10/12/13 | RESEARCH | MOVIE OPENINGS – NOW YOU SEE ME

I watched the opening of Now You See Me (directed by Louis Letterier). The genre of the movie was a crime/thriller. The opening scene is very interesting as it took you through the stories of the main characters. They are portrayed in a positive light even though they are seen to be doing questionable things. e.g. stealing money, black-mailing people and faking their own death. There are 4 of these mini stories and they last about 3 minutes each. The title is not displayed until after the 4 scenes introducing the characters are done. There are also no opening credits. This has inspired us as we would like to have quite a few characters in our plot and we want to make a movie opening like this. We could use the idea of having brief scenes to introduce the characters. However, we will add in opening credits. This is because we will not create a whole movie because the brief says the movie has to be under 3 minutes long.

PRODUCTION LOG | RESEARCH: FILM OPENING ANALYSIS

Today we looked at and analysed the TV drama Zen that aired on BBC 1. We saw the ways in which the genre (Thriller) was shown:

·         Pictures of guns to signify crime

·         Pictures of keys to signify prisons (as in ‘Lock ‘im up and throw away the key (THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW))

·         The protagonist (Zen) is in a dark suit with sun glasses, looking in charge and formal

·         Buildings that relate to the Italian buildings, particularly the police station with ‘The Questera’ clearly inscribed on the front of the vuilding.

This crime and detective series features the main character Aurelio Zen. It is based in Rome and the storyline is based on the books by Michael Dibdin. I saw how the opening had many clues that showed the Italian nature of the drama, such as:

·         Constant use of green, white and red to signify the Italian flag

·         Silhouettes of famous buildings in Rome and Italy such as St Peter’s dome as well as birds eye shots of St Peter’s square which are iconic emblems of Rome which are well known throughout the world.

·         Lots of pictures of Fiat Cinquento, a classic Italian car which appears frequently in Italian movies and TV shows

Sherlock Holmes (2009) Action/Adventure Practice | 19/10/13

Sherlock Holmes (2009)-Opening Scene

 The genre of this film is a hybrid genre. It is mixture of an action/adventure and an Historical. You can tell this because of the setting and the mise-en-scene. It is set in Victorian London, with the main characters of Sherlock Holmes delightfully remastered and remade. The books in which they feature were of course written in the times of Queen Victoria, her era and the Edwardian era. A carriage is shown with men looking serious, cocking guns. This gives me a sense of camaraderie  and adventure.These men are obviously looking for trouble. The tracking shot emphasises the urgency of getting to the place they need to go as soon as possible. 

The jeopardy and suspense is heightened by the fast paced orchestral music and the fast paced drums. When the guns are cocked, this gives the viewer the impression of a gunfight in which action is implied.  The fast paced running of a man heightens this sense of mystery and suspense. 

The speed and motion of the extract are the carriages and the horses thundering through London. More speed and motion comes from the shady man running through pedestrian streets. The shady man is taking shortcuts and jumping over things. This emphasises the speed and motion and the need for these men to get to wherever they're going.

A twang of a banjo starts playing as the movie begins but that slowly turns to a build up of music with loud drums. This is designed to build up the tension. This gives the signal to the audience that possibly action is coming. Holmes's pounding footsteps blend in with the orchestral soundtrack and the drums. The drums are there to reflect how urgent the chase is, and how urgent it is to locate the villain and liberate the victim. 

Our hero, Sherlock Holmes is not a typical action/adventure hero. He is smartly dressed but at the same time, he is disheveled, possibly from the running. He seems to be an antihero by the way he is dressed. He wears black which is not typical of the hero but rather typical of the times. He wears black and because of this colour, he blends in and is hard to notice. Prehaps this is because this hero does not wish to be acknowledged. He is mysterious. 

FILM TREATMENT | SCENE 1 | 08/10/13

ALFIE BIRCH (15-18) a brown haired, plain looking boy who looks stressed, is talking to  UNKNOWN PERSON (age unknown) in a shady street or room. UNKNOWN PERSON, says the letters DNP.

ALFIE is walking home looking shifty. He walks through the door and throws down bag. he walks through to the kitchen and puts on the kettle. He walks into a sitting room and sits down on a sofa. He opens a package left on the table with his name on it. He brings out the box with the pills in it and puts it onto the table. The sound of the kettle can be heard in the background. He puts the pill in his hand and moves it to his mouth. ALFIE BIRCH takes the pill. His eyes widen and dilate. He falls to the floor and doesn't move. The kettle is squealing.

My Scoop It! on Thriller Openings 01/10/13

My Scoop It 

Thriller Movie Openings

Link: http://www.scoop.it/t/thriller-movie-openings

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Project Log | PLANNING | 25/09/13

Planning
Today we discussed our points in finer detail. We discussed the opening scenes for our thriller film. We discussed more of our options and we decided to have a possible opening scene be silent. Our idea was to have cut away shots of the scenes listed below.

We have decided to have a shot of the hand and to possibly have my eye widen as the drug affects me. I was slightly inspired by a scene in The Amazing Spiderman movie where his senses are heightened and he notices things like a fly on the window. I wanted to recreate this partial hysteria. I drew for the end to have a me collapse and as the screen goes dark, a scream would be heard.

We looked up how to change eye-colour because we did have pans for me to reappear as somebody else but we decided it was too confusing, here is the tutorial that I found which shows you how to do it.

PLANNING | CHALLENGING STEREOTYPES | 24/09/13

Date: Tuesday 24th September 2013

PLANNING: CHALLENGING STEREOTYPES

Today we re-thought an aspect for our narrative because we realized after discussion that we would be positioning Chinese medicine as suspect we were reinforcing negative stereotypes. As a group, we were not comfortable with this idea. We would like to challenge stereotype by shifting the negative slant towards either the consumer of the medicine or the middle-man (distributor). We wanted to make clear that the distributor was to blame so we decided to portray the Chinese person as an unwilling participant by using looks of worry and uneasiness.

PRODUCTION LOG | RESEARCH | BRAINSTORMING IDEAS | 19/09/13

We looked into mysteries that have yet to be solved, but we decided that we weren't going to use a big mystery. We then looked at the newspaper and found a report of teenagers who have died because of DNP which is a drug which is a slimming drug. We decided that this was a good idea and decided to look more into it next lesson.

We brainstormed ideas after watching  movie and although we did not have a solid idea, we had decided that we did not want to to do the genres comedy or horror. We decided that we wanted to do a thriller.

Research | Film Openings | 17-09-13

Today in class, we started on research for our film opening project which is to be done for this year. We watched two film openings, Made in Dagenham (dir. Nigel Cole 2010) and The English Patient (dir. Anthony Minghella 1996). From these two openings, we discussed the ideas that we got from them. In the English Patient, a person was painting a picture or writing. This gave us the idea of important documents being signed, something that would reveal a big secret or would feature in a spy/thriller movie.