Title sequence analysis

Film opening sequence Analysis (Edward Scissor Hands, Twilight and Panic Room)

Edward Scissor Hands/Twilight/Panic Room: The film starts off with the 20^th Century Fox logo which is very distinctive. This logo has been on popular film franchises such as Star Wars, Ice Age, Night at the museum, The chronicles of Narnia and many more. The logo shows that it is as famous as the Hollywood sign. Where the logo is normally golden, for this film it has been designed to be dark blue with light areas as well as the effect of snow falling. This gives the impression that the film may contain sad events or that the settings in the film are cold and negative. This is similar to the film Twilight by Stephenie Meyer where the Summit Entertainment logo has been used, this is also designed to have a cold negative effect which will relate to the film. The Columbian logo used for Panic Room represents that it’s an American film and by using strong rich colour schemes the director tells the audience it is going to be a well produced film. The music that is heard is powerful and appealing.

Non-digetic sound from the soundtrack has been used in Edward Scissor Hands; the music starts of calm as it is a violin that is being played. The first shot we are shown is a following shot of a doorway, as the lighting is dark and shadowy it creates an eary effect. The shot follows towards the actual door itself to a close up shot of the door, showing all details of the door. The lightning is still dark and has a cold feeling to the scene. The door gradually opens and the scene is cutaway by a title of the actual film name. Whilst the sequence is carrying on the music continues to stay calm but does occasionally have loud beats that add to create suspense. This is a complete contrast with Panic Room, as the whole opening sequence is based on different images of high top posh buildings in a busy city in America. These images simply change from one another. The shots used vary from tilted shots, bird’s eye view shots to face on shots. In comparison to Edward Scissor Hands they have both used non-digetic sound in their opening sequences. The music on Panic Room is an instrumental that starts off with the beat slow, low and calm then the beat suddenly changes to a faster beat and get much louder.

The sequence from Edward Scissor Hands the audience visualises vivid images, once the title of the film fades out to a scene of an old dusty gargoyle. The background is pitch black, with lighting reflecting on to the gargoyle gives an negative effect. The angle used for this is an arc, and it shows the whole of the gargoyle. This makes the audience feel slightly intimidated and anxious. This shot is then cross-dissolved into an tilt shot view of a dark, dusty old stairway. Because of the tilt in the shot, it makes the stairway look large. As the sequence continues keeping to the lighting and colour scheme more images are used but of different objects that look like torture objects, this makes the audience feel uneasy.

In comparison to Edward Scissor Hands opening sequence with Twilights opening sequence they both create an anxious yet negative feel as they both start of in a negative way. Twilight starts off with a voice over talking about death in a brief way. Followed on by an deer being chased to be killed. The colour scheme and lighting is also negative and cold. But this soon contrasts with a sunny atmosphere of Pheonix.

In conclusion all three opening sequences you could spot similarities and differences. I felt from a personal view that they all created a negative feel at the start to try and create a some kind of suspense and to make us think and feel prepared for upcoming events.

Draft movie project: Living London & Evaluation

To produce this draft movie we use a program called Premiere Pro. This program was extremely new to me as I had never used it before or have used a similar program. To start off this movie I chose three images that I could create a sequence with. The story I thought of was a day starting from early in the morning where London starts of calm and quiet and gradually the day begins to get lighter and busier. My movie has a mixture of short clips and images. In fact my movie starts off with a short clip of London Bridge using aCanted angle shot which shows that the bridge is in fact really big and famous element of London.
This is similar to the following clip which shows the London Eye which is also a famous element of London. For this a wide shot is used which enables the audience to get a good idea of the surrounding environment i.e. location and time scale. After this a bridging shot was used to connect another similar scene of the Thames with a boat going down the river, by the lighting it also shows a change in time and location.Once I had created this part of the movie, I moved on to adding titles for each scene. This was done by clicking the icon near the history of the previous functions I performed, I clicked new item, then title.. I repeated this for every new title that I wanted. For every new title, I was able to edit the font, font colour, size and angle positions I wanted them to be in. When the title was finished, it had to be placed in to the video 2section, so that the title was viewable and easy to move around when necessary.

For each title I thought carefully about what I should write, as I wanted them to resemble to the story of the movie- as I wanted to develop so that the day eventually unwinds to a busy city, at the same time, the day to become lighter. However I was unable to perform this function towards the end of my movie as an error kept occurring, so I was not able to add titles to the new sections of the movie.I developed the video even more by creating a longer video by adding more clips and images. I added a short clip of people walking; this was a close upshot. This showed that people were on their way to work etc. Following on from this the next part of the movie were just images of Big Ben. It showed a close up shot of the gate, but in the background you could see Big Ben, then from this a tilted low angle which makes the Big Ben look large like reality.

Once the movie was developed, I added finish touches such as linking the clips and images together and adding music. This helped me to improve the video. I had access to a list of Royalty-Free tracks. From this list I found a track that was mellow and calm which suited the story of my movie; this was added to the audio 1 section. Out of the different transitions I decided to use a cross-dissolve transition which meant that the images/clips dissolved into one another. This was used for scene throughout the movie as it made the sequence flow more smoothly. We had to increase the image size, but this made the images look blurry.

Now I have a much greater understanding of the program I know that I will be able to create a new movie and develop my skills. Although my movie turned out to be a well created, I did encounter a few problems such as errors- for the titles and saving/opening my movie. This was a problem at the start of the task so I had to restart this task using another computer. However from this happening, I had more time to think about the movie.

Mood Board on the film 'Trainspotting'

For this task we watched the trailer for 'Trainspotting'.  We then had to create a mood board using images that relate to the film trailer that we saw. The trailer contained images related to crime and drugs. From this I looked for images of a mixture using freeze frame shots taken from the actual film and I also used a website 'www.dafont.com' which allows you to choose from a large range of different style fonts. I chose fonts that were from categories such as 'destroy', 'horror' and 'graffiti'.

Every picture tells a story.

As one of the first tasks for the Media studies course was to create a story using six pictures taken from a digital camera. This task was to prepare us and help us to get an understanding of cameras and the course itself.As the pictures where taken within the school, I thought it was hard to find places to take decent pictures that would make a good story.