Planning for Main Task & Construction

Now I have done some research in to opening title sequences of films, I am now going to start planning factors  which I need to consider in order to complete the brief. Just to remind you again the main task is to create the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. I will be working in a group of two, myself and one of my peers.

 Consideration of Classification
 We have decided that we would like our film to have a classification of "12A". BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) guidelines state that "Moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail." in a "12A" film. We would like this classification for our film opening as we believe  it is suitable because we  want to imply a death but not show it.

Equipment/Software we will need in order to create our film opening:

-Panasonic NV GS500
-Tripod
-Sticky Tape
-Pen
- Kodak Easy Share Camera
-Photo Paper
-Printer
-ScrapBook

 Firstly, myself and my partner discussed what type of film opening we would like to produce; we discussed various genres such as horror, romance, comedy etc. We discarded horror as we thought this was a too obvious choice to consider and we discovered many pupils in the past had chose a horror based opening title sequence, so we decided we did not want to do this as it has been created many times before.Then we discussed the idea that the genre of comedy might be difficult to portray in the time set (maximum of two minutes) and it might be difficult to come up with a comical story, so for this reason we decided to discard a comical opening title sequence. Lastly, we discussed the genre of romance, we made it clear to one another that we did not want to make a typical romantic "lovey dovey" opening title sequence because similar to the genre of horror it has been done many times before. Taking this factor in to consideration, we started to discuss ways in which we could create a romance without using cliche elements i.e. an opening title sequence consisting of a couple expressing their love for one another and constantly kissing.

We gained inspirational ideas from films such as "Time Traveler's Wife", "Dear john" and "The Death and life of Charlie St Cloud". We got the idea of her missing him and trying to come to terms with his absence from these films.

'Dear John'

'The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud'

The way we will be filming this film opening will be through the eyes of the grieving girl, creating a scrap book of memories of her and her boyfriend who appears to have died. Shots will consist of her sticking various photographs in and turning pages looking through the scrap book. We will then zoom in to the photos and have a dip to white transition to create the effect of her seeing in the past and what isn't in reality now.

 Target Audience Member

This is Grace, she is 17. She is currently doing her A levels in which she is studying: Art & Design, Photography, English Literature and Media Studies as she is a very creative person. She enjoys meeting new people and socialising with friends through such activities as shopping and partying. Her favourite shops are New Look, Accessorize, Top Shop and any shops that keep up to date with the lastest trends. Grace enjoys watching  romance films such as "P.S I Love You", "Romeo and Juilet", "Titanic", "Dear John" etc. Grace likes all sorts of music, anything that is in the charts and popular. Grace likes to babysit young children as she likes the responsibility and the connection you can create with children and their care free, loving nature. This reflects Grace`s caring, sensitive personality and love for people especially her friends and family. Grace would like to persue a career in Photography or Journalism, a career within the media industry as she believes it will let her creativity and love for people shine.

Music/Sound

We looked at various types of music clips, and decided to use the music 'Stardance'. We chose this because we thought it fitted really well with our ideas. We were drawn to this music because the flow of it was slow and it had a thoughtful kind of feel to it. We have also decided to use a voice off screen, of her mother shouting through to her saying:

We believed that if we added this piece of dialogue, then it would be a good device to show that the film carries on. The person speaking the dialogue will be Mags Perry, who is my partner Sian Perry’s mother. We chose Mags because as she is a mother herself we believed she would be able to express the voice we wanted.

 The Story Boards

This is our first page to our story board, this shows us the first few shots of our film opening, there is an establishing shot of the scrap book, pen and the tape. Then there is a close up of her turning the page to start the film.We then have a manual focus close up of the tape, a close up side shot is then used to show her writing in the scrap book. A close up of the writing is introduced to show what she has wrote. An extreme close up of the pen is used and then a shot of the next picture is used to show us what will happen next. This then zooms into the photograph and a white out  is used to take us into the following shots.

 The second page of our story board shows us the scenes following the photo zoom, we see a close up of the dog 'Charlie' walking along the shot from right to left, next we see a wide shot of the dog and his owner. The owner then crouches down to stroke his dog, an extreme close up of the dogs lead is then shown trailing out of the shot also from right to left. We then see a close up of 'Charlie' running away, we then see a wide shot of the dogs tail and the floor. A close up him is used to show the audience that he has fallen over. Another white out is then used to take us back to the present day. and a close up of the photograph is used.

This is the last page of our story board this shows us the room shots, a wide shot of the door is used to show the audience where the audio of her mothers voice is coming from. we then see a side view of her, a close up of her face is then shown,  with her looking down and a tear rolling down her face. a rear view shot is used,  she then closes the scrap book and gets up to walk away, another wide shot is used to show her walking away from behind and lastly we see her walking through the door leaving it open behind her. This suggests to the audience that the film will carry on.

Casting

We needed to portray emotion and a connection between the two characters that we chose, so we decided on Jamie Richardson and Jessica Beecham as they are already in a relationship so they will be able to understand the emotion and connection we want to portray in the genre we are trying to create, romance.

We will also be using a dog in our piece. This dog will be my partner’s (Sian Perry) dog “Charlie”. We decided to use Charlie because he is comfortable with our actor/actress, Jamie and Jess so it will be easier to film the scene which Charlie is in because he will be more likely to co-operate with them, making the film processing easier than if it was an unfamiliar dog and actor/actress.

Location

Location for our film opening will be in Sian Perry`s house in Normanby- By- Spital for the scenes consisting of the girl looking through the scrap book of memories and the location for the dog walking scene will be down Mill Lane, a location close to Sian`s house which is a popular dog walking area and won’t be disturbed by on going traffic as a typical road would.

Weather

On the Friday, we decided to do the filming we needed to do inside as it gets dark quickly after school so it was not possible to shoot our outside shots. On the Saturday, we decided to do the outside shots as we had all day to shoot so lack of natural lighting was not an issue because we filmed in the middle of the day where natural lighting was at its maximum.

Issues

We had an issue with the music that we had originally chose, we had chosen the music stardance from freeplaymusic.com but once we had shot our piece we realised that the music we chose did not fit into our film opening.

We then decided on the music, morning of the storm we chose this music because we thought it fitted very well due to the pace of our work, this music fitted better than stardance as it set a better mood/atmospheric sound.

We decided not to use the voice off screen as we believed it stopped the flow of the opening title sequence  and did not get the message across that we wanted by implying by going downstairs to have her dinner  the film would carry on but we believed that this was not implied. Therefore, we decided to include a dialogue sequence between the parents of the grieving girl expressing their concerns about their daughter as we believed this worked better.

The dialogue sequence was as follows:

• Mother: "We have to do something about her, she won't put the book down."
• Father: "Well what are we meant to do, we can't lock her in her room can we?"
• Mother: "No i am not saying do that at all, i think she needs to go and see someone thats all."
• Father: "I can see where you are coming from but we can't force her to do anything she doesn`t want to do."
• Mother: "Yes, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind."
• Father: "But this is our little girl."

Another issue we had was we did not give our actors "equal billing", this means that the titles for each actor were not on screen for the same amount of time making one actor "Jessica Beecham" whose starring title  was on screen for about eight seconds appear more important than our other actor "Jamie Richardson whose title was on screen for about three seconds. We did not like this as we wanted both characters to have equal importance because the narrative is about them as a couple. Therefore, we gave each actor "equal billing of approximately five seconds. We also decided we did not like where the "Starring Jamie Richardson" title was placed as it was on a shot of him laid on the floor, so this made it appear like it was his corpse. Although we wanted to express the motion of death we did not want this to be the dominating focus as we wanted to express the narrative of the girlfriend reflecting on the happy times with her boyfriend and his life, so this is our reasoning for moving the title to shots of him walking the dog. Also, another reason we decided to move this title is because the pace of the shots of him laid on the floor were too fast for the audience to take in the title but we did not want to change the pace of these shots as we felt the fast pace gave the audience a quick insight in to the boyfriends death but did not bring a bleak feel which is what we wanted. 

  

 Questionnaire

We have created a questionnaire to help us create our film opening, this was very helpful as it gave us chance to give the film in which the audience wanted. Here are our results for our questionnaire.

1. We gave questionnaires to 5 males and 5 females, this was to give us an equal sample in order to get the correct data to analyse. We are aware that this is a small sample, which makes it an unreliable source, but in our circumstances this was the right amount of participants for our work.

2. We decided to give our questionnaires to people in the right age bracket for our target audience, this was also an opportunity sample as we only had 1 person over 20.

3. We decided to ask the question of what type/genre of film do our typical audience like? This was so we could analysis the ratio of films that people preferred and then see if the type/genre of film we want to do (Romance) was the highest genre of film chosen. By doing this we could then see how many of the people who took our questionnaire would be part of our typical target audience.

4. The fourth question in our questionnaire was "What do you look for in a film opening?". This question was asked so we knew what our audience expected from an opening title sequence of a film. As you can see from the results below, music was the most popular choice, followed by titles. Therefore, we knew that we needed to make sure that we paid particular attention to these aspects within our piece but still making sure we considered the other less  popular choices within our piece, to ensure an equal, successful film opening.

5. We decided to ask the question of "how important is music in a film opening?" as we wanted to know how important this was to our audience members. We discovered that 5 out of 10 people we asked rated music 10 on a scale. So therefore, we needed to make sure that our music was effective in our piece.

We also asked them Why? they chose the rating they did. Here are some responses we received:

• "Because it sets the scene for the following scenes"
• "If not the opening will become very boring, it should be able to interest me in the opening."
• "It sets the scene and makes you feel involved."
• "Sets the tone of the movie."
• "Because the opening of a film is the part that draws the attention of the audience into the film."
• "Music helps to create mood. The mood at the opening of the film is vital as it encourages the audience to stick with the movie or not."
• "Helps set the scene, and adds tone and depth."
• "Because the music tells us the theme and emotion into the film."

Post Production. 

 There was a few aspects of our film opening we wanted to develop. Therefore we went into the production room this gave us access to equipment which we we're not able to access in the classroom such as Adobe After Effects suite. Using this software gave us the opportunity to change the titles to create a better focus on them as before they did not really stand out. We changed the titles of "Starring Jamie Richardson" and "Starring Jessica Beecham". We decided to use the animation effect of a foggy style, which stays on screen for 4 seconds and then disappeared via an evaporation effect, we used these effects for both titles to express continuity and we felt that by using these effects it would express the idea of Jamie's characters death, almost like a ghost-like transition.

We moved our production title of "Stages Productions" to the beginning of our film opening, as we felt that it was not in the right place where it was (just before the dialogue scene) as you would expect the name of the film to be here. Also it is typical for the production title to be at the beginning of the film to introduce the makers of the film, so this is our reasoning for moving this particular title.

In our opening title sequence we have used text on screen, we decided to do this as we felt it would emphasize the idea that the boyfriend figure has died and we also felt it would link well to the title of our film "Chapters" as it would be like reading a book. We decided to change the order of the text as we felt the content of the text did not flow very well the way it was, it do not make sense, this meant we had to change the order of the shots as well  because they no longer flowed with the change in text order. Once we had made these changes,  and re-watched the opening title sequence from beginning to end it made much more sense and flowed much better.

The text on screen is as follows:

• "We will open the book......It's pages are blank."
• "When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book."
• "We are going to put the words on them ourselves......but translate it into a better language."
• "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments......but what is woven into the lives of others."

We decided to change the music at the beginning of the opening title sequence because it didn't sound right, it sounded out of place. We decided to bring the music in when the text "We will open the book" appears on screen as we believed the silence before this and the sudden hit of music at this point would catch the audiences attention and create impact and it made the opening flow better.

More Research

We have studied various movie opening title sequences.

One of which is Cold Mountain. Many features have been used in this sequence.



Text on screen is used at the beginning of the sequence, this makes the audience aware of the setting of the film and also the dates in which the film was set.

A voice over is also used at the beginning of the sequence, this gives the audience information as to who is in the film. A female character is reading out a letter she has written to her loved one.

A linking device of a Rabbit is used. This is a clever device to use as it is very subtle in how it links the two forces together. We first see the rabbit underground and then it appears above ground where the other force is situated. The rabbit lures the defence force in to the oppositions trap.

Donnie Darko is the next opening title sequence we studied. We established as an audience that the atmosphere/mood of the movie is very unusual/ weird and this is portrayed through out the movie in various different ways.



We as the audience are introduced to this unusual atmosphere at the beginning of the movie when we see a young man (who we later establish is Donnie Darko) lying in the middle of road which attracts the attention of the audience because it is not an everyday occurness. Also the character is wearing his pyjamas, this choice of costume has an effect on the audiences perception of the character.
Unusual camera-shots are used within the sequence, this is visible to the audience when the character stands up and emerges from underneath the camera which appears odd to the audience because it is not an expected shot to use.

We have looked at the movie City of God, this is an international film, it is set in the slum region of Rio, in Brazil.

 

The beginning of the sequence starts off silent, this creates tension and mystery, we then get the loud foregrounded impact sound of  somebody sharpening a knife, ready to use, this shocks the audience as you don't expect that sound after the long silence previous to it.

Voice over is a device used in many movie openings. Voice over is used in this sequence to tell us the story of his childhood and how he ended up where he is now. This introduces us to the characters and the setting of the film.

Parallel editing is used in the opening of City of God, these are both linked together by a chicken. The chicken is seen at the beginning, it is tied up ready for the upcoming execution. It then escapes and the 'gang' chases it until they meet up with Rocket, this is a good use of a linking device as it helps the movie to flow better.

Cutting of scenes in the title sequence are very quick, this reflects the pace of life living in the slums of Rio. It is a very clever way of editing as it grabs the audiences attention and makes them want to see more.

A sound of somebody taking a photograph is used to introduce the character Rocket, this is a very clever technique as it links in with his dream of being a photographer.

Time has been played with in this sequence as it uses a bullet time effect technique, this is when Rocket is going to grab the chicken the camera revolves around him producing the image of him playing football as a goalie.

Research

We have studied various opening title sequences, one of them being Six Feet Under. this is a TV show, even though we know this information, I have learnt certain features contained within the title sequence.



Close - ups dominate the title sequence, this is for the audience to question why the subject is being represented in this way. E.g. There was a close - up of the feet with a tag on the big toe, to focus on the tag, which suggested it was a dead human being.

Animation was used in this title sequence, on two occasions, this made the titles more interesting for the audiences viewing. These were, the credits chiseled onto the grave stone, and the name above and below the line on the embalming fluid. Also at the end of the title sequence the animation of the tree suggested to the audience the cycle of life and it also related to the name of the TV show Six Feet Under.

Use of music at impact points, this helps to catch the audiences attention. Also it gives the audience a sense of knowledge that some parts of the programme will take place in a hospital. E.g. the trolley wheel, this turned rapidly, which made the audience aware of where it was going, another impact on music is when the image of the flower slowly dies, the music gets louder.


Secondly we looked at the opening title sequence to Dexter.



There is one main similarity in Dexter to Six Feet Under, this being Close - ups. Close - ups are used in dexter to manipulate the audiences view on the reality of the programme. E.g. Dexter starts to cut the meat which the audience are put under false pretenses, they are led to believe that it is flesh. Then the audience are re-assured when he fries the ham in the frying pan, and then he eats it. The tension is then later resumed when he cuts his egg and the ketchup spurts out onto the plate, this suggests to the audience blood, even though we know it is ketchup.

Union of the correct sound with the correct image, this represents power. E.g. when the blood droplets falls into the sink, a triangle is played to draw the attention to the blood droplet which then creates power.

Brief

Video
Main Task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.