Genre Choice

For our opening sequence our group has chosen to do a romantic comedy, we've decided to open with a montage of the couples life leading up to the present day which would be the start of the film.

Opening - flashes of their life:

• When they Meet
• Shots of them walking together/holding hands
• Falling in love
• Moving in
• Getting Engaged
• Wedding
• Shot of present day pregnancy test with positive sign
• Title of film

Film Genre Audiences

Horror Audiences - mostly male
Normally its the suspense and tension made by the elements of the film that make the film good, depending of what type of horror it is it could have many attractions to this audience (gore, slasher, psychological, mind games). For a male audience there is normally a girl in the film that at one point or another has not a lot of clothing on not necessarily in an obvious way they may just be ripped from something in the plot.

Action Film - aimed at males 18-30 year old's
Most action films have a lot of explosions, guns and one main leader/character. To appeal to this audience there is usually a bad side and good side that have some sort of confrontation.

Fantasy Film - aimed at children 8-14 year old's
As this audience is children the film normally charcterises the main characters as kids of those ages, they sometimes include someone slightly older aswell so that the audience watching have a rolemodel in the feel to look up to. Generally for fantasy they are stories that include some sort of fairytale like features that the kids know and can relate with.

Romantic Comedy - aimed at couples
For a romatic comedy is usually starts out with a couple that fall in love but get split up by something. The male lead tries to win the girl back by some big romantic gesture but along the way things still go wrong for him but in the end the female lead realises the still loves him and it ends happily ever after.

Film Openings - Different Genres

Horror Film - mostly male audience

For a horror film our idea was to show a serial killer dragging his latest victim into the forest, only to see that when he's leaving the possessed ghost of his victim is following him to seek her revenge.

The opening would show the man dragging a body bag into the forest, only showing shots of his feet walking and hands pulling the bag, showing no face so that the audience can't connect with the character. The reason for making the ghost a girl is that this will appeal more to the male audience but because of the storyline the women watching could connect with the female role in the film.

Action Film - male 18-30 audience
The opening should be almost like a flashback of the day a teenage boy finds out his dad has died in the army but wants to continue with his dads honour by becoming a military officer himself.
Eventually throughout the film the son would start to realize something isn't quite right within the army and when one of his friends/team member life is in danger from a outside group, the same group that killed his father, he tracks them down to kill the leader.


Fantasy Film - children aged 8 - 14
It could open to a classroom where a young girl that doesn't quite fit in at her school is being assigned a short story to write over the weekend, the following week she reads the story out in class only to find that later that day things around her start to change, elements from her story start to come true. The parts of her life that she's including in her stories are changing quickly, she has to continue writing to make the ending of the story and the life around her how she wants it to be.

Romantic Comedy Film - couples
A young girl and boy meet in a bar, he's new in town coming in for his new job, he tries to hit on the girl but she already has a boyfriend, the next day at the girls work there's a new colleague and guess who it is? the guy from the night before. They have the offices next to each other so have to see each other every day. Throughout the film they become closer as friends but behind her back the guy is trying to split her up with her boyfriend. Towards the end she would find out about this and does not want to be friends anymore but the guy would later make a big romantic gesture that makes her realize that she likes him too.

Preliminary Project 1 Final Film

Finally our film is done, it was quite hard to edit as we had a shot missing but by using a sounds bridge we managed to make it flow quite well. I found the project fun and was good practise for future films that we'll make, as we have experienced quite a few problems in our group it has given us an idea of what we need to do in the future and how we can make sure those mistakes aren't made again.
In the end i think that our film has turned out quite well, the continuity is pretty good and we tried to think about how each shot would look on screen. The only major problems with our film is that we ended up filming during the lesson as in our last lesson of filming there were no other rooms free, but as our film is about handing back coursework it fitted in with the situation quite well.

Se7en Analysis

The opening credits to Se7en are made up of 6 elements which all go towards the overall effect on the audience which in this case is very disorientating and creepy and also makes the audience very tense. Theses elements are mise-en-scene, editing, sound, lighting, performance and cinematography.

It opens with pages of a book being flipped across the screen and then using multiple cross cuts from the main character writing over and over again in blood, peeling skin off his hands with a razor, collecting threads and hairs, cutting newspaper clippings, drawing on pictures and text, sticking in photos of dead people and also in-between each image is a scribbly handwriting of the credits. These images are all very aerie and the fact that the character is never fully seen means that the audience has nothing to relate to, this is also shown through the character crossing out people eyes in photographs because an audience immediately relates to a character through eye contact and doing this makes the audience uncomfortable. The text and pictures show us a bit about the story of the film, each piece of text is slightly odd, we are shown one piece that tells us about pregnancy and intercourse which are the words he is crossing out, each of these short previews give us a clue to the plot of the film

Each image is cut of short which is called a jump cut; there are a lot of these throughout the opening making it a discontinuity piece of film. Other effects and transitions that they’ve used include flashing, flickering, overlay of shots (one shot on top of another shot, playing at the same time), fade and blur, each of these effects bring across a sense of confusion and disorientation.

The background sounds and music is quite tense, the metal equipment noises and the everyday noises for example to turning of a page linked in with the creepy images don’t link together and this creates an uncomfortable strange sensation for the audience as they don’t know what happening or what is going to happen. As well as these sounds the music is quite low and has no lyrics, this is another way of the film not letting the audience relate straight away as lyrics give you a feel of the mood and characters emotions. As the only lyrics at the very end of the opening scene say “You bring me closer to God” this makes us think of death and religion, which also gives us an insight to how the character might believe or have beliefs about.

The only lighting in the scene is red light as it is mostly set in a photography dark room, this creates dark shadows and silhouettes which means we never actually se the characters face or body we only really see there arms and hands. Other light used in the opening scene is flashes between shots and also and old film scratch effect during transitions.

 The character only gives us a very small insight into their personality because we only see their hands, what’s going on within their hands and the room that gives us idea of who this is. We can tell through the actions that they are making some sort of book and the way they are carefully placing each picture and spending time over writing text in their own blood makes us think that there is something very disturbed about the character. As well as the very odd actions we can see that the characters hands are bleeding scratched and covered in plasters making us think that something bad has happened.

Editing

We've filmed the final project and impoted the shots onto the computer and almost finished editing when we found out that one of the shots wouldnt import to the program. This caused us a lot of stress as we thought we were going to have to re-film but we've decided it is going to be easier to add in a sound bridge between shots rather thatn re-film ANOTHER two shots. Hopefully we can do this and can upload the final cut of the project soon!!

Ahhh problems!!

We've had a few problems filming in our second attempt at filming the project, we thought each shot was fine and had made sure we corrected the mistakes that we did the first time, but on a couple of shots we  had not stuck to the 30 degree rule which means that the shots didn't flow together when editing. The link above shows this as we've put together a rough cut to show our mistake. To change this we will have to film again, we've decided to make sure that we get the shots right we will continue to do shot reverse shot instead of side on view which we had done previously. Its been quite frustrating but the group has coped well and no one has had any arguments about it so hopefully our FINAL attempt will be okay.