Titles

As titles are very important in an opening sequence, as a group, we decided to analyse where titles occurred so that we could get an idea of where to put the titles in our opening sequence. We decided to take a look at The Conjuring (2013) as our genre for our opening sequence is psychological thriller/horror.

 Here's the link to the title sequence- http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-conjuring/

We created a timeline of where the titles appeared-

What we found interesting was that the director (James Wan) came up first which is very unusual as normally the director is shown last. As a group we liked the idea of having the name of the film last so that is stuck in the audiences mind. 

Production Pitch

Production Pitch Media

This is our group's (Katie, Joel and I) production pitch for our Main Task. 

Opening Sequence Analysis

To help create a good opening sequence for our main task, we have to look and study other opening sequences and see what makes them good. Our group (Katie, Joel and me) decided to look at the 2009 film adaptation of the book Coraline by Neil Gaimen, starring Dakota Fanning. 

Here's the opening sequence-

Our Analysis

• The music creates quite an eerie effect with the soft music and repetitive nature, making it seem quite creepy
• The focus on certain elements throughout the scene such as the buttons show that they are going to be an important aspect of the film.

• It contains titles, which is a general convention of opening sequences. 
• The treatment added the opening sequence during the post-production stage, is a green murky effect which adds to the coldness and slightly odd nature of the film.
• The mechanical hands shaping and creating the doll act as almost a god-like figure. 

Main Task Brief

Our Main Task brief is to create a fictional opening sequence for a film. This includes the pre-production stages such as scripting and storyboarding, the production stage (filming) and the post-production stages such as editing. It should be roughly 2 minutes long.
To prepare for this we decided to look at what other opening sequences include to find the general conventions of an opening sequence.

General conventions for an opening sequence are -

• Titles such as director or producer
• Some information being revealed about the film- for example perhaps see your the main character, but not too much as you want to make sure the audience still want to see it.

A good website for looking at opening sequences is Art of the Title (http://www.artofthetitle.com/).

Preliminary Task Video

Below is our preliminary task. We had some issues when filming. Unfortunately our first try at filming didn't work and I wasn't there for the second try, leaving Katie and Joel to film it by themselves. Fortunately though we were able to complete the task within in the deadline.

Here is our preliminary task-

In this we have used a variety of camera shots, including the required shot/reverse shot set in our brief, also we included some camera movement such as a pan.

Preliminary Task Brief

For our preliminary task we had to find a location, storyboard a scene of someone walking through a door, sitting down, and having a conversation and then film it. Our scene had to include shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.

We decided to film it in the school cafeteria as it had a big enough space for us to film comfortably in. Instead of the usual method of drawing our storyboard, we took pictures to create our storyboard.

Here they are -

Storyboarding

Storyboarding a scene is where you create a series of rough sketches outlining the scene you want to create. They should include some basic information, such as what type of shot you want to shoot, for example a long shot or a close up, but also the duration of the shot, so you know how long to shoot the scene for. 

Storyboarding is an essential part of the pre-production planning as you can refer to it when you're out filming your scene,saving time, but also making filming much easier as you have a visual representation of the shot you want to create. 

Here's an example of a simple storyboard template-