Audience Questionairre

For this task, we created a questionnaire using survey monkey to find out about our chosen genre for our film opening. We asked the question 'what do you believe an action film has to have in order for you to like it?' to get feedback from so then we know what sort of things we must consider including for it in-order to draw in the audience. By doing this task it will give us a primary source to information about what people like about action films so we know what people would want to see so our film opening is more likeable to a bigger audience.

These are the results from this question. We asked a total of 18 people and collected a wide range of answers from it. The most popular answer was 'a realistic situation' meaning that most people would prefer to see an action film that could happen in a real life situation. For example in the film Deadpool, it doesn't show a realistic situation because its a superhero movie so people are doing the impossible, where as in the film 'San Andreas' it is about a huge natural disaster that could possibly happen - maybe no to this extent though. Having 9 people vote for this option was quite surprising because a lot of the best action films out today don't actually have a realistic situation. However this makes it easier for us because we don't have the equipment and time to create a CGI character or to create the impossible. We will most definitely use this option in our film opening as most people voted for it. The least voted option was 'cars' which didn't have any votes at all. Although the question is about specific things that must be considered for action films, we may use a car just for general use to show someone travelling from one place to another. So even though it had the least amount of votes we may still include it for the purpose of the narrative, not specifically because we have chosen to use action as our genre. Other options that got high votes as well were 'big stunts', 'a chase of some sort' and 'fighting scenes'. Depending on what works, we may not use these in our film opening or not to a big extent anyway as we can't perform big stunts as it would be too dangerous and the chase would have to involve people running rather than a car chase.

 

By doing this task we have collected some necessary primarily information that has helped us a lot on finding out what sort of things we need to consider including as we have now seen other peoples opinions so we know what most people like and dislike, and therefore we can draw in a big audience.

Group Research Into Our Genre

Researching into our genre helped us find valid results with regards to what would be the strongest genre in order for the widest audience. Our first piece of research we did, was ask questionnaire to a range of different people and age groups. From our research we found that the 2 most popular genres, were comedy and action. This then reinforced our minds that the 2 genres we originally picked were then the 2 most favourite. Our 3rd possible genre was going to be thriller and surprisingly got 16% of votes. We then decided to implement small elements of thriller, as too much would be more than needed seeing as action is our made genre and the second most favourite genre from our primary research.

For our secondary research, we looked at different student film openings and found the common trend that a lot of the openings started in a forest or somewhere outside. The majority of the time the genre was crime and horror. From this we thought that we could do something different and mix two different genres together (comedy and action). We then found online for our secondary research, the most popular genre voted by the general public which was action adventure. That then helped us to finally pick the genre action as our main and official genre.
The film 'Taken' has an excellent representation of the way they portray action and crime. Their plot describes the film as 'A retired CIA agent travels across Europe and relies on his old skills to save his estranged daughter, who has been kidnapped while on a trip to Paris.'  This links to ours as the plot in our film is a guy trying to get his wife back from two evil people working for a hostage company. Through the use of IMDB, we found that the film genres were action and thriller, giving us a good idea of what other films are using as their main genres.

Our Chosen Genre

For this task we will be talking about our chosen genre and why we have decided this. We have chosen to do action because most of our ideas fit in with this genre and it is one of the most popular genres that we can create an intriguing realistic situation from. We want to accept the challenge of making a good action film opening without having explosions, car chases, etc so instead we are also going to add an aspect of comedy. We are hoping this will widen our audience because comedy is a more popular genre than action. A film that influenced our ideas for this is Deadpool as its an action film but its also a comedy and we think these genres work well together and with our ideas. These are action films similar to how we expect our film opening to be like.

Mind Maps on Genres we Could Choose

For this task we are going to look at the aspects of film genres and the sort of target audience we want. This will give us a brief idea of what we could/need to involve for each genre to help us gather so ideas of what we can do for our film opening.  

By doing this task we now have a good understanding of what's relevant for each genre so we have some idea of what we need to include for our film opening. 

The Type Of Institution We Will Be

We would like to be a mainstream institution, because we wanted a bigger range of target audience and who we aimed the film at. The mainstream concept made us want to give us a bigger audience so that more people would enjoy it. Our film genre is action, so therefore that genre will more likely fit in with a mainstream institution. This will help us when creating our film opening because we are looking to create a high quality take because it would seem like there is a lot of money supporting it, but really we are going have to put our best efforts in what we have. We originally named our company 'Cuff Studios' but then decided to change because we felt like it wasn't catchy enough and the logo wouldn't suit our mainstream film and audience. Therefore we changed it to 'Zip-Up Studios'.

Companies in the filming industry that we plan on being like is companies like the big six. For example Universal or 20th Century Fox. We would like to be like them because they are very successful companies who create mainstream films that draw in a huge audience in which would be our target for our company if we were in their position. Our genre would have to be something specific like action or comedy as they are popular genres which these institutions use to draw in a mass audience.

What we Know About Film Openings as a Group

For this task we are looking at what we know about film openings as a group to help us gather some ideas together and understand what we need to consider including for our film opening.

• They contain credits of the main cast and crew to give the audience knowledge of who's behind the film.

• The purpose of them is to draw the audience into the universe of the film so they have an idea of what the storyline is like.
• They often contain non-diegetic music and a small amount of dialogue because they don't what to give away the story in the first few minutes. Therefore they show more action rather than dialogue to show off the film but this all depends on what film it is. For example, the Fast & Furious 7 film opening has a small amount of dialogue near the beginning, and then the rest is non-diegetic background music.

• They usually contain the main character of the film and not all the others so they make it clear who the main character is and introduce them before the others.
• They show the institutions logo to show who is presenting the film. For example in the Fast & Furious 7 film opening it begins with the Universal animation what is the institution behind the film.

• They make the genre of the film obvious so it is clear to the audience what it is.
• They give an indication of the sort of locations involved, whether its in a city, a desert, or just in someone's house.
• Often in film openings, the director's name is mentioned last because that is the most important name for the film as that is the person behind everything. For example at the end of the Skyfall film opening it has the director's name at the end.

• During film openings, the name of the film mentioned as this is the introduction for the film as a whole, but there isn't a specific time it appears except it wouldn't be shown at the beginning. It is often shown near the beginning or near the end, if not right at the end.
• The general order of the credits is institutions, cast, then crew, which is the order we are likely to use for our film opening.

By doing this task we have looked at the general overview of film openings and looked at the basic things we need to consider for our own film opening.

Our Re-Make Film Opening

Constructing Our Re-Make

Throughout the process of our re-make, we had to keep referring back to the original film opening in order for ours to follow a similar trend. Our remake was based off of the film opening 'Se7en', which is a very fast paced and dark film opening. So what we did was picked a really dark and small room to film in, in order for the mise and lighting to be perfect. So first of all, we had to examine in the original film opening, what props were used and we could implement similar objects into ours. For example we saw pocket knives and pictures of people who had been to jail. So we hunted around for a similar aesthetically looking knife and printed off a picture with a dark shade on it. Next we made a pre-shot list to help us have a step by step timing guideline for us to follow when creating the re-make. This was beneficial, because we weren't creating the re-make blind, we could follow our plan in order for things to correctly as we did prior to the filming.

 

The Re-Make - Shotlist

Shot Number	Shot type	Length	Props	Equipment
1	Close up	02-07 (5 Seconds)	Book	Handheld Camera
2	Close up	08-12 (4 Seconds)	Drawings of hands on a piece of paper	Handheld Camera
3	Close up	13-14 (Around 2 Seconds)	Knife, scissors, paper and sharpener	Handheld Camera with Tri-Pod
4	Close up	17-19 (Around 2 Seconds)	Pocket Knife	Handheld Camera
5	Extreme Close up	21-25 (4 Seconds)	Teabag, tap with water	Handheld Camera
6	Close up	26-31 (5 Seconds)	Book inside a box	Handheld Camera
7	Extreme Close up	32-37 (5 Seconds)	Pen, book with writing in	Handheld Camera
8	Close up	38-39 (2 Seconds)	Picture of a guy in red on a piece of paper	Handheld Camera
9	Close up	41-42 (2 Seconds)	Scissors and paper	Handheld Camera
10	Close up	44-46 (2 Seconds)	Cellar Tape holder, film, and scissors	Handheld Camera

We have benefitted from created this as it has given us an idea of how to hide shots and create a mystery for the audience by not giving clues away. The shot list helped us as we can use the same layout of this shot list for our actual film and follow an orderly structure making sure that everything goes to plan instead of it being filmed all in one go with no planning. This would be bad as we wouldn’t know when the timing is, what props are needed in shot and how long the shot should be. This will be giving us specifics.

The Re-Make - Storyboard

For this task we are creating a story board to analyse what is involved in each shot. This will help us visually see the layout of each shot of the sequence when we begin filming it so we know what it is meant to look like.

This is what we created for our storyboard. By doing this task it has allowed us to look in-depth into each shot that we need to include for our remake so it makes it easier for us to know what each shot is meant to look like for when it comes to film it.

 

The Re-Make - Timeline

Time	Type of shot	What is in the shot
00- 02	Black Screen	Nothing
02-07	Close up shot	Book
04-07	Text	‘NEW LINE CINEMA PRESENTS’
07-08	Black screen and text	‘An Arnold Kapelson PRODUCTION’
08-12	Above Shot	Drawings of hands
10-12	Text	‘A FILM BY David Fincher’
12-14	Three close up shots fast paced	Tools and blade
14-16	Black screen and blade	‘Brad Pitt’
16-18	Three close up shots fast paced	Fingers and a blade
18-20	Black screen and text	‘Morgan Freeman’
20-23	2 Close up shots and flash transition	Tea bag put in water
24-26	Black screen	text
24-28	Text	‘SE7EN’
26-29	2 Shots	Picking up book about of cardboard and opening book
29-31	Shot and text	Book and ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’
31-35	Side shot	Someone writing
33-35	Text	‘Richard Roundtree’
35-37	Overlays	Flashing writing and red
37-38	Black screen and text	‘R.LeeErmey’
38-41	2 Shots	Cutting up film and pictures
41-42	Black screen and text	‘John C. McGinley’
42-45	Shots	Cutting tape and arranging pictures

We decided to do the timeline up to 45 seconds because there are a lot of shots involved in the 'Se7en' film opening and the purpose of this task is to practice and get experience on creating a film opening so we felt that we would benefit more from extending the shot lengths and involving good content rather than having too many shots. By doing this task this has helped us understand whats involved in the film opening so we have a clear idea of what shots we need and how long we need to show them for.

The Re-Make - The Actual Film Opening

We chose to re-make the film opening of 'Se7en'. This is because we liked the idea of having a fast paced edited clip as it would give us a challenge, because it would be giving us a task to edit short clips and animations in a very short period of time. We wanted to do this, as it would help us develop our future skills for our actual film opening we are creating. In addition to this, it can help us make our film look more professional due to the recent practice of editing a film opening re-make that could be considered as a difficult opening to re-make. Another reason we chose to re-make this film, is because we had a brief idea of what genres we wanted to implement into our film. Therefore re-creating a film that had the same etiquette as a film we wanted to make, was a good way of inspiring us and giving us good ideas to fit into our film opening. It would also give us an idea of how certain 'horror' film openings are created, and can give us a structure when it comes to making our film opening.

The Re-Make

We are going to re-create a film opening to get more experience and to help us understand what we must include when it comes to creating our own film opening. By doing this it will allow us to practice the process so we know how to film and edit our piece and therefore it will make us become more prepared on what to expect and help us to collect more ideas.

The Group Members

April Woolridge - 2343
Alex Savvides - 2299