MAIN Post 3: Research into Opening Sequence Designs

I watched 2 clips from the interview of Kyle Cooper, part 1 and 2, in order to learn more about the opening sequences of films. This will help when we think about producing the opening sequence of our film. The two clips are as follows and I made my own notes from them:
Kyle Cooper Interview (Part 1)
Kyle Cooper Interview (Part 2)

After watching these clips I've learnt more about what makes a good opening sequence. An opening sequence is good if it makes the audience want to be nowhere else but right there watching the film, intrigued to find out what the film is going to be about. It should set an expectation of how the film is going to turn out, if the opening sequence is good the film will also be good. This has influenced me as in order for our audience to want to watch the film the opening sequence is going to have to grab their attention and make them want to watch the film. I also learnt that detail and the typography of the opening sequence is important as the typography can impact the effects of the opening sequence, it can help work with other visual codes in creating a specific atmosphere. Kyle Cooper spoke about using CGI (Computer Graphic Images) but as we don't have access to this instead we can use the editing suites in order to portray the detail and atmosphere on screen. The final thing I learnt was that we can be as adventurous as we like when creating our opening sequence, although from researching other short film opening sequences being simple can also work.

This has helped in learning more about the effects of an opening sequence on films and this will also help when we discuss in our group about what we think will work best in the creating of the opening sequence.

MAIN Post 2: Choosing your Genre

There are plenty of different genres that we could choose to use in our opening sequence of our short film, but we need to find out more about different types of genres and what is the most popular.
The following research I undertook in order to help find out what the most popular genre is of fiction film:

Before finding out what the most popular genre is, I decided to remind myself of all the different genres that exist and that are used in producing short films, therefore I found the site below.
http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html
This site allows me to read about each genre in a little bit of depth, it gives information on 11 main genres from Drama and Action to War and Westerns.  

http://ddunlop.com/2010/01/recapping-2009-most-popular-movie-genre/
The link above shows the most popular genre in the year 2009, with the most popular genre being Comedy, followed by Action and Adventure then by Drama, this is shown from the chart below:

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html

The link above gives information about the most popular genre, from the table below it shows the most popular genre is Drama with 30.7%, the second most popular is Action Adventure with 16.2%, followed by Romance with 12.4% and then Comedy with 10.5%.

From all the information found on other websites above, this has helped our group finalize a decision of what genre we are planning to use for our short film, but in order to be sure we carried out some more research into people's favourite genres.

Questionnaire

In our group we produced a short questionnaire in order to investigate and ask a range of people what their favourite genre is, what they expect from the opening sequence of a film and what type of genre they'd like to see more of.

Below is a copy of our questionnaire that we asked people to fill in for us:

From our questionnaires and after asking a range of ages our results are as follows:

1. From the results of this question the highest marked, therefore most popular from our results, was Drama with 14 and the second highest was Action with 11.

2. This was an open question therefore we got a lot of different responses ranging from interesting to tense and thrilling. However the most frequent answer for what they liked most about their chosen genre was for it to be funny. This answer came up 7 times in all the results, the next following popular answers with it appearing 3 times each was exciting and fast paced.

3. As well as question 2 this was also an open question so again we got a lot of different results. The question asked what would typically be involved in their chosen genre, the most popular answer was for it to be funny allowing for laughter from the audience. The next two popular were fighting and the storyline.

4. The fourth question was what makes a good opening sequence, the most frequent answer that came up in the results was the location and the second was the characters. This gives us an indication that these aspects of our opening sequence need to be of a good quality to please the audience.
5. From this question we found out that people go to on any day as the highest marked option was no specific day. Although if one day had to be chosen the results show us that Friday is the next most popular day to go to the cinema.
6. Following from the previous question, people tend to go to the cinema with their friends the most as this was the highest marked answer from the results. Second highest was with their partner, so this could give us an idea to film something that people will go to see with their freinds.

7. This question asked what genre people would like to see more of, the most popular response was drama, followed by comedy and horror.

As the genre drama was most popular we think as a group this would be a good route to go down as many people will enjoy seeing some form of drama in a new short film.

MAIN Post 1: Conventions of an Opening Sequence

The following information is my summary of the analysis on the opening sequence of two short films with different genres that highlights the conventions of these films. I carried out this research in order to find out about typical conventions used in an opening sequence and different types of opening sequences for different genres of films. This research will help when I have to work with a group in creating an opening sequence of our own.

Casino Royale
The link below leads to the opening sequence of this film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiGy8lD4a_c 

This James Bond film is a 2006 action adventure genre with the opening sequence being compact with graphics of the highest quality and edited extremely well. The opening sequence lasts just over 3 minutes, whilst displaying the opening titles and credits, the opening sequence also shows an almost silouette of James Bond doing what he does best, thats loading guns and killing people. The graphics are highly revolved around cards and their patterns such as hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades, these are significant as throughout the film James Bond is playing poker and at several card tables aiming to get his man. This is vital to the opening sequence as it can give the audience a hint as to what they can expect to see in the film. The main conventions used in the opening sequence consist from the mise-en-scene, showing the guns and fighting as these are typical for the action adventure-thriller genre.


This shows a couple of screen grabs from the opening sequence of Casino Royale, highlighting the card graphics and violent nature.


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The link below leads to the opening sequence of this film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY4f_83t_rw 

Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara star in this 2011 mysterious yet thrilling drama film about a man's mission to find a girl who has been missing for 40 years. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has very dark and graphic opening credits, the dark flashing of images at the beginning of the opening credits highlights the mystery and suspense that will be seen throughout the film. The panning of the camera over different objects and shots keeps the audience thinking about what the film has in store and uses a convention of creating a mysterious atmosphere. The rushing of the liquid over the objects works alongside the title to do with tattoos, this could show that the tattoo is an important aspect of the film that the audience should keep notice of. As well as the rushing of the liquid, body parts are also shown to be overuled by the ink, such as face features. Towards the end of the opening credits there is a hint of violence as the audience see a fist hit a face, this gives off a hint that the film will have some violence in it.

This shows a few screen grabs put together from the opening sequence of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, highlighting how dark and mysterious it is.