Memento (texual analysis)

A convention of this thriller opening is that it is mysterious. It doesn’t reveal very much to the audience, only hints of a whole message. For example clues are left around the room to give you an idea of the situation, the narrators voice acting over the top of the extract tells the audience a great deal about the character and what he is dealing with and the camera movements hint at his general disorientation. Mystery is something that many thrillers contain and so we think that it may be a key aspect of our thriller opening eventually. Overall an active audience is best suited to thrillers with this element. Especially with this extract because it is very complex and sophisticated, but also because the information is almost thrown at your in bits and pieces by the narrator and so needs an active audience member to decipher it.

                 Low saturation of colour is used in the extract. The effect of this makes the sense of disorientation and confusion in the extract bolder and makes the clip seem even more mysterious. It also makes the characters life seem even more bland than it already is with the lack of colour. The use of this in our product may have a emphasising effect on the mystery and horror aspect of it, but just in case it turns out to be ineffective it may be worth editing the colour on one version of our product and not doing so on another. Then we could compare the two or even get feedback from outside our group on which is better.

                An extreme close up on the male protagonists face is used to start off the extract. This shows his empty facial expression really well and creates a good starting point in the process of understanding the character.  We may be able to make use of a shot like this at the beginning because we plan to use close ups of our characters facial expressions in our product as well.

                The camera movements are very slow throughout the extract, the effect of which is the emphasising of the characters slow perception of his surroundings. Another way the extract uses camera movements to effect is when there are POV shots of what the character is looking at in his room. In Memento this is used to show the characters disorientation and overall thought process, justifying what is being said in his head through shots of what he is looking at. The way that we would use this technique in our piece is for the effect of this same disorientation, but as we are not using narration in our piece, we can’t use it to the same effect that Memento can.

Video of reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bragrpm50k