark attacks to the audience.
• Indicating the themes
• Including titles throughout the opening sequence like Heroes which often has its titles appearing until way into their episodes.
• Incorporating music as we created our own soundtrack adaptation of Twinkle Little Star. We developed the lullaby by slowing down the temple and repeating section to create discomfort to the audience.
• Having a visual reference to the film title as Silent Play was display in red at the end of our opening sequence, which can be seen in many other films.

Even though, our opening sequence is unique according to our overall treatment and look of the film, there were other movies and opening sequences that presented the psychological thriller genre well, of which we developed there ideas and conventions onto our opening sequence. Our main character is not fully introduced throughout opening sequence, as whilst making the doll, we only used Close ups and Extreme Close ups to establish the Toymakers character (screen shot). These shots were similar to the film Se7en (1995) but we adapted them to suit our story. For example the shot below shows the killer in Se7en sewing a piece of paper, but we adapted this shot to present that the Toymaker was sewing the note left with the doll. Initially, we had decided to make our opening sequence fast and choppy much like the style of Se7en. However, it didn’t look right and didn’t present the Toymaker in the smooth and cautious way in which we had intended. So we challenged the style and made it softer and added smoother transitions such as cross fades to ease the audience through the story. The opening sequence to Dexter suited the pace of our opening sequence much more, so we also took a few pointers from its style. The shots, transitions and overall style of the opening sequence suited our Toymakers character as much like Dexter, he is a psychotic killer. But we soon became aware that the shots were still to gruesome and rough for the look we were going for as we almost wanted the Toymaker to appear sophisticated. Therefore we developed on the eating shot from Dexter and represented it in a way that suited the Toymakers character. So instead of the having the Toymaker ripping viciously through a piece meat, we had him sipping a glass of wine.