Storyboard No.1

This is one of our final story boards but we have decided to change it again. We drew this out in basic detail just to get the main idea of what we wanted to do and the camera angles. We did this to see what would look best and we did this early on so that we would have lots of time to change it. We haven't done that many shots but we will develop into this. We have done the change overs but we are not sure whether we need more or less and what camera angles we should use.

Organising Tittle Sequence

We have been organising and discussing where we are going to film our opening sequence. One of the girls in my group Mariella, her dad owns a pub which is close by and we thought that we could film there. We have asked to make sure that this is all right to do so. He’s said that it’s fine which means that we have sorted out our location. Their probably wont be anyone in there when we film. This means that the pub probably won’t be very busy so we are going to ask people to be extras and fill one corner of the restaurant to make it look busy. We have also been writing down people’s names who we think would be best to take part in our opening sequence. We have got a few people in mind for our main characters, who would suit what we are going to ask them to play.  We have also discussed how we are going to film and what we are actually going to do. This we are still thinking about as we want to get it perfect and make it look as good as we can. As the main part of our opening sequence is to poison someone we need to think of what to use, which would look realistic. We came up with the idea of using eye drops but taking the label off so the audience wouldn't realise what it really was.  It’s also transparent so you wont actually see it on the food. We are still progressing our ideas though – these aren't final.

Favourite Idea

Our main idea that we would really like to pursue and both media teachers that we have had meetings with like the idea of a someone 'poisoning a man'. We can develop into this idea in lots of ways and make it really effective.

'It starts where the motorbike is driving around the roads very fast or another type of vehicle. They are passing something around (poison) but at first the audience shall be unaware of this. They will be wondering though as they will be able to tell that there is something in the package. Then someone gets of the bike and walks really quickly through double doors just by pushing them and will enter the kitchen. They will then slide the package across the kitchen counter and you just see the chef making the food and dropping something in to it while preparing it. You then see the busy restaurant and then the camera zooms in on his food. You can see the poison and the clip fades out.

That is our favourite idea. We like this because this is different from all of the others that have been done before. We all think this would be fun to film also. We all agree that we like this idea the most and we can develop on it more and more each lesson, like using different camera angles and who we would like to take part in it.

We have thought about how we are going to film it and one of our media teachers has got a motorbike which we can use. One of my friends in the group dads owns a restaurant, which would be perfect as we need a restaurant and a kitchen. We have thought about whom we'd like to be the main character and the chef etc. We haven’t thought about the setting in the actual restaurant yet but we want to make it look rather busy. If the restaurant looks quiet then it wouldn't be as effective. We hope it will be quite a fast opening title. 

With the actual opening titles we can write them on the frying pans and around the kitchen etc. 

Review of Our First Ideas

Yesterday on Thursday 11th we had our first meeting with Adam, our media teacher and one of the media technicians  We had about four or five ideas which we liked. After discussion we then decided that some of the ideas weren't suitable as they were either  to cliché (Forest) as people in previous years had already done them or they were to hard to film (Diving). We limited all of our ideas down to two.

We then as a group, with the media teachers spoke about expanding on these opening sequences. One of the ideas which I liked had a few complications but we managed to sort them out. We had to think of which one wouldn't have many complications to film as we are limited to just one day of filming.

One of our ideas was running through the woods which we changed so that it wouldn't be so cliché and running would also be too obvious to the audience what was going happen. We changed it so that the young girl running through the woods was walking home from a party but still had to enter the woods. We all decided though that the start of this story predicts the whole of the film and that’s way to cliché.

We also thought regarding the other ideas that some would be hard to film. We had an idea involving diving. This had lots of complications which would make it hard to film. We also only have one day to film which is a limited amount of time. But then we came up with an idea which we liked a lot more. As a group we concentrated on this one idea.

We were down to two ideas which involved the first one being set in a restaurant and there is an important person going there to eat. We are hoping to film this secretive ‘package’ being past around using motorbikes etc. Then someone bangs through the door of the kitchen and puts the package down. It’s poison and then gets put in the important mans food. That is the basic idea of our main title sequence.

Our other idea we need to develop more but the basic story line was to have a ‘wanted’ article on the floor or a deserted street. Then the man who is on the article who is 'wanted' picks it up off the floor and chucks it down. We weren't going to show his face though just his outline and start the camera on his feet and work up. We need to work into this idea as at the moment it’s not very interesting.

First Production Meeting

Today we sat down in our groups and discussed all of the ideas that we had come up with last lesson.  We put them together and added to them to make them better than they already were. Everyone has input in saying what was best and what they would like to do with each of the ideas. We even got rid of some of them as we thought that they would be hard to film. A few of the ideas we decided where to cliche. Some of our newer ideas where:

1) Have a piece of paper blowing across a ghost town (very empty place). The piece of screwed up paper stops; the camera then zooms in on it. It’s a Wanted poster with a picture of a man placed on it. The piece of paper carries on rolling, until feet obstruct it. The person who is printed on the piece of paper picks it up and the camera rolls up the body, up to the face to reveal the man from the poster in real life.



2) A young girl in going on a run. She has her iPod on very loud and we want the audience to focus on the sound of her breathing heavily. You then see just a camera and hands taking pictures of her.  She doesn't realise and carries on running to find a barn and decides to go in and have a look. When she goes in she see’s loads of pictures of herself throughout the duration of her life and the audience sees her closely looking at them. She then freaks out and runs and you just see then man looking at her. As the woman is running the camera cuts back and forth to her, to a zoomed in shot of the mans hands pinning up photos of the woman’s everyday life. With red string leading to a new photo.


3) Another idea was to have a man eating sushi in a bar. His food comes out and he eats it. He looks very smartly dressed. We then zoom in on one of the chefs putting alpha particles on the sushi. The chef then gives the food to waiter to give to this man sat at the bar. The guy that eats the sushi, his vision starts to go blurry and we see that on the camera and then you just see a blur. Then for sound have someone shouting but in a fade ‘call an ambulance’.

4) An old man retracing his past in a field where he fought in a battle at the age of 18. Skips to flash back of people invading his base, he hides but all the other soldiers die. This could be interesting because of the different eras used and we could make it quite clear about going back in time.

Groups ideas for Tittle Sequence

We were asked to think of four different ideas. This was to decide from the four what would be the best opening sequence. I like all four of my groups ideas but I think the 'Running Girl' one is best. It would be most suitable to film. It is  also slightly different. Even though it is running like a lot of thrillers are, it's different to the other ones because of what happens. From an audiences point of view I think that it would be understandable to see what was going to happen later on in the film.

                                
                                     Running Girl

I like the idea of a girl running through the woods, possibly Hurtwood woods. You can use the effect of a person running behind her, by using an over the shoulder shot so it looks like its her view and a few wide shots. There is a camp in Peaslake which would be perfect. We can use the camp to have a perverted man that takes pictures of this girl as she runs and then he puts them up in this camp. We could get camera shots of him taking the pictures and of the pictures that are being taken. We could end with her coming in and finding the pictures and being very creeped out. This is how it makes it different from other films as she finds out in the tittle sequence.

Racing Track

We could only do this if we can get hold of a motor track or go-karts. Someone can be getting into the go-kart but without the driver knowing someone has fiddled with the engine. We would make sure that the audience knew something suspicious was going to happen and then the go-kart or car would drive of perfectly at first and then the driver would loose control and crash. Then zoom back to the person that had fiddled with the car to see their reaction. You could do shots from inside the car like they do on actual formula 1.

Abduction

Another idea is having a happy family with three young children on a family day out, including a mum and dad. The eldest one wants to go on a ride at this park but the parents are looking after the other two and say no. In the end the parents carry on walking and stop to go to a public loo and take the two youngest ones in but say to eldest to wait outside and an elderly man comes and says he will take her (the eldest one) on the ride and they walk off and it ends like that. We could have wide shots at the beginning showing the whole family. You could have close ups of the little girl being grumpy when her parents saying no to her.

                                                                                    Home Alone

There is a young girl, about 14, who is babysitting for a 3 year old and it is her first time. She is being explained all the rules of the house. The house is fairly old and people have died there before but she in unaware of this. She puts the baby to sleep and goes down to watch tv and ends up falling asleep on the sofa. She then wakes up to something shaking her but there’s nothing there. Then she hears lots of banging and picks up the phone to call 999 but the phone line has been cut dead and then it would end there. We could do wide shots of her lying on the sofa, close up on the phone. There is a variety of shots which you could do for this.

Getting Started on Opening Sequences

Today, Friday 5th October we were put into our groups for our tittle sequences. These are the groups that we will be in to produce our thriller and the people who we shall be working with - I'm very pleased with my group. Last week we started preparing. We got into groups on our table and read through newspapers and magazines to see if any stories interested us. We thought of old films to inspire us and that is where we took our ideas from.
I am in a group with:

• Myself
• Chessie
• Mariella
• Toby

We haven't been through our ideas yet but each of us have different ones. This makes it easier as we have a variety to choose from.  Even if we don't choose one we can possibly merge two or three together. We discussed as a class today some of the ideas that people have come up with. Some sounded harder to do than others but hopefully our ideas will be possible to do.

Kyle Cooper - Se7en

Se7en

The film Se7en was directed by David Fincher in 1995.  Se7en enjoyed wide critical and popular success. The film doesn’t open directly with the sequence. It first introduces you to Detective Sommerset ( Morgan Freeman) and Detective Mills (Brad Pitt). It shows then that they meet for the first time, establishing their combative on-screen chemistry and investing the audience in the evolution of their partnership. This prelude then also shows the key themes found in Se7vn. For example hopelessness, desperation and lots of violence. At the end, we welcome Somerset’s night time Zen ritual of drowning out the chaos with a metronome on his nightstand.

The opening sequence for Se7en is very well thought out and created. The whole sequence in a montage of clips and pictures from what we gather as the murderer however it could be other detectives. Most people know before watching the film about the 7 deadly sins, so when we see the clips we may try and relate them to the title. The sound in the sequence is very effective. Its as if the sound is also a montage of music and soundtracks very like the clips. You often hear the sound of screeching this could be relating to the screams of victims. The editing is very clever in the titles and credits. The font that is used is almost creepy and jagged as it has been scratched – this could be related to murders.

The sequence is as if the montage relates to the murderers brain and how it works. We already think that someone has to be a lunatic if he is going to commit murders like this so we think that it is murder and feel that the montage is what’s happening in the mind of the murderer.This creates a million questions of what is happening and if looked at closely you can see hints of what's to come in the film.

About Kyle Cooper

Opening Sequences

Cooper studied graphic design at Yale University. Early on in his career Cooper worked as a creative director. He worked at an advertising agency with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Cooper created the tittles sequence for the film Se7en and this inspired a lot of young designers. He then co-founded Imaginary Forces, which is a creative agency that came of the West Coast division. The work eventually got to much and he decided to move on and focus on his creative work. Then in 2003, Cooper founded the creative agency Prologue. He then moved Prologue, which was in Malibu to offices in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. His work got compared to Saul Bass and then he ended up directing a feature film, New Port South.

Kyle Cooper specialises in title sequences. He does not do just bog-standard ones though. He makes his opening sequences like mini-movies in their own right. When he did the opening sequence for se7en it won universal acclaim and established him as a big player in the movie industry. He has done a lot of opening sequences including, Spiderman, Spiderman 2 and Mission Impossible. He now even does a bigger variety of work and has even ventured to do Video games and commercials.

Opening sequence - Mean Girls

The Mean Girls  opening tittles are shown for a rather long time. They are combined in with the beginning of the film for example some are shown in the corners of the picture. This makes the tittle sequence less boring for the audience to watch as there is more going on than just writing on the screen. Before the actual film starts it says who the production company. Even before the title of the film is has the main actors name ‘Lindsay Lohan’ which is laid out on a black screen in bold writing.  The sequence keeps the black screen while showing the tittle of the film ‘Mean Girls’ written across it which is emphasised because of the black background.

The opening titles for this film aren’t boring at all because after the title has been shown it goes straight into the story. She is telling the audience her story with the use of old videos and pictures. We then understand what is happening in the film and what it’s about. It tells us round about how old she is now and what she’s been doing and how she has ended up where she is. The film then carries on but after a while the important actors/actresses names start appearing at the bottom of the screen. Their names are shown in bold colours but are not very big on the screen. It then stops with the titles for a while and then does what every other film does with the co-producers etc.  

We can see from just the opening sequence that she is the ‘new girl’. She’s not very popular and not very many people want to be her friend. She’s not very welcome at this new school and because we know she’s been home schooled we wonder if she will ever fit in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVT2YKP_bG4

 Below is a table of the order that the tittles come in.

Paramount
Paramount pictures presents
Lome Michaels Production
Lindsy Lohan	Black Background
Mean Girls	Black Background
List of actors/actresses	Small break of watching the film before these are shown
Co-Producers	Another break between actors/actresses before the rest of tittles are shown.
Costume Designer
Editor
Production Desinger
Photograpghy
Executive Producer
Screen Play
Director

Opening Sequence - Spiderman 2

Spiderman 2 opening sequence was obviously done a while ago, you can see this through the way which it is layed out. It's a comic drawing film and so there is not much movement throughout the opening titles.

It has so many credits at the beginning of the film. This doesn't stop you from being able to tell that it's Spiderman though from the background images which are used. For example it’s red with spider webs and Spiderman is in them. The drawings change with the credits.

There is only the tiniest bit of action throughout the opening tittle.You can see from the comic drawings the transformation of his dad dyeing and that’s who's grave we see a picture of and him becoming Spiderman and taking his dad's place. The opening tittles contain a lot of writing in this film. We have from the director to who did the music to what it was based on. We met the main characters quite early on in the sequence and there were pictures of the characters placed behind them so we knew who was who and expect to see them throughout the film.

The order in which they showed the opening tittles went: Sony pictures entertainment, Columbia pictures, marvel enterprises, ziskin production and then it said the title of the film 'Spiderman-2'. It had the main characters and then all of the people who helped make the film.

It wasn't a very enjoyable opening sequence to watch as there wasn't much happening which made it fairly boring to watch.

Production Details	Story Action
Columbia Pictures
Marvel Enterprises/Laura Ziskn production
Spiderman – 2 : The tittle of the film	The film tittle was introduced after the production companies.
Main characters are introduced	We see pictures in the backround (drawings) of the main characters so we expect to see them again.
Who the music was by	When theses were being shown there was just drawings of spiderman and cob webs but no action going on untill opening credits were over.
Costume Designs
Film Edition
Produce Design
Based on Comic

Opening Sequence - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The girl with the dragon tattoo has lots of opening tittles before the actual film starts. The films starts with displaying the production companies which most tittle sequences do.It then goes on to say what film it was 'David Fincher Film'. It then followed to say who was staring in the film which was 'Daniel Craig' who is one of the main actors in the movie. The reason his name is shown so early is because he is a well known actor, especially from the Bond films and this encourages people to watch the film. If they see his name early on then it gives the audience more of a reason to carry on watching it.  After the main actors had been mentioned the film tittle appeared 'The girl with the dragon tattoo' and you knew this through the way it was presented in bold writing.

It then went on to list a lot of the actors who  obviously play a decent part in the film and that’s why they are mentioned. It then went onto Casting etc. The director's name came last out of all of them before the film actually starts which is very strange as the director would normally be near the beginning.

As there are so many opening tittles you would expect it to be boring to watch but it’s not as there is a lot of action happening in the background. There is no colour used except the colour of fire at one point to relate to the dragon. Its all very dark colours such as black and grey. This is really effective as you can’t quite work out what is going on. The opening sequence action is hard to understand so you need to watch further into the film to find out what is actually going on.

Below is a table to show the order the titles go in.

Columbia Pictures

A Scott rudin yellow bird production

David Fincher film

Daniel Craig

Rooney Mara

The girl with the dragon Tattoo

Actors/Actresses

Casting

Costume Design

Co-Producers

Sound design

Music

Editors

Production Design

Photography

Executive Producers

Producers

Based on a book

Screen Play

Director

'Kill Bill : Vol 1'

Analysis of Sound in 'Kill Bill : Vol 1'

In the clip of Kill Bill Volume 1 you can really imagine everything happening as the sound effect is in so much detail. The sound of the banging nail makes you feel very tense and at first you can't quite see whats being nailed down.


 You can hear it being banged into the wood and in the background him out of breath from nailing the nails down. The women in the coffin sounds very scared and breathing heavily because she's most probably very claustrophobic.

3 You can also tell from the sound of the women in the confin that she is trying to stay calm but it's very hard to.  The music at the beginning is very calm and then it goes into a whistling sound which adds to the tension. 

She starts to cry quietly after while and even when the whistling stops she carries on breathing very heavily. You then here all of the soil being put on top of the coffin and it all being dropped. It sounds like it's being dropped from a fairly high height.

 It then stars to go quieter but you can hear the coffin being lowered becaue you can hear the rope putting the coffin in very slowly and gently and the girl starts to go calm but then she starts stuggling lots and crying once the soil is being pushed on. 

She starts to bang the sides to get out and you can hear her but she sounds like she knows she can't do it.