We've decided to change our film idea to a different genre, from a comedy to a old/war/romantic/classic film.
The basic film idea is based around an elderly woman reminiscing about a traumatic time. Flashbacks are key to our film with the elderly woman thinking back to scenes of her perhaps running through the woods. We chose to do this genre as from looking at previous examples of AS film openings nobody has chosen a film similar to this.
Our possible location is forty hall, this is perfect as we can do our flashback scene in the woods and the house gives the impression of the character being in an old peoples home or her own house which is what we wanted to give the impression of.
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!
Here is a video we edited of footage we filmed on the flip cameras before we filmed our actual film. This was to practice using the cameras and experimenting with different angles etc. We also practiced our iMovie skills by editing this.
For todays lesson we went to the CLC centre to learn more about the iMovie software, we were given footage to edit and were able to experiment with different aspects of iMovie such as music, transitions and title credits. After that we went back to school and edited some of our film and here is a fisrt draft of it.
In todays lesson we watched the film Se7en starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey.
I had never seen the film before and was anxious to watch it as I had heard how scary it was. I thoroughly enjoyed the film as the concept was so clever as a murderer based his murders on the seven sins; Gluttony, Pride, Lust, Anger, Sloth, Wrath and Envy, hence the name of the film being Se7en. The film had me glued the whole way through as I was waiting for the next terrifying moment to occur.
I was really impressed with Brad Pitt in this film as he did not reform to his typical stereotype film role, Kevin Spacey really scared me in this film as he was so creepy!
During the film I took note of certain camera shots and angles that were used to create suspense and add to the horror/thriller genre of the film. Also I noticed the non-diagetic sounds used, this was very effective as it added to the drama and thrill of the film.
The film ending was excellent as the audience wonder where the murdered is taking the detectives and whether or not he will kill them. The murderer ends up killing Mills' wife, delivering her head to the desert, this being one of the sins Envy, the last sin to occur is Anger as Mills kills the murderer. This is a very controversial ending as the class debated whether or not he should have killed him. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Se7en and would highly recommend it.
After a very long day our group filmed the footage needed for our two minute film opening. Firstly we had a quick group meeting and discussed what we would do first and went trhough each scene. We started filming at around 10am at my house as we were using my sisters room to film in. The first scene we shot was Andrea changing her outfit, it was rather hard to film this scene as we had to make the camera movements very precise as we had to zoom in and out to give the effect of Andreas outfit automatically changing. After many attempts we finally got the footage we wanted, then we started to film Andrea waking up and getting ready. We had some great ideas and thought of putting the camera in the fridge as Andrea got a carton of orange juice out to give different camera angles and perspectives.
We then decided to start filming outside as the weather had brightened up, unfortunately for Charlotte she had to lay on the ground for a long while as we had to give the impression of her being hit by an alarm clock, but the shot was very effective so i'm sure she didn't mind after all! As we shot outside my house road cleaners happened to be down my road so we took advantage of this and asked one of them to appear in our film and he happily agreed!
After lunch we started to do the bus scenes which was a bit of a hassle due to angry bus drivers, passengers looking into the camera and a waving bus driver! We got the shots we needed, although the journey was a bit bumpy but hoepfully it will look efefctive.
We made our way back to my house and shot the final scenes of the bedroom scene such as the alarm clock scene which included throwing it out of the window! Luckily me and Valentina had the job of catching it in a blanket which was rather humourous. We also back combed Andreas hair which gave the effect of her looking as if she had just woken up, we also did the wardrobe shot of Andrea throwing clothes at the camera lense, this looked really effective and we thought of the idea of making that one of the parts of the film where a credit should be shown.
Seven hours later the day of filming was finally over, we were all really happy with the shots and footage we got, although we were very tired! Now we couldn't wait to start editing
