Teacher Comments

Further to our conversation in class yesterday, action points to take forward from the rough cut to final cut include:
- edit your sequence down so that the total running time is approximately 2 minutes
- Add your production company logo to the start of your sequence
- Add titles (credits and title with the name of your film). Remember, your final cut needs to look like an opening sequence
- Take care with continuity editing (try to achieve matches on action, avoid jump cuts, use shot reverse shot during conversations, observe the 180 degree rule etc.)
- Add your music track

ANIMATIC STORYBOARD

This is our mood board, it shows the mes-en-scene of a pub and sets the mood of what i think our film will be, in a pub, with rough people, weve portrayed this by pints of beer and people fighting as well as like scampi fries and other pub snacks.

Today

Today i have been looking into the influence of music on a tittle sequence, i have decided that i may introduce some low backing music which creates a feel of suspense to build interest and generally make the sequence flow a bit better. As well as this i have written a script for my shoot and planned exactly how i want it filmed.

The plot

After alot of thought i am now going to film a crime caper with an ensemble cast, i have drawn up a story board and am going to film shortly after finishing my shot list and aquireing a cast, the plot of my shoot is to start out with a pan shoot scaning across from left to right, following a man into a local pub meanwhile having the tittles flash up along side with produced by and directed by. The general plot is that the leader of an old group who were notorious criminals are called again once more to discuss one last job, my aim for the opening sequence is to establish each characters roles, and to stereotype the characters as well as a strong use of editing. I have been held back by the snow and so have had to postpone my filming, however it gives me time to create a new mood board and a couple of analysis' from the genre of crime caper. this is 100% what i am doing and i am putting alot of work and effort into its success.

First analysis, This is England

The opening sequence for this is england is really inspiring for us, the montage of clips shows England in the 70's to 80's the clips are varied but have a large amount of clips of the 'skinhead' movement and of Margaret Thatcher, aswell as this there are clips of the army and riots prehaps showing lack of control at the time and general national revoloution in the sense of protestes, womans power and racial discrimination.
The montage works because it is very fast paced and exciteing which are important trates for an opening sequence as well as this it gives you a taste of the general topics that are comeing up in the movie. I really like this method and think it breaks the viewer into the film without the large question of 'Who are they' which is relevant in quite a few films, i think our opening sequence should follow a similar technique to this one.

opening sequence's conventions

Today we as a group have discussed in detail A British social realist drama as a genre and the typical functions of them, we mainly concentrated on This is England we noticed conventions such as hand held camera work and long takes which are examples of little basic editing.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am back on here to blog upon deciding that i really want to get a good grade and as a result am going to put alot of work in. I have decided to instead of doing a social realist drama to do an adventure story for younger audiences, i have chosen this because of my lack of group and therefore lack of cast, so as a result i have decided to base my opening sequence on a more artistic aspect, a cartoon with if possible some smart editing to animate it into real life filming.
This decission was not a rash one, it involved a lot of thought and planning possibilitys, ive watched many opening sequence's from other summaries and from this aswell as from lesson i made my decission. I have been EXTREMELY influenced and inspired by the opening sequence of juno and curious george because of their cartoonized artistic approach to the sequence, i will speak about this more in my clip analysis. It appears stereotypical conventions of child adventure films openings are an upbeat memorable defining song accompanied by straight away showing of the main character so that this can be established very early on in the childs head, aswel as this there are the obvious credits of the production team, if the film is targeted at a slightly older audienc say 10 years it may begin with a story or alot of action at the begining. I think that definatly music choice is a very key part to any good childs film hence most pixar movies have this as their trademark.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are a few examples http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arBP26pUC94 <- this is the lion king (it is part 1 so it is quite long). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1uc-0m427c <--hercules

Q1-07 FILM OPENING PROJECT

Welcome