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Showing posts from March, 2017

Film Opening Timelines

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0:00 - Fade from black 0:01 - Nikki Lauda looking around from the seat of his F1 car 0:02 - "Twenty-five drivers start every season in Formula 1, and each year..two of us die. What kind of person does a job like this? Not normal men for sure. Rebels. Lunatics. Dreamers. People who are desperate to make a mark, and are prepared to die trying." 0:04 - Shot of the sky with clouds going past 0:06 - Shot of the grandstand, Panning down to show James Hunt standing with three women on the starting grid 0:13 - Shot of the two front cars on the grid, Lauda's Ferrari on the left and Hunt's McLaren on the right 0:16 - Shot of someone putting their helmet on 0:17 - Shot of the Tyrell 6-wheeler F1 car 0:18 - High angle of a person performing checks on a car on the grid 0:20 - Shot of the Tyrell 6-wheeler F1 car from a crowd perspective. Out of focus flags are being waved in front of the camera 0:22 - Shot of the other Ferrari 0:24 - James Hunt standi

Independent Research on Film Openings

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From some of the openings I've written about so far, and some of the things mentioned, it probably doesn't take much of a genius to work out I'm a bit of a car nut. These film openings are my favourite car based openings, all for different reasons. The Italian Job - 1969 First off there is The Italian Job. The end chase with the old Mini's in Turin is probably the highlight of the film, especially for me when I was younger. The film we owned was on two DVDs and I would only ever watch the second one for the car chase at the end. But that's not what I'm here to write about. The beginning with the Lamborghini Miura cruising through the alps with Matt Monroe's 'Days Like These' in the background has to be the most iconic film openings of all time. Until the very end of the opening, the opening actually has nothing to do with the film, other than setting the scene. An Italian car, the mountains in Italy (Great St Bernard Pass) and a cha

Student Film Analysis

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Chosen Film: Innocent Until Proven Guilty Genre - This film is of the genre action. This can be seen initially from the outfit the main character is wearing. All black combat clothes with a bulletproof vest, not the sort of thing you would wear to go to the pub. The second piece of evidence is during the phone call, where gunshots can clearly be heard. There is then the armed guard, who is dressed the same way the main character is. Then after that there is the fight scene, where the editors have made use of a fast-paced edit with lots of shots.  Editing - The film starts off with a slow edit with lengthy shots. As the tension builds. When the fight scene starts, the edit becomes much more fast paced with lots of short shots. After the guard has been 'taken care of', the edit then slows back down. This is all good quality editing because it all fits with the scenes that are going on.  Sound - This film, excluding the music, uses sound recorded especially for the film

Our Production Company

Our production company is called Red Tie Pictures (we needed to choose a title with an item of clothing in the title). We have chosen to be a Mainstream company instead of an independent  one because our group as a whole have watched a lot more mainstream films over independant films, so we would know what to come up with. Also, in terms of creating the film, independent films have much more technical story lines and avoid mainstream genres, some even being difficult to pinpoint a genre onto, such as American Honey (2016) . This would mean that research into similar genres we were planning on doing would be hard to do, as well as the story needing to be aimed at a niché audience.

Chosen FIlm Genre

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Our group's chosen film genre is an Action Rom-Com. We chose this because we all had different ideas of what we wanted to do and were unable to agree. In the end, we were torn between the idea of either an Action Film or a Romantic Comedy. To satisfy everyone, we subsequently combined the two into an Action Romantic Comedy. Something that was made apparent was that there aren't that many films of this genre that had any real success, other than Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005). After reading up more about this film, we decided to make our film around the storyline of this film.

Films That Have Influenced Me

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There are a number of films which have influenced when coming up with our final film. The first of these being  Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) .  "A bored married couple is surprised to learn that they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other." - IMDB Another element of a film we liked was the opening to the film Lord Of War (2005) The thing we liked most of all about opening was the way it followed something through its life. We aren't going to use this for the opening's entirety, just the first 15-20 seconds. Something I personally would've liked to have done was a breaking of the fourth wall, where a character talks to the camera as if they were actually talking to the audience. This can be seen at the beginning of Lord Of War, but rather more famously, it is used in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) Something else I would have liked to have done was to film something in one take. On the face of it, that seems li

Generic Conventions in Film Openings

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Action - Suicide Squad Portrayal of violence: Deadshot's punching bag, death threats towards the prison guards and then portrayal of police brutality, Harley Quinn being electrocuted on the bars Males shown as strong and powerful: Deadshot not wearing a top, which means you can see the entirety of his muscles, the shine and sweat shows he has been working out hard, not afraid to mess with people of a higher power (i.e. the prison guards) Female shown in a sexual manner: Harley Quinn is wearing a rather minial amount of clothing, Harley referred to as 'Hotness', Harley licking the prison bars in a seductive manner, "I sleep where I want, when I want, with who I want", "That is just a whole lot of pretty and a whole lot of crazy" Comedy - The Secret Life Of Pets (Due to presumed copyright issues, there is no opening clip to this film I can legally link to (I think a PutLocker link would be rather unacceptable). This is the earlies

My Own Institutional Logo For Our Film Company

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  This is our chosen institutional logo for our production company. Because our chosen company was a Mainstream company, we needed a moving logo since all mainstream companies use a logo like this. Universal pictures has the universal logo orbiting the world, MGM has the lion and Paramount has the stars forming a circle in front of the mountain.

Our Opening Remake

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This is the opening to our film remake. Our chosen film was The Shining [To clear up any confusion, I was in a different group for the film remake than what i was in for our own film openings] The reason we have made a film opening remake is so we understand the camera angles used and the length of different shots and how they affect the film as a whole. For anything that we couldn't recreate accurately, we needed to improvise. In the real opening to The Shining, there was a Volkswagen Beetle driving through a mountainous landscape. With us being 16 year olds without driving licenses and not being within easy access of an alp or two, we decided to improvise. Instead of a real car, we used one of my 1:10 Radio Controlled race-spec touring cars. To get the helicopter shots, we originally planned to use a drone with a camera mounted on it. The issue with this was that i was the only one who could drive the car (i wasn't letting someone else drive the car due to its va