FILM OPENINGS

During the lesson, we brain stormed about the codes and conventions of a typical film opening. This is what we came up with.

The main purpose of a film opening is to entice the audience into carrying on watching the film.

'CHILDREN OF MEN' OPENING ANALYSIS

We analysed the opening of the film 'Children Of Men' and came up with a fair amount of ideas.

In the very beginning of the clip, we hear a voice over of news reporters talking about the dystopian features:

• Army occupation of Mosques
• Day 1000, Siege of Seattle
• British boarders closed for 8 years

We also know that the film was located in London in the 16th of November 2027; we are able to identify straight away that this film is set in the future.

The fact that it is the 'Siege of Seattle' foreshadows a negative vibe. This is because Seattle is seen to be a 'nice city' where the area is calm and less polluted.



According to our conventions of the future, we expect to see improved technology, modern buildings, clean streets/roads etc. However is this clip, Seattle seems like a very busy city with polluted air and full of rubbish lying around the streets. This may suggest the carelessness of the people, and the lack of organisation within the city.

In this scene, we can also see 'Chinese carts' and 'tuktuks', this shows the diversity in culture because we don't usually see these type of transportation in London.

In this scene, we can see a military helicopter, this gives an impression of how monitored and oppressed the city is.

Firstly, we are able to identify the man in the middle as the main character because the camera follows the him throughout the clip. He is also positioned slightly to the left but the still covers the middle area of the frame. 

Other than recognising the main character, we were also able to figure out his personality briefly. 

   - Careless (about the news / in general): He is facing the opposite direction to the others; which are giving full attention to the news. He also bumps into the lady on the left and ignores her instead of apologising.

   - Lives near the coffee shop: It seems like he comes to this coffee shop everyday as if it is his daily morning routine. We know this from the way he already has the correct amount of change in his hands ready to pay. This means that he comes to this coffee shop very often that he knows the price.

    - Alcoholic: He takes out an alcohol bottle from inside his coat and pours it into his coffee.

QUESTIONS 
After watching the opening, we came up with many questions. This suggests that this film's opening was a success due to the fact that it creates curiosity for the audience. 

1. Why is the death of baby diego a big deal?
2. How can he possibly be the youngest person?
3. What caused the explosion?
4. Who planted the bomb?
5. Why the coffee shop?
6. Who's is this man?
7. Why doesn't he care?

OVERCOMING A DIFFICULTY

The difficulty in fixing the laggy slow motion after changing the video speed to under 50% motivated me to research on perfect slow motion videos. I found out that the video must be at least 60 frames per second in order to get the perfect slow motion. 

This is the product:

This video was colour corrected using a preset on lightroom. This is the comparison:

    BEFORE                                                                                                 AFTER

  

'HEAT' CAMERA WORK ANALYSIS

ONE MINUTE FILM REMAKE EVALUATION

Out of the categories that we were able to choose from, my group decided to choose a movie remake of a horror film (Annabelle). The reason for this was that we did not need any other specific props other than the doll itself; which one of group member (Eye) owned a blythe doll so we thought it was a suitable choice.

CREATIVE PROCESS
How did you find working in a group when it came to:

   COMING UP WITH AND DECIDING ON AN IDEA

Personally I was happy with my group because we easily came up with the idea of horror. Although horror is not my favourite genre, I thought to myself it was time for some change, or  that it might help me overcome the fear of watching scary movies by experiencing the process of the film myself. We then got on to the point where we had to choose one film to work on, which we researched on different horror movies by watching trailers of famous horror films, or searching for horror films on google. We finally decided to work on the movie 'Annabelle'. Overall this was an easy process because communication was successful.

   WORKING TOGETHER WHEN FILMING
In my opinion, teamwork was a success in our group. We decided on the different roles that each of us had to work on. We did this by identifying each other's strengths and weaknesses in order to decide on who gets which role. The roles included the 'camera man', editor, actor/actress, and the director which all of us took part in. I helped out with the acting, directing, and the editing. All of us showed full contribution throughout this project. Even though we had different free times, we still managed to complete the film as a whole. To conclude, we worked efficiently in terms of our roles, and all of us were committed.

TECHNICAL PROCESS
How did you find working with:

   THE CAMERA
Since I am very passionate about photography and videography, I often learn the settings on my camera myself therefore it was not much of a problem for me to figure out the settings on an unfamiliar camera.

   EDITING SOFTWARE
Despite the challenges that we faced while using Premeire pro cc , we helped each other to figure out the different settings on the software in order to make our film seem more cinematic. This may refer to the colour corrections of each scene, or the duration of each cut.

   AUDIO EQUIPMENT
We were lucky that one of our group mates owned a microphone which plugs into the camera. We used the micro phone to record the sound effects to put into our film. By doing this, we were able to adjust the audio without having any background sounds disturbing.

FINAL PRODUCT

Overall, our movie remake was quite a success, discriminating the fact that we forgot to colour correct every scene in the clip. Personally I would say that we did a good job despite the challenges that we have faced while editing the film using a complicated software (premiere pro) for the first time. Our classmates enjoyed watching our short clip; we had lots of positive responses. However, I think that our film would seem more professional if we included a background music to it, as it is less thrilling without the music. This refers to the scene where the girl is being dragged.