Friday 16 January 2009

Amendments and Reflections

.To begin with our introduction was going to consist of 5 different establishing shots, but because this took took up too much time of our introduction and the transition between them was too smooth, we have cut this down to 1 sole establishing shot to set the scene, along with a couple of slides before hand for our titles. This therefore will be cutting the time from 35 seconds for establishing shots to 6 seconds, and hopefully this will make the introduction more fast moving and intense.
.In shot 7, Man 1 will not turn off a radio, although the music will stop at this point. It was felt that because he is such a run down character and has no electricity in his house, a radio would not be a logical choice and the music will be left to make an impact to set to contrast the mood and storyline of the introduction.
.There won't be a shot of Man 2 walking off a train, instead the scene will cut from the train stopping at the station, to him walking next to the train as it makes its exit from the scene. We have done this for smoother and quicker transition speed.
.There will be no close up of a knife in Man 2's pocket as this shot was unfortunately lost during editing.
.Man 1 will have less essentials in his house, no chair, clock or desk will be added, thefore Man 1 will be writing with pen and paper on the floor in an empty room, and there will be no focus of a clock in shot 9. This choice is again to emphasise the situation of Man 1 in contrast to Man 2 and suggest that it is because of Man 2 and his associates that he is in that situation.
.We thought that watching the train approach the station rather than watching the opposite direction of the train tracks would be more effective as there is no need for surrealism or disorientation at this point.
.Red converses were substituted for dc skater trainers to make Man 1 look more common and run dowm, unfortunately we do recognise that there will not be an as stronger reference to the theme of red he will be wearing, however we hope that the reference and boldness of the red t-shirt will be impacting enough.
.We have had to change the intended soundtrack because of copyright protection.
.We have been improving our titles sequence all the time, and have moved on from the idea of having a straight sequence of titles with a knife background, to embedding the titles within the establishing shot onto a black background, in white font, fading into and out of the establishing shot to show these titles.

2 comments:

mw said...

Well done for posting this Jeni. The train passing through frame and reverse shot is very evocative. You have created this effect very well in your own opening sequence. The titles emphasize the ambiguity of the moment. Having looked at your opening sequence, I asked Ian and Ryan whether it was right to fade music so early and leave shots with just diegetic SFX. In 'Heat' opening, the cut from non-diegetic to diegetic sound is very powerful but your opening does not have this clear cut to interior from exterior. Play around with int/ext sound but possibly you need to retain music throughout or introduce very bold and interesting ambient sound. Go back to 'Don't Look Now'.

mw said...

I get most excited about the train shots and the shot of burning paper. These are both startling images and both adhere to codes and conventions. With the music, I'm now not so worried about the lack of light in over the shoulder writing shots. I still think that the walking up to house shot is far too long. I've been thinking about opening titles. In order to link knife image in titles and what actually happens in film - would it be possible to shoot some knife close-ups (maybe in CNS kitchen) this week and flicker them into title sequence (replacing current bit-cliched stills image)? - bleed out to white - or some such? Look again at opening titles to 'Hard Candy' not referring you to graphics but pace and suspense.
mw