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

Our opening sequence is between memories and dream. In fact, I think that the first scene of the film would be Alix waking up in her bed, the morning after the notorious night. It is therefore a discontinuous narrative with a lot of close-ups. 

Forms and conventions of our media product use and develop those from mainstream productions. 

Our audience said, after having watched the product, that it was very similar to Wong Kar Wai's productions. Wong Kar Wai is a Chinese filmmaker, "internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylised films." Wikipedia 

Chungking Express, realised in 1994, has made him win the awards of Best Director and Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards. He is a festival producer and gives access to complex, very stylised productions to a wider audience, in other words not only regular audience of art-house productions. 

As we can see in the trailer below, our camera work and atmosphere is similar to the Wong Kar Wai-style. 

Another style we have been using is the extreme close-ups used for instance in Dexter. We have been therefore reproducing the Dexter's opening sequence-style, but at the same time challenging mainstream productions because extreme close-ups are quite unusual.

We have developed Gaspard Noe's productions, an Argentinian-born French filmmaker. His film Enter the void, released in 2009, of which he has been the director, screenwriter, editor and producer, influenced our media production. In fact, I thought one of my main influence was the videoclip of the song All of the lights from the American rapper and record producer Kanye West. However, it happens that Kanye West has been copying Gaspard Noe style! So let's render to Gaspard Noe his original idea and creativity.

 

Top: Opening sequence of Enter the Void, Gaspard Noe, 2009

Bottom: Videoclip of All of the lights, Kanye West, 2011

Gaspard Noe did not put any video in his opening sequence, but I thought about developing his style to use it in videos. His intro is discontinuous but the film is then a continuous narrative. Our intro being composed of vague memories, we have developing his original idea.

Certain people could find our media product challenging because they might not be familiar with art-house productions. But as regular watcher of french art-house films, I find it quite normal!

Credits:

www.youtube.com

www.wikipedia.com

Getting the authorisation of using a track under the label Virgin.

The soundtrack in our media product is composed of 4 elements:

First, diegetic sound played slower or to which we added special effect like echo.

The intro starts with Pavane en Fa Diese Mineur from the french baroque compositor Couperin.

In the middle, it is One (Your Name) feat. Pharell from Swedish House Mafia.

Then at the end, I used the very end of Act 3 "If Love's a Sweet Passion" from The Fairy Queen from the english baroque compositor Purcell. 

I could not find under which label where the two classical musics. However, I found that One was under the label Virgin. From this moment onwards started the difficult and exhausting contact-hunting, or procurement-hunting.

I then started looking in the section Contact Us on Virgin Media's website. However I couldn't find any contact number or email. I sent emails to info@virginradio.com, webmaster@virgin.com (idea from my neighbour but it wasn't convincing really), media@virginproduced.com. 

The answer I got from Virgin Produced was this one:

They ask me to contact them directly without giving me any contact number or email address. My hunt wasn't finished!

So I went on the chat of Virgin Digital Help at 3am in order to get a respondent quite quickly. I perfectly knew I was not asking neither the right person nor the right department, but I needed to talk to someone instead of fighting with a machine.

As we can see, this conversation has been completely useless. I called the two numbers he gave me the next morning though. The Press Office was unable to give me any information and Virgin Media was a sort of MCQ.

I started looking on the internet again. After three days of research, I finally found that the head office of Virgin was in Hook, UK. Then I found on 192.com, in the category Holding Companies Management Activities in Hook the address and phone number of Virgin Media Communication Ltd.

I called, unfortunately it was closed, opening hours 8.30 to 5.30. I called again the next morning and after having explained my inquiry, someone immediately gave me the email address procurement.helpdesk@virginmedia.co.uk. I sent them an e-mail:

The most wanted file EVER.

I got an answer a bit later, which has been the one below: