We decided to give our film opening a classification of 12A, this is because we believed that our film opening implied death but it did not show it. A quote from the BBFC guidelines for a 12A film is 'Moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail.'
In order to create our film opening. The following Equipment & Software were needed;
-Panasonic NV GS500
-Tripod
-Sticky Tape
-Pen
-Kodak Camera
-Photo Paper
-Printer
-ScrapBook
To start off the planning we discussed the what genre of film we would like to produce, we discussed doing a horror, comedy and romance films. we came to the final decision of a romance film, we decided this because we believed this to be too 'obvious' and also many students in the past have done horror films. We then discussed comedy we thought this may be too difficult to do as we only have 2 minutes to do it in, we believed that we needed more time to give the comedy a chance at success. We then got onto the genre romance we decided on this genre because we thought it would make a very good film, we had some inspiration from the film 'Time Travelers Wife'
We decided that we did not want to make a typical film opening where the couple are constantly kissing and expressing their love for on another, so we decided that we would put a twist on it. The idea of doing a twist to our film opening came from the film 'Dear John'
And also 'The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud'
We both decided on a twist, that twist being that the boyfriend of the relationship was in fact dead, and that she was struggling to come to terms with it. We both agreed that our film opening had to be different and not too obvious, we have chosen to do the film opening using a scrap book and photos of a couple. The girlfriend in the couple is going to be creating the scrap book as the film goes along.
This photograph shows you the first few shots of our film, it involves the scrap book, the girl turning the page, a manual focus on the tape, a close up side shot of her writing in the notebook, a close up of what she has just wrote, her turning the page again, another manual focus on the pen, and a zoom from the full page into the photograph, this will them go to a white out to give the effect of her remembering what could have been, if he were still alive. We thought that this would give a very good idea about what was going to happen in the film. After the white out we see a piece of footage of the boyfriend walking a dog down a track. then he falls and we go back to her sat at the desk putting the scrap book together.
This next photograph shows you the next couple of steps into our film opening. This part comes after the white out, we see a close up of the dog walking across the shot from right to left and then we get a wide shot of the dog and his owner. Next we see the owner crouching down to stroke the dog, then an extreme close up of the dogs lead, another wide shot this time of the dog running away, from right to left. Another wide shot of the ground and the dog's tail leaving the shot. We then go to wide shot of the boyfriend laid on the floor, there is then another white out and we see the photo of the boyfriend walking the dog.
We then go back to the room scene, firstly we see a wide shot of the door, then a side view of the girlfriend sat at the desk fixing the book together, then we have a close up of the girl looking down at the scrap book, with a tear rolling down her face. There is then a rear view of the girlfriend sat at the desk. then her closing up the book, her getting up out of the chair, a wide shot of her walking away from the side, and her walking out of the door. This helps to portray that the film is going to carry on, and that it will not stop there.
For audio we have decided that we are going to be using a piece or music from the web page http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ called 'Stardance' this music seems to go extremely well with our film opening sequence ideas.
Stardance
We chose this music because we thought that it would go really well with the footage that we have. Also it kind of reminds you of time, and traveling back and for through time and it also had that thoughtful feel to it.
The characters we have chosen to use are a boy and a girl in a relationship. We thought about using these two in our film opening because they are already together and they would be able to understand the emotions the we need them to portray in the film. we have chosen, Jamie Richardson and Jessica Beecham, we are also using a dog in the film opening, the dog we are using is my dog called Charlie.
The location of the film opening is going to be in Normanby - By - Spital, down a lane called Mill Lane and also in my house, Tretower Cottage. We chose this location because we thought it would be a good place for filming, as it is a regular dog walking site and also there is hardly any traffic on the road.
Props that we will be using are the following;
- A pen
- A scrapbook
- Some sticky tape
- A lamp
- A dog lead
The weather
Issues that we had.
We had a few issues with
We chose to film on Friday night and Saturday daytime. We thought this was a good time to film because it was the time that we could get our actors, my partner and myself together, we then decided after we had filmed our media that the music we had chosen Stardance was no good, that it didn't go with what we had got, it originally went with our ideas but not with the real thing. We have looked a few other options for music. Path finder, Counting Sand, End scene, Morning after the storm.
my personal favourite and the one i think will go with our film opening most is Morning after the storm.
We have edited our film opening, we have chosen to use the music Morning after the storm.
We thought that this would be the best music to use as it goes really well with the footage we have got.
Another issue we had was the off-screen dialogue, this did not go with the footage we had, we hoped that it would but it just didn't work, so we decided to cut it. This gave us chance to extend the music to go along with the footage.
When we filmed our film opening, we didn't film enough cut away, this created a problem, as when we developed our film opening, it did not "flow", we then decided to resolve the situation by adding some titles with quotes which said;
'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 that this would guide the audience into the story a bit more. We then discovered that it has gone more towards watching a film trailer rather than a film opening.
To make it look less like a trailer we have chosen to film a dialogue scene between 'Natalie's' parents, this will help it to create the sense of it carrying on. This will be the first dialogue scene we have in our film opening.
The script for this dialogue scene will be as follows;
mum; We have to do something about her, she won't put the book down.
dad; Well what are we meant to do, we can't lock her up or anything like that can we?
mum; No i am not saying do that at all, i think she needs to go and see someone, she has a problem.
dad; I can see where you are coming from but we can't force her to do anything.
mum; Yes, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
dad; But this is our little girl.
Another issue we had was with the titles for the actors. We originally had 'Jamie Richardson' on the screen for 3 seconds, but 'Jessica Beecham' on screen for about 8 seconds, also, 'Jamie Richardson' was situated in the wrong place, it was originally next to him laid on the floor, this didn't go well because it looked like it was next to his corpse.
We have changed this so that there is equal billing for both actors. This is much better now, they are both on for the same amount of time, this is approximately 5 seconds.
We created a questionnaire to give to members of our class, we decided to give them to our class because they were the right age group for our target audience.
Here are the Results for our questionnaire.
1. The first question we asked was there gender, we gave out questionnaires to 5 females and 5 males, this gave us an equal opinion of the following questions.
2. We asked them their age this gave us a rough idea of who our target audience was going to be
3. We then asked what type of genres they enjoy watching, this gave us an insight of what type of film opening we should do.
4. The question of what they look for in a film opening was asked, we thought it would be appropriate to ask this question as we needed to have a good understanding of what we should contain in our film opening.
5. We also asked them if music was important in a film opening, this helped us to decide whether we needed to include any in our sequence.
Along with question 5, we asked them why this was, the responses to this question were things such as;
- '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.
We went into our post production room, this helped us to develop our film opening using the programme called Adobe after effects suite, this is not accessible in the classroom so we had to go through to the technicians room. We changed a few things in here, we changed the titles. The titles were changed in order to create a more visual effect on the titles. The titles we changed were, 'Starring Jamie Richardson' we decided to animate the title by it coming in by a foggy animation staying on for 4 seconds and then it exiting the shot by an evaporation effect. We did exactly the same for the title 'Jessica Beecham' this works well on both occasions.
We also moved the title 'Stages Productions' to the front of the film opening. We moved this to here because it made the opening flow more than it did before the dialogue scene, also where it was before, you would have expected the title to be there instead of a production title.
We changed the order of the text, this works a lot better, in order for it to work we also had to rearrange the order of the shots. When we moved all of the text and shots we re watched it and it made much more sense.
The music was changed in the beginning of the opening in order to make the opening flow. We start the music when the title 'We will open the book' with the music starting here, this is because we thought that it helped the film opening flow a lot better and it didn't sound out of place.
