Todays Minutes

In our lesson today we made some critical decisions about our Main Task, before we start filming tomorrow. Some things we have decided to add in include :

1. A ticking clock. We had the idea of using a music box to provide the source of our sound, but before that we are thinking of adding a ticking clock sound, and with every other tick the shot changes to different locations in the room, preferably more creepy things, such as china dolls. After the music starts were going to make our movement more move and flowing so that it creates the sense that the monster is dancing to the music.  
2. We have decided what to film for the nightmare. We will have our actor (Katie) in a dark room alone with several whispers surrounding her.
3. We had a discussion about titles. In a previous blog I talked about the importance of titles and how they can add or detract from an opening sequence. Today we finalised what our titles would be and the order in which they appear.

Minutes from our previous meeting can be seen on Joel's blog - http://joelurner.blogspot.co.uk/

 

We looked at some other students AS Main Task Opening Sequences and noticed how titles were incorporated into theirs. A good example of how titles are used was in this opening sequence called Inner Evil-    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLsiGGF9DPc

I particularly liked how the titles faded in and out, as I felt it fitted well the genre of this piece -

 

I liked how they were simple so that they did not detract from the piece. For our scene we don't want to use white as the colour for our titles as we feel it would stand out too much against our dark setting.

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. 

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.