Ideas for First Two Minutes

Our piece will be about a heist, it will start with the release of one of the characters from jail. The heist is going to take place in an office building.

The first 2 minutes will consist of the passing of a note. This will be between 3-4 people, it will happen in places like a cafe, a busy street, an office block etc. It will start in a cafe where the waiter will pick up the note under the bill and leave with it. It will then lead to on a street when two characters ‘collide’ and the note is dropped into one of their pockets. A scene will then cut to someone in a jail cell who is pacing. It will then cut to the note again being passed to a homeless man drops it into a woman’s handbag. It will then cut to the jail man again looking at the clock and you can hear the clock ticking away.  The note will then be taken through an office with POV camera and dropped on a man’s desk (with emphasis).

Ideas for Opening 2 Minutes

Research Into Film Openings

Research into film openings

·        I have learnt the different camera techniques and have thought about why they have been used so am thinking more like a filmmaker now.

·        In the ‘School Of Rock’ I learnt at the beginning that a POV shot engages the audience to feel part in the movie.

·        Doctor Dolittle includes a voiceover which gives an introduction to the scene and makes us connect with the character.

·        Little Miss Sunshine also sets the scene of a girl admiring the women in a beauty competition and starts really close up and then pulls out, I always thought films started out and worked in but I liked this technique.

·        Bend It like Beckham starts by a POV shot but we don’t notice until later on at the beginning of the film. This could be helpful because in a way it also gives an atmosphere of what is happening at the daily lives within the movie.

·        The Lion, Witch and The wardrobe shows a WWII scene with bombs and planes flying at night which in a way is more factual about the time it was set which gives a lot of Mise-En-Scene -  we need to pick our locations carefully because people will read into them.

·        Shrek starts with a POV shot of a person reading a book which is effective because it gives a sense that the audience is included and knows what the person is reading. We want the audience to feel part of our story-telling and to make it obvious it's not real as we're choosing a non-transparent editing style like Hustle.

·        Cool Runnings start with an establishing shot and then shows the person with a close up about to do a sprint which in some reason gives an indication of what he does but doesn’t give that much information on the movie. It's the most usual way to start though, starting out and working in. Not much happens - I'm a bit worried there's tok much in our sequence.

My Ideas for First 2 Minutes

Film Plot and How It Draws On Initial Research

There is a separated group of criminals that used to be in a very skilful gang. There are five in the group ( the gambler, hacker, strong man, high class lady, mob leader) and the boss that leads them all, however one of them are in prison and that is the reason the gang has split up. The boss decides to bring the gang back together so that they can pull off a major scheme to get a lot of money. But first they need to get into jail.

·         In the films I have seen they normally start with an aerial shot to establish the setting of the scene and where the location of the film is, in the beginning of my film I am planning to have an aerial shot of a city

·         Not much happens in the first two minutes of the movie as it doesn’t want to reveal too much in the beginning of the film, this creates suspense and leaves the audience to find out what will have in the rest of film because if you put too much in at the start then there will be not much to develop on in the rest of the film or it might get a bit too messy and confusing for the viewers. Ideally in our opening two minutes iIwant the audience to a rough idea of what might happen and general familiarisation with the characters that have been introduced.

·         Normally there is a close up of at least one person showing that they have a significant role at that moment in time and from what costume/props/voice they use you are able to get a rough idea of what kind of character they are. In my film I was hoping to add information to the characters though non-diegetic narration from the boss of the group.

·         In the beginning scene even though not much happens you are still able to understand what is the general mood and atmosphere in the scene as there will be signs of what kind of film it would be, for example, a romance film normally begins with a cross cutting of two people that will soon meet or one person fantasising about someone they have a crush on. The mood of my film is secretive and this will be portrayed by not much talking between people and an envelope that has ‘top secret’ written across it.

·         What I have noticed about the opening sequence of films is that they normally always have non-diegetic music playing and if there is non the feel of the film is quite eerie and peculiar as it does not seem right. The opening music reveal information about the film, whether its a happy or scary or adventurous film the music will portray it. My film is an action/heist film and so I want the non-diegetic music to be quick and upbeat to represent being in a rush and the sound of ticking to show anticipation.

·         Due to the setting and costume you can roughly tell what the time period is in the film even in the start of the film, on occasion there are films which add in what the year and location. Our film is not a period film and so we would not need to worry about the style in which that time was like.

 

Initial Storyboard Ideas

This video shows us walking through some filming ideas for our real coursework. It might all change, but this gave us the chance to present some first ideas to the class and to think about how we might film them.

Practise Film Sequence

This is the practise film sequence that I took part in early in the course. We used this to learn how much you need to plan, how to film with good continuity and to learn to edit. After filming and editing this sequence, we looked to see what we could learn from it.

Planning and storyboarding

Our planning did not go as well as it could have. We ended up spending our time discussing what we should do to make it interesting and so we didn’t have time putting our final idea onto paper and so our story board was incomplete and this made it more difficult to shoot and edit as we had to make some decisions on the spot.

Acting

I felt that the acting was good in general, especially when they were running. However I felt that when we did the close ups, they did not seem to fit into our final piece. I believe this was this was the case as they were looking at the camera when they did this. This could have made the clip less believable.

Selecting shot and angles

Most of our ideas where pretty spontaneous as we didn’t have much material on the storyboard. Our starting shoot was the victim and the killer’s feet running thought this was effective as it leaves a lot of questions for the viewers like; ‘where are they going?’ and ‘why is he chasing him?’ We decided to not show the face of the murderer in any of our shots as it adds some mystery to our story and the character. Also we had had a canted angle to represent distortion and lack of control.

We also had a point of view shot.

Editing decisions

This was a particularly tricky task for us as we could not work the camera at the start so this wasted a lot of our time and so we did  not have enough time to get the all the shots we would have wanted or to experiment with different angles. With this problem, merging the separate clips that we did manage to get appeared to be a bit of a difficulty especially with close ups. I will be sure to spend more time shooting different shots in the actual coursework.

Sound

We didn’t really focus on this as much as the other elements as we thought the original ambient sound worked quite well for the running scenes especially as just having the sound of running leaves the viewers to focus more on that and less on what music we might have used. There was one point in our video that we took out the sound and it just didn’t seem right so we must be sure not to do that in the real one or try to fill it up with a sound effect or background music. We did have some dramatic background music at the murder scene, what I liked about this was that it added tension to that part of the video and when the music picked up in volume so did the atmosphere.

Use of mise-en-scène

I liked having the island as a place where the two actors have the chase, as it has a nice atmosphere there as it had a lot of green leaves and the ground was stony and it had no sign of any buildings and for them to end up in a building makes you think they have run quite far. However I did not like the setting of the murder scene as it was a confined space and it didn’t have a very dramatic atmosphere in my opinion.