CONVENTIONS

STRUCTURE

Beginning

Middle

End

What We Do In The Shadows - inter titles. Viago wakes up, turns on his alarm, and opens the curtains.

Trollhunter - inter titles followed by the main characters driving to the troll hunter's house.

A Sight For Sore Eyes - inter titles followed by Joyce waking Toby up.

What We Do In The Shadows - Viago introduces the other characters with crosscuts to interviews with each character, as he wakes them up and calls them into a group meeting.

Trollhunter - they meet the trollhunter and start to try and persuade him to let them join him and video him.

A Sight For Sore Eyes - Toby introduces the different characters and it crosscuts to interviews with each character.

What We Do In The Shadows - They have a house meeting and discuss what it is like to be a vampire with crosscuts to interviews and clips.

Trollhunter - they follow the trollhunter until he agrees to let them join him.

A Sight For Sore Eyes - Toby gets in the car and drives away to university.

The function of using the classic narrative structure is to make the plot make sense and make the opening sequence flow well.

TITLES

Distribution and Production credits

Inter titles

Their function is to inform the audience on things like institutional details, character names, actors names, etc.

What We Do In The Shadows and Surf's Up,use inter titles with the character names on them.

Almost all mockumentaries have inter titles with character names and roles on them.

What We Do In The Shadows - there are no company credits in the opening sequence of this film, but we had to use some in order to follow the conventions of film opening sequences, so we looked at other films for guidance.

A Sight For Sore Eyes - it is not conventional to have institutional credits in mockumentary film openings other than the first inter title, so we used the same technique as in Surf's Up.

Surf's up - the institutional credits are shown on a clapperboard in the first shot.

GENRE

The function of using genre conventions is to satisfy the audiences expectations of the genre and the film, particularly avid fans of the genre.

A Sight For Sore Eyes

Use of jump cuts

Crosscuts to clips

Crosscuts to character interviews

Handheld camera movements

What We Do In The Shadows

Use of jumpcuts

Crosscuts to seemingly random clips that emphasise/ illustrate the dialogue

Handheld camera movements

Crosscuts to interviews with different characters

Trollhunter

Handheld camera movements

OPENING SEQUENCES

Convey the genre

Introduce the charaters

Introduce the main themes and ideas of the film

Set up the audience's expectations of the rest of the film

This is the opening 6 minutes of What We Do In The Shaodws.

This is the video.