Trip to Southbank- Thursday 2nd December

On Thursday we travelled to the National Film Theatre in Southbank to go to a cemenar discussing film openings. In our first session we focused on genre, narrative, character, atmosphere, themes, setting and sound. We watched three film openings to Catch Me If You Can, Dawn Of The Dead and Napoleon Dynamite and discussed how the topics fit in with these opening sequences. The openings made us think about our own film openings and how they compared to eachother. I came to the conclusion that the openings we saw focused on graphics, especially Catch Me If You Can which is very different to our openings due to our lack of software in comparison to the hugh budget films.

I really liked the opening sequence to Napoleon Dynamite, as I found it very entertaining and creative, it also allowed the audience to see what genre the film would be. I really liked the quirky and indie style of it and also found the titles really different to others I had seen in other films.This inspired me to be more creative when making my opening titles.

In the next session Daniel Kleinman came and discussed his work with us. He explained how he created the majority of the James Bond title sequences, we saw an example of his work from Casino Royale and I was very impressed feeling fascinated about how he created such amazing graphics. He expressed how important the titles are and how the music should fit in with them, this made me rethink our title credits that we are using in our film and how they should be analysed properly in order to look effective with our film. Apart from creating title sequences Kleinman also directs adverts and to our surprise he had done very well known advertisements such as the Specsavers and Coca-Cola adverts.

Next Simon Frame spoke to us, a director whose recent film is Monsters. We watched clips of the film and I was amazed when he told me they only had a cast of four people. I was also shocked when he told us that several parts of the film were not filmed together, with one scene being shot in several places. He expressed how important sound was and how it is key to many films. He said the best noises come from everyday things and by layering these noises up, great noises come as a result.



Later in the afternoon we watched examples of different film openings. We watched three films all at different levels, this helped me see what was needed to achieve certain levels. Some films we watched were really impressive and made me want to make us as high quality as others. Although some films we watched were laughed at, as they were Level 1. This made us all determined not to make our video as bad as others!
I particularl enjoyed Angeldust, I really liked the way such a simple concpt had such a brilliant effect. The film also left the audience wondering what would happen next, making it a good opening sequence as it did not seem like a trailer.


Overall, the day at the NFT was a great success and I came away with a lot more knowledge of film openings that I had before. It made me feel really inspired for my own film and I hope that it can reach a high level or otherwise it might be laughed at!