BFI Southbank

Today, I went to the BFI in Southbank with my Media class. I really enjoyed it and I found it really useful. Firstly, Pete spoke to us about how the day was going to run and he taught us the basics of our openings like atomosphere, characters, genre, narrative and setting. He also spoke to us about credits and title design.
Pete then introduced us to a few film openings that he found quite interesting. We were shown 5 and they were the openings of Napoleon Dynamite, Dawn of the Dead, Once Upon a time in the West, Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Catch Me If You Can. They all had very eye-catching, technical elements to them that could give us some ideas.
We then had a man come and talk to us who is and has been an effects producer for films such as The Kings Speech and Soloman Kane. He told us how much hard work is put into a film opening as well as a whole film and what really goes on behind all the effects and techniques that we see. We got shown clips of how a film opening is all put together using the visual elements in editing for example green screening.

In the second half of the event, an actor and upcoming director came to speak to us called Dexter Fletcher who has been in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Misfits and Bugsy Malone etc. He mostly spoke about the film he has just recently finished directing called 'Wild Bill' which he describes as 'a western kind of film set in East London' which I am really looking forward to seeing once it comes out in March. He showed us his opening and then a short clip from the film. I loved how in the film, there are lots of establishing shots, close up's and tracking shots. His method's of directing really interested me because he said 'I like the music and imagery to relate to each other as well as the characters.' He also said that he added a lot of strong visual images into the film in terms of the purpose of the characters. This interested me because this is what me and my group are aiming to do by making the music reflect the imagery and making the character stand out as an individual.
Lastly, Pete shows us some film openings that have been done by students in the past and we had to give them all a certain level, the levels being levels 1, 2, 3 and 4. We got shown 3 film openings. Two of them were quite standard and one was fairly bad in my opinion but at the end of each opening, we were aloud to give our own view on what we thought of them which I thought was a fun exercise to do at the end.

All in all, I really enjoyed today and it has given me some ideas for my group's film opening and how we can make it better.

^ Dexter Fletcher!

Filming Day 1.

The day we filmed for our opening went really well.
We were allowed to go out and film during one of our Media lessons so we all gathered together and headed down towards our set location. When we got there, it looked perfect. There were leaves everywhere, it was a bit damp, and not too cold which was ideal because it was the first type of weather we used and it didn't matter if it rained or if the sun came out but thankfully, it stayed the same and a bit foggy. After getting the camera set up, we began filming. We did so many takes using our story board that we actually lost track of time. We started filming at 1 and finished at about half 4 which is when it began to get dark. There were so many cuts because certain things didn't look right which we would have to change like a position of the camera or Elisha's position on the bike. We tried to use as many of our shots from our story board as we could but some just didn't look right however, we thought of alternatives instead which helped us a lot so that we weren't stuck on what to do. The whole day was pretty consistent. We always came up with a solution if something wasn't working. There were thankfully no arguments, we all just contributed our own ideas and tried to incorporate them all. For our first day of filming properly, I think we did really well and I can't wait to do more. It just depends if the weather holds out for us. The video below shows our edited footage so far. It's not very long however outtakes will be coming soon to show how much we did behind this.

Filming preperation

Before we started to film properly for our film opening, we all had to story board. We spent this lesson coming up with ideas on what shots we could use and from what angles. This lesson was useful because it helped us plan out our day of filming. It saved us from being stuck on what to do. Using our ideas, we went straight into filming and it was a very productive day which you will see in my following post. The video below shows me and my group talking about our ideas and also getting feedback from our teacher.

Location idea.

So all week, me and my group have been discussing where we could film our opening. We have had lots of ideas from Whitewebbs to Forty Hall. Megan suggested this location however and filmed her dog walk giving a brief description of how we could use it, what it's like etc. It is a park just around the corner from her house. The leaves in the park symbolise the season of autumn and the sound of the leaves rustling would make it effective. Seeing as we are going to be representing nature in our film opening, we will be using this location in all different types of weather if we can e.g rain, wind, sun etc. On the other hand, we don't want to use this location the whole time. We want our opening to look diverse.