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Wednesday 2 February 2011

AS film openings

We have been set an assignment to create a film opening. We have been put into groups to work together and make the film openings. I am in a group with dan finn, leah beavis and alice griffin, we started the process by picking the description of our film openings. The choice of film was devided into 4 briefs, these are:


A mainstream action film that will appeal to 15-25yr old males
Your film should appear to be based on a "fictional" comic book

(Opening to Dark Knight, Kick Ass, Sin City etc)

Watchmen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRnKMQFpvMc

Film Brief 2

A supernatural thriller that will appeal to female audiences
Your film should appear to be an international co-production

(Opening to The Others, Gothika, Shelter etc)




Film Brief 3

An independent movie featuring a young protagonist
Your film should appear to be financed through regional funding

(Opening to Fish Tank, This Is England etc)




Film Brief 4

An art house feature to appeal to adult audiences
Your film should appear to be based on an actual event in the last 2 years.

(Opening to Elephant, Milk, Che etc)

We chose to make our film opening in accordance to brief 3, this means our film has to be independant and needs to have a young protagonist.

We then ran through ideas of what the film should be of, as we had to make to film to a certain breif we had to evaluate what it should look like to be considered an independant film.

What is an independant film?

and independant film is a film which is not produced by a major film company for example 20th century fox. Independant films are usually made with far lower budget than blockbuster hollywood productions. We can usually distinguish between independant films and larger budget films because of the style they are shot and the content of the film, the artists inspiration is normally much more fluent in independant films and this means that independant films have the tendancy to challenge normal stereotypical views.



Our opening plot.

The film opening starts with a teenage boy dreaming he is in a party, the camera is fitted to a helmet and is used to create a realistic point of view shot. Below is an example of how point of view is used to portray an event where the person is not fully conscious:

the song is called smack my b***h up.



We used this music video to give us further ideas on how the scene should look, for example we used a similar kind of music to make the party sound realistic and very hyper, our camera also is reactive when the person operating it moves and this makes it more realistic.

the scene then developes with the young protagonist walking past the people that would normally pick on him and bully him at school and their reactions to him being completely different, in the dream they are kind to him and great him like a party hero and make him feel really popular and important, the young protagonist then walks up the stairs and see's his "dream" girl at the end of a corridor, she turns with a fluent swish of the hair and this is used to show her to have the looks of a goddess. She grabs the boy and pulls him into the bedroom, this is when he is woken up by the alarm clock and the camera cuts to a close up of the alarm clock with a manual focus to distort the character. The next scene is of the boy getting ready for school and the aim of this scene is to juxtapose the image given of the boy in the dream, he is made to look as if he is a party heron in the dream but in real life the audience can identify him to be a geek. This is done by low angle shots and by the mise on scene of the scene.

Our aim in this scene is to show him to be a very different person to the person we saw in the dream scene. We will do this by exagerating the boys movements and making him seem a complete nerd. We use a lot of detail to make this happen, we are making revision posters and putting them up on his wall, we also will use a background from a warhammer website which people will connotate to the stereotype of nerds by using hegemonic beliefs. This is how we will use mise en scene during the film opening.

During this scene we will use dubbing to add dialogue which we also need to portray the character of the nerd. This is how we will use non diagetic sound during our film opening.

Our credits will then appear and this will done via the use of the computer, we are going to create a website and the we will record us moving around the website and going past the names and titles of the people in our group. This will then be edited and the writing will come up whilst we a going past it to look like we are writing the words as we are going past.

This then goes through to the title where we will also have filmed the two main characters walking to school and then bumping into eachother, we will do this on a dreary and rainy day to create a sad look of the characters. The title will come up after some clever editing to have a split screen and the title will come up letter by letter.





Here is our story board edited together to form an outline for how the filming should be done, this is called our animatics.

We also created a mood board to show what we used as inspiration for our ideas for the film opening.This is our mood board:

Our potential audience is assumed to be younger people which are female, between the ages of 12-30, just to be sure we asked a group of people whether or not the would watchit and the majority were of this segment. The people weasked were our focus group. Wewould advertise the filmby creating a webstie and by creating pageson popular socialnetworkingsites for example twitter and facebook.

We used actors from our group to make it easier and this also meant that they knew what they needed to do and they could give good feedback from the actors point of view. The locations we used were very easy toobtain,we used myhouse for the party scene and invited a few friends round to act as extras and we gave them detailed instructions to make sure they did it perfectly and were not confused. We use Dann Finn's bedroom to film the bedroomscene as it was very close to schooland we could film it in a two hour period.

We did not need many props or costumes but we made sure we had complete continuity if we had to film the scene again and we did this by making sure the locations were exactly the same and the clothes of the actors were exactly the same.