What should a film opening include?

What should a film opening include?

The purpose of an opening title sequence to a film is to establish the visual style of the film and to introduce the viewer to all or some of the following:

Characters

Location

Narrative/Plot

Genre

Themes

Typically, an opening sequence should contain:

· Details of cast and crew

· The film's title

· An introduction to character or character type (can be done through costume)

· An easy-to-establish location

· Indication of time period (historical/modern/futuristic)

· Indication of genre that audience can confidently identify

· Enigma

· Patterns and types of editing that will be echoed in the remainder of the film

· Mise en scene and cinematography that will be echoed or elaborated upon later in the film

BFI Trip

We went to the BFI Studio in London and had a presentation even with someone called Rob Miller that talked about the Film Industry and the different aspects of it.

First of all he compared and evaluated both Independent and mainstream films. I learnt that the purpose of producing and independent film is for the viewer to ask questions and also challenges them, compare this to mainstream where they are just for the viewers entertainment. An example of an independent film is Frank which is a low budget film only costing £1 million, has less established actors, black comedy which is a difficult humour and is an unusual genre that may put audiences off watching it. Compare this to the New mainstream blockbuster Star Wars: The Force Awakens that has a high budget of $200 million, made by one of the 'big six' (Disney), amazing use of CGI and SFX, well known actors that allows a good market campaign and is also and event movie. 

Elaborating on the 'big six', when we think of past films that were huge sales films like Captain America, Harry Potters and Frozen they were all produced and promoted by one of these. This shows the difference in the marketing in which the big films are more heavily advertised because they have the money to advertise it everywhere compared to independent film where they are a lot less advertised.

There is currently a lot of money in Television because of Netflix and Amazon as examples.

When creating a film the producers have to take into consideration what they are interested in as well as the target audience they are trying to reach. Furthermore, it was explained that in the film industry to make the film recognisable you need a distributor and they do the following:

- Pay for advertisement

-Negotiates release date

-    Chooses which film to distribute

- Decides on number of prints/ copies

The main aspects of film marketing; television, cinema, trailers press, outdoor, online. Trailers are by far the most expensive way of advertisement but the most effective in some ways with consumers wanting to see moving pictures and clips of the film, so it gives the audience a preview of what to expect.

Following this we the discussed the effectiveness of the Spectre trailer:

- Action: explosions

- Familiarity with franchise and star marketing

-Enigma created leads people want their questions to be awnsered

- Romance: classic James Bond scene

-   Good vs Evil: classic theme

With all this into consideration they are expecting it to be the biggest sales film of the year but have tough competition with the very popular new Star Wars film coming out in December.

Exhibition/ Exchange:

-DVD/ Blue ray sales are decreasing

- Most popular consumption of films it watching it at home

- Online film consumption like Netflix and Lovefilm that are again available at home

- Streaming of films increasing

Emaze for 'You For You'

This is my Emaze which i created.  In this presentation, this tells you information of what order i created my film in including the planning, filming and editing.

Sound

In today's lesson, I learnt about sound and the effects of sound in films and TV programmes. The different types of sound that we were taught about are:

1. Diegetic - anything that the actors can hear (e.g. radio, cars)

2. Non-diegetic - anything that the actors cannot hear (e.g. voice over)

3. Synchronous - matched with the visible source of the sound on the screen.

4. Asynchronous - not matched with the visible source of the sound on the screen.

5. Sound bridge - blending two scenes together by sound.

6. Ambient - the surrounding sounds that create the atmosphere and creates soundscape.

The Hobbit

• Non- diegetic music
• Voiceover of bilbo speaking
• Synchronous sound of a candle
• Sound bridge to different scenes and settings
• Synchronous sound of a pen
• Ambient sound of the river running outside Erebor
• Synchronous: weapons moving, footsteps, gems being scooped up, mining, banging of the axe

Preliminary Task

For the preliminary task, my group which was; Megan Thomas, Jono Mooney and myself had to plan, create and edit a short film.  Our genre we got given was Romance, therefore we made a love story which also had a moral to it.
The movie we created was called 'You for You'.  The story line of the movie was that there was a typical, good-looking, popular boy named Jake who had a popular girlfriend named Megan.  The nerdy girl which was acted out by myself, caught Jake's eye as she was different to everyone else.  Yet she try's hard to look like the popular girls but Jake likes Chloe for who she is, not who she pretends to be.  The moral is everyone is beautiful in their own way, inside and out.
Below is a picture of the shots we had to do to make our film which Megan created.  We then highlighted each shot in a colour, specific colour's were a key to where we would shoot the shot.  For example, the orange highlighted shots were being located in the library and so on. A necessity for the film task was that we had to include 6 different shots in our film, this included; match-on-action, shot/reverse shot, 180 degree rule, an establishing shot, at least two close-up shots, a tracking shot and a high angle shot.

You For You

This is the final edited and completed film.


                                                        

Megan: Megan Thomas
Chloe: Chloe O'Hare
Jake: Jared Chambers
Camera man: Jono Mooney
Chloe's friend in the library: Jono Mooney

Talk by Pete Fraser

Today we had a talk by Pete Fraser on the opening scenes of movies and student media clips.  We had to watch the opening scenes on movies which we may or may not have been familiar about and analyse the effects it had on us.  We would discuss what genre the film would be, if there was any enigma codes, the setting of the movie and many more specific details. 
I learnt today about the process used in films called 'Foley'.  This is the use of sound effects emphasising certain scene/moves in a movie clip.  For example, if a fight is taken place in a film, if a punch was thrown, they would seperately record a sound similar to what a punch would sound like and edit it onto the fight scene.  This foley is also used for simple things you wouldn't notice such as; footsteps, sitting on a chair, knocking on a door, writing with a pen and many many more.
We also had an innner view of the criteria on how our 2 minute movie would be marked, consising of marking the levels from 1-4, Level 1 being a D, level 2 being a C, level 3 being a B and level 4 being an A.